Category Archives for Australia
The Friday Photo: Sunrise over Uluru
In an attempt to improve my photography, I’ve been reading an ebook called Getting Out of Auto. To motivate me, I’m going to post a regular photo every Friday. This week? A shot of Australia’s sacred Uluru, showing the colour change from sunrise to dawn. Like travel pictures? Pop on over to Delicious Baby for [...]
The Sunday Six: Melbourne Bars
Biero Like beer? Then you’ll love Biero, which offers several hundred of the world’s finest brews, from the eye-wateringly expensive high-alcohol triple bocks through to local craft brews at $5 a pint on Wednesdays. And the styling’s funky, too. Biero is at 525 Little Lonsdale Street, CBD Der Raum If you’re a cocktail geek — [...]
The Sunday Six: Sydney Bars
1: Shady Pines Saloon A New York hipster bar with an Aussie sense of humour. Country and Western plays, skulls adorn the bar, a fine selection of whiskies, beers and cocktails fly about the place and pretty much anyone’s welcome, provided they enjoy a good time. That means, in a city where CBD bars have [...]
Going Nuclear in the Outback
The Outback majors on crazy towns. Tiny communities, stranded in an inland sea of sand and scrub, hundreds of miles from anywhere. Yet even after the Martian landscape of Coober Pedy, Woomera, South Australia, is pretty special. Woomera sits on the edge of a bona fide nuclear wasteland: the Woomera Prohibited Zone, a landscape more [...]
1: Farmers Don’t Like Pulling Your Camper Out of Their Road Outback Australia is a great place to drive a 4WD. If you know how to do it. When a road says “4WD only” it means: “only for drivers of high clearance 4WDs who know how to use a 4WD in different grades on different [...]
The Craziest Town on the Planet?
Arriving in Coober Pedy, in the South Australian outback, is like landing on another planet. Not just because the place has stood in for Mars in many a movie and almost outclassed Tina Turner in Mad Max III. Not just because of the crazy pits and slagheaps which dot the barren red landscape. This place… [...]
My Love-Hate Relationship with Australia
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT AUSTRALIA 1: The Landscapes After Namibia and Mongolia, Australia is the third least densely populated country in the world. And given almost everyone lives in cities and the nation has the money to build roads, it has the most easily accessible big, empty landscapes on this earth. The horizons are huge… [...]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a pulse will not be in want of attention in a cocktail bar. I have no idea how I’d forgotten this. But I had… Over the course of a “career” not so much chequered as positively gingham, but dominated by language and [...]
Today in Adelaide saw the fifth and final day of the second English-Australian Test cricket match, to the outsider one of the most bewildering sporting events on the planet, after cheese-rolling, bog-snorkelling, synchronised skating and that thing that Afghans do with dead goats on horseback. I went down to the English end of the ground [...]
Seeing Stars in the Outback
Weather doesn’t get more biblical than droughts, floods and plagues of locusts. And that precise trifecta has hit the South Australian outback this summer. The great salt lakes, which sit dry for decades on end as brilliant mirrors of pinkish white, oscillate between aggressive blue and muted brown. The impossibly ancient mountains have turned from [...]
