I’ve just got back from watching Wolf Creek, an Australian film, at the cinema. I’m still a bit shaken.

It’s about three backpackers who head off into a remote part of the Australian outback, and I guess you could slot it on the same shelf as The Blair Witch Project or Open Water – chilling and disturbing in a subtle, unassuming way.

Without giving away much of what happens, it’s a very typically Australian film, with rich colours, wide open shots, and great scenery. It moves at a pace which is slow and careful without dragging, and the dialogue, camera work and soundtrack is almost subliminal. However, it’s not exactly a film you’ll see being used by the Australian tourist authorities.

So part of me is glad my Australian trip this year was before, not after, watching this film; and yet another part of me is desperate to pack up and jet off to the land of vast, vast expanses and beauty. The whole idea that a country can be so big that older settlements might have existed, abandoned, for decades without anyone knowing, is so strange. Coming from Scotland, even though it is claimed to be home to one of Europe’s last wildernesses, the idea of a country that can be that unquantifiably huge is just… amazing.

And no, the wilderness I mean is the Highlands, not Dundee on a Saturday night.