But the desolate drives through redneck badlands proved instead to be our first experience of being loathed, hated and threatened by the few inhospitable Americans we ever met.
In three short decades successive governors, British soldiers and convicts had done much to tame the inhospitable wilderness immediately around Botany Bay, while pushing pastoral settlement further towards the heart of Captain Cook's great southern land.
The terrain is, though, suitably bleak and inhospitable.
But back to the stone country, and ranger Terrah Guymala who takes me to a painting based on observations in October 1883 of an expedition by David Lindsay whose party had struggled during a six-month horseback crossing of the inhospitable plateau.
But Sandaoling is not for the casual day-tripper.Remote and inhospitable, its locomotives are visited only by the determined (unlike Sichuan province's readily accessible pandas).
There, processing refugees on the inhospitable island of Nauru seems to have worked as an effective deterrent whereas refugees were arriving in Australia by boat at the rate of 500-1,000 a month in the autumn of 2001, only a single person arrived this way in the first six months of 2002.Britain would like the rest of the EU to adopt the plan.
In the Arctic, for example, which is warming faster than any other large environment on earth, new shrubs and plants are invading formerly inhospitable areas.
The multinationals, by contrast, spared only a handful of people, selling to the province's towns from afar.Huawei also ventured to inhospitable backwaters outside China.
Since the allies dropped their pledge of a Kurdish state, made after the first world war, the Kurds have been divided mainly between four inhospitable countries: Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.In Syria, successive governments have been trying to dilute the influence of their Kurdish minority, who number perhaps 1m in a population of 15m.
ONE day in 2000 the people of Puerto Casado, a small town in Paraguay's inhospitable Chaco region, were shocked to learn that the ground had been sold under their feet and that their new lord and master was the Rev Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who leads the Unification cult, better known as the Moonies.
Small wonder that the most common reason given by unbanked households for not having an account was not having enough money to feel they needed one (see chart).But just because mainstream banking seems inhospitable to the poor does not mean it has to be.
