Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly one-thousandth of the world population. Around eight million people.
Technically the Gold Coast is the strip of beachside apartments, malls and theme parks south of Brisbane but I get to name millispheres and sunshine and beaches seem an appropriate image for the millisphere covering the eastern watershed of Australia north of Canberra.
In the late 1990s I visited Gold Coast for the first time. I was travelling with a sketchbook and my first drawing was of the statue of Captain Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park, which has him "born at Marton, Yorkshire, 1728".
Cook stands next to an Australian Bunya Bunya pine; an Australian ibis, like a grubby white fowl with a long beak, is searching for picnic leftovers at his feet. In 1770 Cook named Terra Australis "New South Wales", nullifying the Dutch "New Holland", and claimed it for the British Crown.
Next to Hyde Park, at the museum, I met my first Australian Aboriginal. He'd come thousands of miles from the Kimberley Ranges to meet with government officials, he said, and he knew about the "Pakaitore occupation" in Whanganui, in 1995.
I was a foreigner in his land and realised that race relations were quite different on the other side of the Tasman. A pencil sketch records the curves of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and my travel companion and I had checked out the galleries.
Outside Brett Whiteley's Studio, next to a signposted "Endlessnessism", stood a sculpture of two, three-metre tall matches - one burnt out. Whiteley (1939-93) had died of a heroin overdose.
At his studio, the late painter described a Zen landscape painting technique he used (via video) - to sit and to meditate for several hours on a view and then to move inside and paint the scene. At Toowoomba, in the Blue Mountains, I decided to give Whiteley's technique a go.
On the plateau I watched the red sun set over the millisphere of OZ to the west. Slowly my eyes became accustomed to the dark and I could make out, dimly in the distance, here and there, bushfires. In the dark, in the bushes nearby, something rustled and I thought of snakes.
Mapping the Millisphere with Fred Frederikse
Another sketchbook records a quick stopover in Brisbane. Flying over Australia on the way to Asia you see how vast and dry it is. Down under the red-brown landscape of the virtually uninhabitable interior are Australia's mines.
"The lucky country" is the world's largest coal exporter, it is one of the world's biggest uranium exporters, and it will soon be the world's largest gas exporter.
Australia also has the world's highest domestic power prices and some of the highest carbon emission rates.
Australia's environmental movement is largely an urban phenomenon but Australia's economy, and its cities, are underpinned by mining.
Australia, under Julia Gillard, introduced a carbon tax in 2012, but it was scrapped in 2014 by Tony Abbot.
By signing the Paris accord in 2015 Australia has committed to reducing its own CO2 emissions in the name of renewables. We'll see.
Australia and New Zealand have a shared history. In the past foreign investment in New Zealand has mostly been Australian and much of New Zealand is still an Australian branch office.
The Anzacs were brothers-in-arms in the 20th century and we fought together for the British Empire but, like distant cousins, we have drifted apart.
One million Kiwis live outside New Zealand at any point in time and about half of those are working in Australia. Half a million educated workers whose "cost of reproduction of labour" Australia doesn't have to bear.
Workers that are not entitled to Australian welfare. Workers that often come home to retire and, if they turn out to be criminal, workers that can be dumped back in New Zealand.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters should keep on at Scott Morrison about how Australia treats New Zealand workers and to stop the Kiwi deportations, which often separate families.
