Category: Travel

We just bought ourselves a ute. The ute is the archetypal Australian vehicle if ever there was one. Real Aussies drive utes. While it is true that you can buy a flat-bed pickup in other countries, I doubt that anywhere outside of Australia can you equip your farm vehicle with alloy racing wheels, metallic fliptone paint jobs, lowered suspension, superchargers and turbos, or fully race-spec V8 engines. Holden (GM) and Ford even sell them fully tricked up from new, and ute racing is an enormous part of the racing calendar.

Some people like to add lots of lights, aerials and unfeasibly large bullbars (known here as roo-bars).

Ours doesn’t look like that, though. Ours is a twenty year old Toyota that has spent its entire life chugging around on a rural property, carrying water from the dam to the farmhouse. In this way, it has somehow clocked up an astonishing half a million kilometres, and accumulated an interesting selection of minor dents, some of which have been repaired with household gloss paint.

The windows were described by the vendor as ‘manual’, in that to open and close them you put your hand against the glass and push. The radio doesn/t work very well, but it really doesn’t matter because you’d be most unlikely to hear it over the transmission whine anyway. Still, its just what we need to ferry heavy bits and pieces to and from the boat. So why mention it here? Well, I just wanted to say that it is such a pleasure to have a car that you actually have to drive, rather than allowing a bunch of electronics do it all for you. You point the bonnet in the direction that you want it to go, put it into gear, and press the accelerator. If you want to drive with the lights on, then you switch them on. When it rains, you can decide when your windscreen wipers come on, and how fast they move. If you come to a hill, you can change down, or not, depending on your mood. When you need to stop, then it is up to you to decide how hard to push the brake pedal in order to stop without locking the wheels up. If you want to turn a tight corner, then you have to use upper body strength to move the steering wheel around.

It is absolutely brilliant. Bronwyn and I fight over whose turn it is to drive.

It was just before dawn, and a crisp cold breeze seeped in through the glass doors of the hotel foyer. A half dozen voyagers had assembled, bleary-eyed, at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra, to meet the crew of Balloon Aloft. Outside, an elderly four-wheel drive manoeuvred into position, trailing behind it a mysterious, gloom-shrouded package. We hurried aboard and were driven to the top of a nearby hill where our pilot, Alan, let off a couple of small black helium balloons and carefully watched as they zigzagged back and forth through the air streams. After a brief discussion, Alan and his ground crew, Rod, agreed on this mornings launch site, and we all piled back in for the journey back down the mountain.

The site that they had chosen was a piece of waste ground on the edge of the city, and it was already filling up with balloonists both private and commercial; obviously everybody had come to similar decisions about their launch site. We found a space in the middle and all mucked in to help unpack our craft. First came the basket, sturdily constructed from wicker, and divided internally into three compartments, one for the pilot and gas tanks, and the others for passengers. Then came an enormous bag, from which we unrolled the nylon canopy onto the frost-coated grass, a long worm trailing from the basket and out across the field.

Finally we unlimbered a small petrol generator and a large electric fan. While I held open the canopy, the fan pumped cold air inside, so that the whole thing started to billow and to slowly unfurl into a bit squashy sausage.

The rushing air was very cold, and I was glad of my gloves, but while I was standing there the pilot was rigging the gas bottles to the burners on top of the basket. Since the basket was lying on its side, the burners were aimed straight past me into the hole in the canopy. After a brief warning, the pilot lit the gas and a huge roiling flame roared past me and into the balloon. Suddenly I wasn’t cold at all.

Slowly the balloon began to take shape.

The crew poked around pulling out folds and making sure that the control lines were not tangled, until the whole canopy lifted up and rolled the basket upright. We all jumped on to it to keep it on the ground and then clambered in. The basket was untethered from the 4WD, the pilot let off a stream of flame into the canopy, and we were airborne.

