The beach was remote, with neither a footprint laid down nor a towel laid out. Its white sand was so fine it hung in the shallows making the water milky. Above it was an escarpment on top of which a plain ran north. Within a hundred metres of stepping on the sand I came across a plastic bottle and picked it up. This is First World behaviour. I’m tempted to discriminate more sharply and call it “Victorian behaviour”. Because it’s what we do. Walking past litter on a beach feels like aiding and abetting a crime to me. We Victorians, when we see rubbish on a beach, whether in Gippsland or on the Surf Coast, are offended at its presence and outraged by the vandal who left it there, and we pick it up, not without a frisson of righteousness. It’s a win-win; the beach and our conscience are simultaneously cleansed.

But this beach was a Western Australian beach and after walking a kilometre I dropped all the plastic bottles I’d gathered back on the sand. Momentarily, it felt sacrilegious, dirty, wrong. It felt like the 1970s. But the ethical dynamic was different here. I didn’t owe this beach what I owed the Victorian beaches. Or if I did, I couldn’t pay. Here was a beach at which my noble eco-friendly traits must fall away. Because this beach was strewn with a crop of plastic that could never be harvested by meandering do-gooders. Rubbish on this scale would require something like Mao’s campaign against the sparrows to clear it up.

This beach was just south of Eucla. And from it we drove west along ever more remote beaches, all fouled with plastic. In a thousand kilometres and 11 days of driving, the only other human we saw was Don, who’d built himself a shack at the nucleus of nowhere. Don didn’t care about Ukraine. Yesterday he’d caught a big trevally.

The Great Australian Bight is Australia’s remotest coast, and the longest stretch of coast in the world without a stream flowing off it. Almost every time we stopped along the Baxter Cliffs (which Matthew Flinders rightly called one of the wonders of the world) we looked down on whales. We heard them sing. They nestled against each other like puppies. One morning I saw a camel on a cliff staring down at a whale with what seemed to me humpbackish empathy.

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Humanity’s appetite for plastic is insatiable and the great sweatshops of Asia hum hot turning petro-kibble into myriad products that are soon thrown off ships and washed out of rivers, circumnavigating the globe to end up on Australia’s southern beaches. Every remote beach I’d assumed pristine while looking at a map was covered with an acne of human waste: brightly coloured ropes, nets to gather minnow and nets to haul in leviathan, buoys covered in Asian calligraphies, troughs, bottles, light globes, mats, hard hats, chairs … and, looking closely down at the sand, the garish shingle of microplastics, big manufacturings ground small by wind and water, pretty speckles of flame blue and cerise. The world will soon be all byproduct, her beaches made of plastic sand.

Politicians routinely have things named for them: buildings, highways, bridges … Plaques dedicated to them stain our walls, creating a chronically skewed history and excusing their sins. I’m proposing a truer accounting, one that will help explain the world’s environmental impoverishment to future generations. From now on, we name environmental catastrophes after the politicians who presided over them. Let posterity, which at present is asked to admire a premier for stumping up dough for a tennis arena, instead despise him for fiddling while forests fell.

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Mark McGowan’s tenure as premier of Western Australia is epitomised by his drooling over ore royalties while sermonising about parsimony to the eastern states. But I’d rename WA’s southern beaches “the Polypropylene Coast” and attach brass plaques to rocks saying they were ruined during his premiership. Let a true accounting take place. Let the brass be balanced. Assign every extinction to the prime minister during whose term it occurred. Over the next three years, whichever species vanishes into the past should be known as part of “the Albanese Extinctions”. The 2019-20 fires should henceforth be known as “the Morrison Fires”.

At every entrance to The Otways place a roadside plaque reading: “The lovely gang-gang cockatoo once lived here. It became extinct during Dan Andrew’s premiership of Victoria.” And place a spittoon below every plaque to catch the contempt of our descendants.

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