The Earth worn to its bones.

Australia is old. Its interior has been rinsed by long ages of sparse desert rain until the nutrients are ground from the earth. Its river beds are as ancient as the abyss. Even in the fertile East the forests look and feel old and worn. Even the mountains of the East are worn to nubs a few thousand feet high. Barely a bump for what is effectively an entire continent. The trees of those forests are grey scented ghosts brushed with silvers and grubby yellows. Their trunks are bleached white where the bark peels away because in these forests the earth is not renewed year on year by falling leaves, it is maintained on life support by the gradual fall of strips of bark, years upon years. An entire wilderness laid back to the Earth by fire is nothing more than in invigorating body scrub to this land. When the sun grinds through the thin needles of the trees, they grow white. The carpet on the ground is pale too. The creeks, when they hold water at all, are clear and bronze like an old statue of water laid gently on the sleeping ground. That ghostly backdrop makes the gorgeous metallic blue-green of a butterfly a thing not unlike a fever-dream. The glinting call of a bird draws the eye to a bullet of gold or blue or red or lime green. Black trees also stop the eye, some natural, some ripped in half by lightening. Scrape back the vegitation and you are through to the bones of the Earth in an instant. These phantom forests hold a shadow of menace too. This land is so sparse that predators have evolved to waste no time on long chases of plump prey. The predators here are tiny and deathly efficient spiders and snakes.