At about a thousand feet, Alan switched off the flame and everything went quiet and still. The patchwork quilt of the land below drifted silently by, and the sun warmed our frosted fingers. Since we were drifting with the wind, there was no breeze in the balloon. Those few sounds that we could hear from the ground came with startling crystal clarity.

Alan did a courtesy radio check with the local airports tower, and then took us up to three thousand feet, where an air stream pushed us in the direction he wanted, right across the centre of Canberra. From that initial hilltop exercise with the helium balloon, he had formed a mental picture of all the criss-crossing air streams above, and could steer us in any of a number of different directions simply by changing altitude. Far from being at the mercy of the elements, balloons can be flown with pinpoint accuracy. Alan explained that when they aren’t taking paying passengers, he and his fellow balloonists often compete in balloon trials, flying from way point to way point and fulfilling tasks such as tossing a bean-bag onto a target on the ground, or picking up a handkerchief from the grass. Others practice bouncing off the water of the lake.

We were not competing, of course, we were just along for the ride. Ballooning is a beautiful way to travel. Even sufferers of vertigo have nothing to worry about. The basket feels rock solid underfoot, and does not swing or flex. The ground drifts by below, looking more like a map than the territory, and there is no real impression of height, just of peace and calm. Our views to the Brindabella hills were breathtaking.

As we drifted in over the suburbs, we began to hear dogs barking. This seems to be a peculiarity of dogs; they bark when a balloon passes over their house, even if they are inside and the gas burner is quiet. Nobody knows how they detect the balloon floating silently far above the rooftops, but they do.

Eventually, however, the trip had to end. Once the sun gets too high in the sky, the thermoclines start up and ballooning becomes less predictable. Alan took careful note of the wind direction and called Rod, who had been patiently dogging us in the car below, parking up at intervals and waiting on various roadside verges for us to sail overhead. We were going to land on a rugby field that they happened to know had a broken lock on the gate which meant that they could get the car onto the pitch. The two of them have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the accessible green areas of Canberra, but even so, Alan said that sometimes they had to put down somewhere inconvenient which meant carrying the balloon out and/or bribing the landowner with champagne to open the gate for them.

There are control lines that lead to a vent in the canopy that can be used to spin the balloon around or, as now, to let hot air out of the top in order to lose height. We dropped gently down, just clearing the rugby goal posts, and threw a line to Rod, who guided us down the last few tens of metres.

Just in case the basket tipped over onto its side or got dragged along on the ground, we all adopted the landing position, which involved crouching down in the basket, hanging on, and waiting for everything to stop moving. The actual landing was very gentle, and it looked for a moment as if the basket was going to stay upright, but it gently rolled over onto its side, still buoyed by the remaining hot air in the canopy.

Rod fought a little with the huge bag, but finally managed to wrestle it to the ground, and one by one we hopped out to help. Repacking the balloon is quite easy with half a dozen willing volunteers, but must be hard work with only two people. First it is squashed up into a long sausage, and then it is carried and crammed, armful by armful, into the bag from which it came. Naturally it still contains a lot air, so we ended up with a laughing pile of people all rolling about on top, trying to get the last few metres under control. Finally we hoisted bag and basket onto the trailer, and piled happily back into the truck.

It was just about time for normal people to be getting up out of bed, and we knew that back at the Hyatt there was champagne waiting to help us to start our day.

We awoke in our comfortable glamping tent in Kakadu National Park, and headed off to a temporary dock on Yellow Water Billabong to board a small tourist boat.

We had (inadvertently, of course) timed our arrival to perfection. With the Wet just starting, the billabong was just starting to flood its banks, and where the water had swept over the surrounding floodplains, life was erupting with exuberance.

Spectacular white egrets, flashing azure kingfishers, red-winged parrots, and all manner of wildfowl filled the lush floodplains or hid in crevices amongst the mangroves.

