No one has had a clearer view of Australia than Story Musgrave. No less than four times, the veteran astronaut has taken part in space walks over our continent. And that, he says, is probably more than anyone else in history.

What he's seen while attached to the umbilical cord of the space shuttle, wearing a life support suit he helped design, has taken his breath away. "The aridity. An incredible sense of the gorgeous beauty that wind and sand creates in the deserts. The beauty of the ethereal lakes as they dry up. The perspective from space is very different. It allows you to get a cultural/national pattern of who Australia is."

During his flights he took about 10,000 photographs of Earth from space with the equivalent of a 600mm lens. Some of the best were of Australia and he's in Australia to prepare for a unique "performance/exhibition" of those Australian images at the City Recital Hall on February 6.

These days, Musgrave describes himself as "artist" and "storyteller".

From orbit, he says, you get "the big picture", the things that make Australia unique. Like what?

"How prevalent the plankton is. How Australia's shorelines are totally different from any other place on Earth. From space you can see that you have the world's most perfect harbours. They're so enclosed. And your beaches are very scalloped," he says.

"There's not a single delta in Australia that protrudes into the water such as the Mississippi does. Australia has massive tides compared to other places and it's the tides which shape your shoreline, not your rivers, because Australian rivers are not powerful."

And a spaceman can appreciate not just that Australia is arid, but why the land is arid. "You're mid-latitude. Every single great desert in the world is mid-latitude. There are none at the equator and very few at high latitudes."

Even though some things become more obvious from space, like "the fault lines in Arnhem Land, one of the oldest geologies on Earth" - other things, which seem huge on land, become difficult to spot "up there". Like Uluru, which he succeeded in photographing only with great planning.

"It's not easy to find. Alice doesn't just pop out at you when you're in space."