As a younger and more headstrong man – as in, when I was very annoying – I arranged much of my life around a sentiment expressed most clearly by the poet Frank O’Hara. “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes,” he wrote. “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

In those early years, I’m sure I noticed that nature existed, on occasion. But for the most part I treated it like a kindly but fatally boring uncle at a Christmas gathering: to be indulged briefly as an act of charity, and then abandoned as soon as it was polite. I thought the things I was concerned with – art, music, cinema – were inherently urban, and that people who concerned themselves too much with the environment were uniformly boring, out of touch, and perhaps worst of all, daggy.

I don’t know exactly when that changed, but I know it has changed so thoroughly – on such a cellular level – that I no longer really feel myself in the city. These days, I have found myself increasingly unable to conceive of contemporary urban life as anything other than a complex machine geared towards both destruction and distraction, which are ultimately the same thing.

So I escape, as frequently as possible, and to wherever possible. And nowhere now feels as real to me as Mount Arthur, a tucked-away spot in Tasmania’s north.

I love Mount Arthur because I love the peace of the place; its astonishing, at times almost overwhelming, natural beauty. The closest town, Lilydale, sits gently in the shadow of the mountain. Fields undulate unpredictably but gracefully, like occasional bars of music in a symphony mostly made of silence. Birds gather in twilight, fog literally rolls off hills. You get the privilege of being stared at by a lot of sheep – which are one of my favourite animals to be stared at by – with their at best only passing interest in your activity. Stay humble, a sheep’s eyes say.

But I do not want to make the same mistake so many have made when describing areas of remote calm. I do not want to paint Mount Arthur as “quaint” or “sleepy”. In fact, the effect all nature has on me is ultimately rousing. On our last trip there, my partner and I felt as though Mount Arthur had quickened us into life. Such spots expel the sense of unreality that sitting in an office for eight hours a day generates. They wake us up.

And in this way, they make certain things impossible to ignore. Observed from the distance of a stretch of green hills and clear skies, the colossal cruelty and stupidity of this country’s politicians is startling. In Tasmania, as in the rest of Australia, those in power have quite happily handed over true control to corporations seemingly intent on ensuring that humans live in a lonely world entirely composed of things they have created.

And yet in places like Mount Arthur, awash with the true sort of quiet that soaks into your skin, it becomes abundantly clear that all life happens in wide open spaces, Frank O’Hara be damned. The real extremist position is the one designed to convince us our modern urban life nourishes us or keeps us safe. In actual fact, the gluggy simulacrum of existence we concern ourselves with – one that involves such horrors as Microsoft Teams, Instagram reels and the endless crowding noise of the digital world – does not exist in any meaningful way.

Trapped in the ersatz world of our cities, our heads all fogged up, a news story about a mine expansion might strike us as sad, but it doesn’t strike us as an urgent, unfolding crime – which is exactly what it is. And so these days, when I run to a place like Mount Arthur and I immerse myself in nature – the greenery and abundance that isn’t our enemy, but our kin – I know I’m not ducking out of “real life”.

I know that there, on a quiet morning, as clouds break over the mountains, everything else is fake. That despite what those in power want us to believe, all that exists is the trees, swaying. Birdsong. The next clean breath. And the next clean one after that.

• Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His latest book is Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated