Living as we do, in communities that are separated into suburbs and towns and whatever we totally and completely fail to understand the size of the places we live.
When we go long distances, like very long distances, we fly between them, be it interstate or overseas. It is an extremely deceptive process, flight is deceiving on the senses.
You enter one large building, go through innumerable security checks and then enter onto a large composite craft, fly for 1-6 hours within your country or 9+ hours outside of your country and suddenly you're within another country.
Yet the sense of travel passing, the sense of movement and things changing is totally removed, you fail to travel you've just moved from a space to another space, there is no sense of scale when you travel like this.
Air travel is about destinations, it's about trying as hard as you possibly can to cut out the middle man, the travelling medium, the thing you use to compress the distances between. The 'jumbo jet'.
Travelling interstate is like travelling on a bus in the sky, you get onto the aeroplane, find your seat, sit down and then you don't even have the joy of watching the landscape slide past, it is just rumble down a runway, see the land disappear and be replaced by clouds and then 1 hour or so later touch down on a similarly sized runway and you pull up to a similarly sized building.
It's all a very clinical, albeit not totally simple, certainly a far cleaner sterile experience of travel.
Very deceptive also when moving between these spaces.
It also deceives us when we're doing this on how big our country and indeed how big (or small) the world is.
To fly to Sydney it takes about an hour, factor in security, arrival times and all those sorts of things and you're looking at around 2 hours or so to travel from Melbourne to Sydney.
Yet, if you take a land based solution; train or road this travel time rockets to around 10 hours.
But that is the amazing part of travel, not the downside.
Travel by air and you are not worrying, not concerned about what lies in between your location and your destination, that is merely the space between, the nothingness that exists in the constructed landscape of your travel, it's the none-event space that is present.
But you need to travel closer to the ground, which makes some sense, to (without sounding too styled) get in touch with the landscape, to understand its foibles and to understand its size and scope.
Travelling the distances lets you understand them, instead of bypassing them. Cities exist in isolation, only relative to one another by size, population and scope. It is the distances, the space that makes them, makes them of their own environment. It gives them context so you can frame them.
When we go long distances, like very long distances, we fly between them, be it interstate or overseas. It is an extremely deceptive process, flight is deceiving on the senses.
You enter one large building, go through innumerable security checks and then enter onto a large composite craft, fly for 1-6 hours within your country or 9+ hours outside of your country and suddenly you're within another country.
Yet the sense of travel passing, the sense of movement and things changing is totally removed, you fail to travel you've just moved from a space to another space, there is no sense of scale when you travel like this.
Air travel is about destinations, it's about trying as hard as you possibly can to cut out the middle man, the travelling medium, the thing you use to compress the distances between. The 'jumbo jet'.
Travelling interstate is like travelling on a bus in the sky, you get onto the aeroplane, find your seat, sit down and then you don't even have the joy of watching the landscape slide past, it is just rumble down a runway, see the land disappear and be replaced by clouds and then 1 hour or so later touch down on a similarly sized runway and you pull up to a similarly sized building.
It's all a very clinical, albeit not totally simple, certainly a far cleaner sterile experience of travel.
Very deceptive also when moving between these spaces.
It also deceives us when we're doing this on how big our country and indeed how big (or small) the world is.
To fly to Sydney it takes about an hour, factor in security, arrival times and all those sorts of things and you're looking at around 2 hours or so to travel from Melbourne to Sydney.
Yet, if you take a land based solution; train or road this travel time rockets to around 10 hours.
But that is the amazing part of travel, not the downside.
Travel by air and you are not worrying, not concerned about what lies in between your location and your destination, that is merely the space between, the nothingness that exists in the constructed landscape of your travel, it's the none-event space that is present.
But you need to travel closer to the ground, which makes some sense, to (without sounding too styled) get in touch with the landscape, to understand its foibles and to understand its size and scope.
Travelling the distances lets you understand them, instead of bypassing them. Cities exist in isolation, only relative to one another by size, population and scope. It is the distances, the space that makes them, makes them of their own environment. It gives them context so you can frame them.