In the topmost branches of the trees, sea-eagles and storks had already kicked their fledglings out of their nests. In only a very short time, not only the river banks and the undergrowth, but even the treetops themselves would be under water. Within days, the boat dock that we had used to embark would be completely inundated and the operator would have to move to another site.

The boat itself was basically a metal raft built on two flat pontoons, each with an enormous outboard engine hanging off the back. Our guide chugged us around into the reeds and under overhanging trees, pointing out different birds and plants, all the while exhorting us not to hang any limbs over the water, just in case.

She explained that in the Dry, which is the colder season, crocs tend to sun themselves on the banks, but here in the Wet they are happier to stay cool in the water, and are more than capable of jumping aboard if they think that they can get an arm.

While we all marvelled at the wonders of nature about us (and pondered the possible fate of two men out fishing in a little tin boat) we were of course hoping for our first glimpse of the real king of the waterways.

Then suddenly a small voice cried “Crocodile!” and everybody ran to what happened to be Bronwyns side of the boat, which tipped alarmingly and left her staring at close range at eight feet of heavily armoured reptile.

From then on, we saw crocodiles everywhere. Rooting around in the mangrove palms, rising mysteriously to the surface around us and then cruising effortlessly out of our way, only sinking out of sight when our wake got too annoying.

Eventually, even the youngest and most vociferous of us had seen enough, and we returned to the dock, to our bus, and finally to our shack in Darwin.

It was by now raining heavily, so we caught a taxi for the short ride into town. After a refreshing beer or two, there was only one public building left that we hadn’t visited, so we ducked into the air conditioned cinema to cool down.

Although most of the Kakadu National Park is nominally floodplain, for eight months of the year it consists of dry mud and burning bush. The area has only two seasons, the Dry and the Wet. We had arrived just at the end of the Dry, when the rivers were beginning to fill and the plants were starting to appear lush and green, growing frantically prior to the complete inundation of the Wet.

Kakadu National Park

Our driver, Andy, had driven us in a bus from Darwin. He led us as we climbed to the top of a red mesa-like outcrop that gave stunning views of the flood-lands below.

Until relatively recently, these plains were home to herds of water buffalo descended from draught animals freed after Darwin was built. Extensive culling has now reduced them to somewhat less than their plague proportions, and now the environment has recovered, although the lush green grass is, inevitably, another introduced species planted by early cattle-ranchers.

Nevertheless, it is an extraordinarily impressive sight, the vivid green contrasting with the bright red rock, all under the merciless glare of the Northern Territories sun.

Aboriginal Rock Paintings

The Park is managed by a committee of ten aboriginal elders and four local rangers, and much of it is off-limits to tourists because it is used for traditional living. The information provided in various centres scattered around the Park give an interesting mix of aboriginal and European facts, stories, and artefacts, and in fact this rock on which we were climbing is one of the areas aboriginal rock painting sites.

I’d never understood rock painting before, but our driver, Andy, managed to bring the paintings and the culture to life for us. Aboriginal culture is multi-layered, such that as you get older you are taught deeper insights into the topics that you already know, until you are an elder and know all the layers; however, you will still only know the layers of the stories in your particular area or clan.

The information that you learn, handed down in stories about spirits, is all to do with survival in the bush and your behaviour in society. The volume of this information is staggering, but as Andy said, they have 50,000 years of culture to draw upon.

In Kakadu, each picture represents an event or happening, typically a particularly large prey animal. Stories are linked to the painting, which is often laid over older paintings. In this area, animals in particular are pictured transparent in order to display the best way to cut them, and to emphasise those parts which make good eating.

Deluge

As the day wore on, clouds began to gather on the horizon. Andy started to look worried, and began collecting us from the far corners of the mesa and shepherding us down to ground level.

What was wrong? It was only a rain cloud.

What we hadn’t taken into account was the sheer volume of precipitation that can fall in these parts. We had heard stories of people being cut off by the start of the Wet, but it didn’t seem real up here on this enormous rock in the sunshine.

