The finding that nearly half of Australia remains untouched by humans might come as little surprise to those cynics who are only too happy to detail exactly why wilderness remains so wild.

The trouble with wilderness, as they see it, is that when you get there, there is no there there.

What is there instead is a selection of flora and fauna which, having been left undisturbed for 20,000 years to evolve without any need to ingratiate themselves with alien life forms (which explains the plug-ugliness of salamanders), do not respond warmly to the arrival of humans. The wilderness is too often filled with the sort of animals and insects that can kill you in hours.

But such cynics fail, in a very literal sense, to see the wood for the trees. The wilderness mapped out by new Australian research covers an area 12 times the size of Britain.

That ranks it alongside the Amazon and Antarctica as a place to which a man or woman might travel and justifiably believe themselves to be the first human visitor since the big bang.

The paradox is that, rather than teaching us about novel worlds, wandering into wilderness teaches us most about the lives we already lead. “The end of all our exploring”, as T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding, “will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

Wilderness allows us to experience the mysterious and the unknown. It offers the charms and challenges of solitude. When everyone wants to be somebody and to go somewhere, it can be bliss to be a nobody, in the middle of nowhere.

The cruel paradox, then, is that we may travel there only in spirit. For were we to visit in practice, it would, of course, cease to be wilderness.