I took my teenage daughter to the movie adaptation of the Tim Winton novel, Breath, last night. It was a stunningly visual meditation on life through the Aussie lens, set in the 1970s on the south-west coast of Western Australia. Tim Winton did the narration himself...

To be an Australian in 2018 means what I wonder? Is it still that we are young and free, and girt by sea? Or, are we in the grip of a greed inspired by rapacious real estate prices for places we used to call home? Does the beach still beat at the skin of youthful...