Andy had told us about one particular guy who had been camping down in the woods one year, and when the rain started to fall he had been flooded out of his tent so he carried his stuff up to the nearby toilet block. After a while, the building flooded, so he climbed onto the roof. The water continued to rise until it reached him there, too, so he started to climb up the corrugated iron water tower on the roof. When the rescue helicopter finally winched him off, he had cut a hole in the water tank and was sitting inside, watching the level come still higher.

Andy wasn’t kidding us around; he was seriously worried that one or more of the rivers that we had forded on the way in might now be too deep for the bus to get out, and he practically force-marched us back to the vehicle and set off at full speed.

The rivers that we had crossed on the way there had just been trickles across the road, but now after just a few hours, and before the rain had really started, we had over a foot of water across the road.

“Are there crocodiles?” asked the little boy who was obsessed with them, as the bus eased slowly across.
“I’m not wading,” said Andy.

Camping Deluxe

We were going to stay overnight at a camp site inside Kakadu National Park. This is a permanent fixture, an attempt to keep everybody in one place and prevent the sort of problems that had befallen the chap in the water tank.

Our large, permanently-pitched tent was certainly a lot more comfortable than our shack in Darwin. It came equipped with camp beds, mosquito netting, a cooking tent, a swimming pool, and a bar, so we weren’t complaining.

We had a very comfortable stay, and the bird noises during the night were wondrous.

The Green Gecko

One of our standard ploys when planning a trip to a new city, is to book accommodation that is outside of the central business district. The night life is likely to be more relaxed, the prices cheaper, and we are more likely to encounter real people in real situations than if we were to follow the standard tourist route.

For our trip to Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory of Australia, we followed our usual formula, and had booked a room in backpackers’ accommodation out in what seemed, from the map, to be the far suburbs.

The airport shuttle dropped us outside a rather ramshackle building populated entirely by dope heads. Struggling a little with the humid forty-degree heat, we managed to extract a key from somebody, and located our room, which was in a sort of shack out the back. Inside it was your standard Australian backpacker’s, with a simple bed and a sink, a broken air conditioner, and some six-inch cockroaches. No real surprises, apart from ducking to avoid the roaches as they flew around like pterodactyls, so we ditched our gear and tried to locate a bus or taxi into town.

We couldn’t find anybody at the hostel who could talk to us without drooling, so we set off on foot in what seemed to be the correct direction. Almost instantly, the heavens opened and we were caught in a stunning deluge. We couldn’t avoid getting wet, but a bus shelter prevented the enormous rain drops from bruising us too much.

Darwin

As quickly as it had started, it was over, and we continued our journey, drying almost instantly in the heat, and idly wondering how far we would have to travel before we found either a taxi or a bus to take us into the CBD. We passed a bar (I lie. We stopped in for a beer), then another bar, and then, mysteriously, our journey was interrupted by the sea. We had just walked clear across Darwin.

It really is a very small city indeed. After we’d had beers in the few bars, watched some locals fighting each other, ascertained that all the shopkeepers were quite excited because “a cruise ship is coming in tonight”, and checked out the seafront (Do Not Swim Here. Salty Crocs), we had pretty much exhausted the possibilities of the town, and all before four o’clock in the afternoon.

A brief perusal of the literature in the tourist office revealed that most of the attractions on offer were not in Darwin at all, but several hours plane-ride away in Cairns, a completely different city in a completely different state.

Next morning, then, having unapologetically “done Darwin”, we boarded a small bus and headed out toward the wilderness of Kakadu National Park.

Termites on the road to Kakadu

The bus seated 22, but thankfully there were only seven of us aboard to share the welcome air-conditioning. One was a kid who was desperately keen to see crocodiles. Whenever we passed a body of water of any size, he would hop up and down and ask, “Are there crocodiles?”

Andy, our Swiss driver, would inevitably reply, “There are crocodiles everywhere”, but although we stopped a few times to check, they were being quite elusive.

