Bill Bryson titled one his fascinating books on Australia 'In a sun burned country' after the popular and romanticized notion of Australia's landscape. But stretching from the Tropic of Capricorn to the temperate clime of Tasmania and fashioned by geological forces, water and wind, Australia's landscapes are much broader than a windswept arid land.
What is a landscape?
A landscape is an area of land that can be viewed from a particular place. For example below we can see the landscape of The Chocolate Hills in the Philippines. This photo shows the landscape from a particular point on top of one of the 'chocolate' hills. This landscape has a unique collection and distribution of land forms that make up its landscape.
We can categorize landscapes. Common categories of landscapes would be deserts, forests, mountains, coasts, grasslands and aquatic. Within each of these categories the land forms and appearance of the land can vary greatly.
What is a land form?
Land forms are the unique shapes of land that make up a landscape. In the image below left of The Chocolate Hills we can see that the significant land forms are the hills shaped a little like lumps of chocolate and the valleys between the hills. Looking in the opposite direction we can see a different landscape, a flat plain, formerly forest but now farm land.
Below we see two coastal landscapes but if we look closely we'll see that their land forms and features are very different. Left - Puka Beach, Boracay, The Philippines Right - Menjangan Island, Bali, Indonesia