It takes 26 hours to drive from Sydney to Ceduna.

That's not including sleep stops, just pure drive time. 26 hours in the saddle as they say. Except it ain't a saddle, it's bucket seats all the way. Though if respect is earned by luxuries spurned, then I'll tell you about the time I drove it solo and without a CD player. I didn't even have a working radio on that trip. Just me and a quiver of Banksy's burning up the miles in silence, watching keenly the changes in the country.

"Every hundred kays the land transforms into something completely different. The trees of the the Great Dividing Range disappear. The soil goes red. You realise you are entering a strange and empty land. It's not sandy desert. There is vegetation. There are rocks. The desert has a lot of faces. We drove by day mostly. We wanted to know our country."

I didn't write those words but I understand the sentiment they carry. We wanted to know our country. It's why I enjoy the drive to the desert coasts so much, and it's why I once did it in silence. Surprisingly, the passage was written by Matt Hoy and it appears in Badlands, the latest book by Surfing World. I say surprising because, until I read it, I would never have thought Hoyo and I had much in common: he the beer-swilling brute, me the coffee-sipping fruit.

But then common ground isn't so hard to find once the highway turns west, away from the cities and their tensions and pretensions. Free of genteel distraction it's easier to find commonality: we drive the same roads, we see the same country, we experience the same emotions. We tell the same stories. Some of them are old, and the stories are old precisely because they are common. The commonality lets us connect across the cultures and down the ages.

It seems like an age ago when Surfing World released a book called Surfing Wild Australia. It was 1984 and SW was under the stewardship of Bruce Channon and Hugh McLeod. Surfing Wild Australia was a hard cover, coffee-table size book, which at the time that was a novel thing for a magazine to publish. It was a beautiful book and it tapped into an aspect of our collective psyche that had lain dormant for many years.

Where once our national character was derived in the bush, it had long since been defined by the beach. Australia had become an urban, beach-loving nation. Yet in an era of burgeoning professionalism, city living and small wave ripping, Surfing Wild Australia went back to the bush to rediscover and tell an old story. Looking for energy out on the edge, as the byline said. It was a popular publication.

26 years later and the story is still the same. How could it be any different? Regional populations have further migrated toward the ocean, concentrating in a coastal crescent on the eastern seaboard, while the vast inland and the distant coasts are largely ignored. Yet for those who bother to go the effect they have on us is as overpowering as ever.

Such wild coasts, such old land. Where visitors either marvel at their insignificance and find order in a history that dates back millennia, or feel vulnerable and flee for the shelter of concrete and crowds.

Badlands vividly captures that wild nature in images (always blue water, always red land) and recreates it in words. The layout is similar to Surfing Wild Australia with well-chosen photos documenting recent forays to the desert coasts of South and Western Australia. Surfers, such as Matt Hoy, recite short but candid accounts of their trips while Jock Serong provides longer pieces about the desert experience. Andrew Kidman, Jon Frank and Vaughn Blakey also muse on the desert and the feelings it arouses.

It was dissappointing to see that Badlands, unlike it's predecessor, has advertisements in it. Their full-page presence conspicuous among the glossy contents and serving to break the graphic continuity. But then, I guess, the corporate encroachment of our culture is a new story. And a necessary one too I suspect. An unavoidable truth that no amount of creative accounting can turn to fiction.

The best advice would be to consider the garish advertising yet another urban distraction to be ignored, and then concentrate on the story within. Because the crew at SW have done a fine job of retelling it in Badlands.

Badlands is $14.99 available from newsagencies (Homepage photo of Pete Tomlinson and dolphin taken by Shane Smith)