Andy took us to a few pit-stops along the way, including a country pub with two penned crocodiles in the car park, a fresh and a salty, but the boy wasn’t impressed with tame ones.

Along the road, we started to see enormous termite cathedrals. Stopping to examine them, we could be forgiven for thinking that they were completely lifeless under the baking sun, but Andy showed us how to tell the old, uninhabited mounds from the live ones. The signs are small, but here and there you can find small rough patches where a dead mound has been damaged. Poking a small hole in the smooth integument of a living mound, however, and within seconds the insects within are rushing around repairing it. The speed of the response, and the speed of the repair, was fascinating.

We flew into Perth airport, intending to spend some time touring around the south-western corner of Western Australia. We had arranged to hire a motorcyce from Bike Round Oz, whose owner, Mark, picked us up and took us to his house in the Darling Range, where he installed us in a beautiful little converted railway carriage.

Fitted out in dark wood, with a plush red bed at one end, views across the range and a serene farm dam, it was a great place to relax after our flight. Add into the equation a friendly bunch of alpacas, black cockatoos wheeling overhead, and a bottle of gratis champagne, and we felt right at home.

The next morning, after a basket breakfast, we had a look at our ride, a yellow BMW GS1200, a little elderly but with impeccable credentials – it had already been around the world once. “She lost those cooling fins in Argentina…”

After packing a handful of stuff into the very small panniers, we set off southward down the Darling Range. The GS felt like a bit of a pig at first, but was very stable at speed, apart from an inclination to pull hard to the right, and fierce wind noise from the windshield.

The Gloucester Karri

Mining equipment dominated the scenery. Coming into Waroona, a parking lot for mining machinery was quite a shock; absolutely immense vehicles standing shoulder to shoulder in the red dirt, surrounded by cast-off caterpillar tracks. Lining the road near Capel were scrapyards containing enormous pieces of old machinery.

Every signpost along the way indicated a mine or a quarry, and the road was chock full of ore trucks which politely shuffled over to let us past. OK, we got the picture, this was mining country.

As we headed south, the machinery gave way to dairies, and then the cows gave way to trees. Regular trees gave way to big trees, and finally to the enormous timber that characterises the logging town of Pemberton.

Back in the early days of Pemberton’s history, the timber of choice was the Karri tree, a truly enormous species scattered around the local forests. Some of the tallest were spared to serve as lookouts for the ever-present danger of fire, and only these now remain.

The famous Gloucester Karri is sixty-one metres high. Embedded in the trunk are hundreds of steel spikes, and if you are particularly keen, you can use them to climb to the top.

Theres nothing to stop you slipping between the spikes if they are wet or you are careless, so the climb is quite exciting, but the views from the watch platform at the top are worth it, and it was easy to see how useful these trees were in spotting incoming bush fires.

We spent a pleasant night at a vineyard B&B, and an equally pleasant morning chatting with the owner, a retired butcher, who cooked us some excellent sausages and answered all my presumably dumb questions about the rammed earth from which buildings hereabouts are constructed.

Much of the soil consists of marble-sized clay balls, and these are mixed with a little cement and poured into a form to build just about anything. The thickness and air-gaps make for a good insulating layer as well as a striking red colour that blends into the equally ruddy landscape.

The Bicentennial Tree

On the road again, it was time to check out another one of those Karri trees, this one even taller and much, much scarier to climb. The spikes were farther apart, and the trunk was devoid of branches to give even the illusion of safety.

There was a midway-platform with a sign that pointed out “That was the easy bit. Reassess your situation now.” Luckily we had the place to ourselves; I wouldn’t have liked to meet anybody halfway up.

The town of Collector, in the state of New South Wales, Australia, is home to some 150 souls. The closest landmark of interest is Lake George. Although the lake covers some sixty square miles, and was once mistaken by an early explorer for the Pacific Ocean, it is more often than not completely devoid of water. Due to a little-understood geological process, it is in the habit of suddenly filling and draining without warning. For much of the time, then, the lake bottom is used as grazing land for cattle.

