The new land pleased naturalists even more than the farmers. We can still glimpse the astonishment of those naturalists who first saw Gippsland's giant earthworm burrowing in the soft soil of the slopes of the Bass Valley, or the mountain-ash trees growing in the gullies of the Dividing Range – one standing as high as a 45-storey building before it was split into palings and shingles. Some settlers marvelled at the waterfalls which spilled over basalt cliffs, the craters on the plains, the Murray billabongs at daybreak, the nest of the Mallee hen, and the platypus. The typical settler, however, was often uneasy in the typical landscape.

A love of the landscape grew slowly and unevenly. Those who lived on the land had to make money to survive, and many drastically altered the landscape in order to earn a living and many changed it because they wanted to recreate Yorkshire in the Ovens Valley or County Clare on the slopes of Kilmore. To anglicise the landscape was not necessarily to dislike it: that was often a first step towards accepting what was still unfamiliar.

Sheep and cattle and horses altered the countryside, by their grazing. So too did the wheat and barley and imported grasses. Many farmers planted hedges alongside their fences, hoping that the English hawthorn or South African boxthorn would overgrow the fence and take its place. Many of these ‘live fences’ ran wild, and homesick travellers marvelled as they walked the roads at the golden lower of the gorse, but the farmer did not marvel because some of his land was now useless.