The towns only story of historical significance relates the tale of a long-running feud between two families of settlers, a litany of drunken brawls, stolen sheep, and overnight stays in jail. So when the good burghers of Collector decided to try to raise the profile of their town, they had precious little to go on. However, one resident, recently returned from a holiday in Europe, had attended a pumpkin festival there, and he had enjoyed himself so much that he suggested at a Collector council meeting that they should follow suit. Disregarding the inconvenient facts that not only had Collector never grown pumpkins before, but also that the area was in a permanent state of semi-drought, the council concurred, and the first Collector Pumpkin Festival was born. Through luck and hard work, and probably because all such efforts appeal to the Australian psyche (this is a country where boat races are held in dry gorges, and people will drive hundreds of kilometres to see a large concrete sheep, or a monument to a dog that crapped in its owners lunch box), it proved to be a great success, and has been held annually ever since.

At the festival, all the food is yellow. There is pumpkin soup, and hot dogs in pumpkin bread rolls, steak sandwiches ditto. Local restaurants set up tents and vie to sell the most exotic pumpkin recipe; I particularly remember being served a complete braised ox tail with a pumpkin and chilli sauce. Hundreds of people mill around the tents, sampling the foods and sipping beers, admiring the produce on display, and listening to the local band which is playing in the background, occasionally breaking off to heckle particular members of the audience, Alongside the stage, a man tends an enormous wooden still, from which he is dispensing, of all things, small bottles of lavender water. Nearby, Queensland pumpkin sellers, who must have travelled for days to get here, hawk the blue pumpkins for which they are famous.

On either side of the roadway, lines of pumpkins are mounted on crossed stakes; there is a prize for best-dressed pumpkin, and anybody can just pick a pumpkin and enter, using either the box of random fabric scraps or anything that they might have brought along.

Finally, a nearby barn is reserved for the serious business of judging. Clearly, villagers and nearby farmers been scrupulously tending to their pumpkins for quite some time, because there are all manner of squashes on display, ranging from the downright enormous to the very small, through a whole gamut of other categories such as best carved and strangest shaped. While some judge, others admire or (if they happen to be children), climb all over the exhibits.

At just after two in the morning, the hotel lobby started to fill with bleary-eyed people. A dozen or so wanderers had signed up with a guide who was to take us to the top of Mt Kosciuzco (or Kosciusco, both spellings are historically valid), Australia’s highest mountain, in time to watch the dawn.

The continent of Australia is geologically old, and thus its tallest mountain is correspondingly weathered and not particularly high; only 2200 metres above sea level, and since it rises from an already elevated plateau, and since the hotel is itself high enough to service the ski fields in the winter, you can see that this impressive-sounding feat in reality only comprises a few hours of upward clamber. Nevertheless, climbing a continent’s highest mountain looks good on any traveller’s CV, so we were keen to add it to ours.

There was a little initial confusion as the guide loaded us all down with enough gear to equip a small army, and then we all packed into an elderly land cruiser bus which made its bumpy way up to the level of the snow fields via a mud track underneath the main chairlift. We were wedged like sardines and the windows instantly fogged with perspiration, so we couldn’t really see anything apart from the swaying bob of headlights in the tree tops until we came to a halt on relatively level ground, and the driver flung open the doors. The temperature instantly dropped as a biting knife-edge wind howled into the bus, and we scuttled into the shelter of a nearby wooden barn. There was no actual snow on the ground, but it felt like there should have been.

Wrapped now in scarves, and suited against the persistent wind, we emerged onto the path to the summit, headlamps pointing the way along the suspended steel pathway which protects the fragile soil and its botanically interesting ecology from the tramping feet of tourists.

The path has been in existence for many years, and has been religiously repaired when necessary, but although it is a tremendous boon for the plant life in the area, it does pose something of a problem for trekkers. It is cunningly designed from rectangular grids, welded together on steel supports, so that at any time you are walking somewhere between a few centimetres and as much as a metre above the ground. Plants grow freely beneath it, and water falls through it. You are close enough to examine the plant life, but not close enough to damage it, and even though steel is pretty slippery in the wet, the designers added a small serrated edge to each cross piece for traction; all in all it was a tremendous idea.

Sadly, however, the people who installed it managed to weld every grid sideways to its intended orientation. This means that the path is viciously slippery in the direction of travel, and when you inevitably fall, the serrated edges (which now run parallel to your course) neatly dice your hands and knees. On a cold winters night before dawn, the grid is a little slippery. Suitably forewarned by our guide, we walked carefully.

The guide himself was a chatty soul, but he had this obsession with rest stops. Frankly the icy wind was cutting through our clothing, and all we really wanted to do was keep moving, but we kept finding ourselves sitting off to one side of the path on a patch of boulders, nibbling chocolate bars and watching the clouds scudding in front of the moon. Would the sky clear for the sunrise?

About an hour and a half later, we were setting a good pace along the slippery path, and the guide made us all slow down. There was plenty of time, he said, and at the moment we were somewhat protected by the sides of the valley. We wouldn’t want to wait too long on the cold summit.

Half an hour later we got to the end of the valley and indeed of the metal path, emerging into the open. The final peak of Mt Kosciuzco rose to our left, a bare rock path spiralling up around it. The guide called another break. Two of the party ignored him and continued up the hill. I wondered vaguely where they were off to. A bit sick of snack bars by now, the rest of us milled around and waited for the guide under the lightening sky… lightening sky! Dawn had come already, and we hadn’t got to the top yet.

Cursing the incessant snack breaks, a few of us started running. The spiral path took us around the western side of the mountain, occluding the eastern sky, so for half of the circuit we had no idea whether we would get to the top in time. Then suddenly we emerged on the summit; we’d missed the first few lights of dawn, but thankfully the clouds were still changing second by second, and we huddled under a rock to watch; in that respect the guide had been spot on, the freezing wind was howling over the exposed mountain top.

The display was well worth it. We huddled together for warmth and sipped Baileys-enlivened hot drinks while admiring the constantly changing cloud colours.

Gradually the sun hauled itself up over the horizon, the sky turned from black to blue, the mist boiling off the plains far below. Behind us, over the back of the mountain, another beautiful vista unfolded. Not to be outdone, the moon shone over the blue-shaded mountains of the Kosciuzco range.

I had always wanted to go to Tasmania. As a child, I would take my globe, put my finger on my home town of London, and then spin it around until I found the farthest possible spot away. Strictly speaking, this would put me in New Zealand, but I also had a collection of old maps and atlases which filled that area with sea monsters and “here be dragons”, a notional outline of the Australian coast, and a peculiar little dot right at the bottom labelled “Van Diemens Land”, sometimes marked by a small devil with a pitchfork. Tasmania was, to me then and for much of my life, the far ends of the earth.

Of course, from my new home Australia, it is just one of the States that make up this nation, and but a small hop by aeroplane from my current house in Canberra, so when Patrick and Helga turned up from Holland one month, I mentioned my Tasmania story to Bronwyn, and she said, “I’ve always wanted to go there too. Lets surprise them.”

Launceston

That morning, we whisked the bemused couple down to Canberra airport with the vague promise that we were taking them to “somewhere interesting”. The first flight was to Melbourne, and we kept tight hold of the onward tickets, but as it happened when we arrived at the transfer gate, all the sign said was “Launceston”. Patrick and Helga were still saying “Where the hell is Launceston?” when the plane left the tarmac and they suddenly realised that there was probably a map in the in-flight magazine…

From the air, Launceston looked a lot like the green fields of England, a somewhat welcome sight after our home town of Canberra’s worst-drought-for-fifty-years look. Once on the ground at the tiny airport, I waited in line at the rental car counter as the smiling clerk explained to the couple in front that the clause you must not drive on unsurfaced roads simply meant “…and when you do, don’t tell us about it.” When he took me to see my own vehicle, he explained away the scratches on the door as “the usual marks you make when trying to put the key in when you’re drunk,” and advised me not to worry too much about damage “because its only a rental car”.

After this interesting introduction to the Tasmanian psyche, we drove to our nearby hotel, and enquired about food. The receptionist looked aghast. “At ten at night? This is Tasmania, you know…”

However, we did end up grabbing some fast food, and headed over to The Lounge Bar, the only pub that everybody seemed to recommend. After a door-check for steel toecaps we were allowed into a cavernous old hotel ballroom with comfy sofas where we could sit with endless four-pint jugs of Carlton and observe as the girls danced to the rather decent cover band, and the blokes stood and watched, or – more often than not – stared glassily at the cricket on the TV over the bar.

One of the defining geological features of Launceston is its gorge, and after breakfast net morning we took a beautiful walk via a winding path and some suspension bridges to an old hydro power station, stopping on the way to watch spiny echidnas and cicadas doing their thing. The water was pretty darn cold, but Patrick went for a dip anyway.

Rosevears Estate

Hungry, now, we headed up into the hills above Launceston, knowing that the area was packed with vineyards and hoping to get some food. According to our guide book, only one – Rosevears – did lunches, so we were a little disappointed to roll up and be told that sorry, lunch was over. We must have looked a bit forlorn, because they offered to bring out some “nibbles”, which turned out to be a couple of enormous platters of excellent seafood, salads, meats, fruits and cheeses, washed down by ample tastings of their excellent wines. In fact, the wine-tasting was going so well that we thought it would be a good idea to ask if the small row of cabins that overlooked the valley were available for rent.

The waitress, somewhat flustered, said that they had only just been built and weren’t really supposed to be available yet, but we were welcome to rent them if we wanted. Heartened, we returned to the food and wine. It was a minute or so before we realised that the waitress was still standing somewhat awkwardly by the table. Nervously she blurted, “but you haven’t asked me how much they cost!”
“Don’t worry”, we assured her, “everything will be fine, and can we have another bottle of this excellent wine?”

Some time later, we ambled up to our cabins, to discover that each was a beautifully crafted cube of beech and glass, decorated inside in semi-Japanese style, and featuring a fully stocked wine cabinet and an enormous bath with views over the vineyard and the lake. Stupendous, sumptuous and beautiful.

After a nap and bottle of Pinot Noir on the verandah, we ambled gently back down to the restaurant for dinner, where our waiter Ken kept us entertained and supplied with excellent food and wine, after which we repaired to the starlit balcony for a Pinot Noir nightcap.

Breakfast arrived, red-riding-hood style, in a covered basket on the doorstep. Sitting in the bath, feeding each other grapes as the sun rose over the vines, we never wanted to leave. However, eventually we all climbed back into the car and set off to Strahan.

ABT Wilderness Railway

Tasmania being vaguely triangular, and – at least on the map – not very big, we had thought that we’d spend a few days in each corner. There’s a steam train that runs from Strahan to Queenstown that we were intending to catch, so we picked what seemed to be the most direct route and set off, Patrick at the wheel because it was Bronwyn and my turn in the back. However, the road soon revealed itself to be an endless stream of mountain switchbacks, and the over-soft suspension of the big Mazda SUV soon had us feeling pretty sick. Thankfully a local store hove into view, and Bronwyn stumbled in to buy us some motion sickness tablets. They didn’t have any, but the owner took one look at Bronwyn’s face and gave her a handful from her own handbag. We were looking so green that Patrick and Helga volunteered to sit in the back, so I settled down to drive.

As corner followed corner it became clear that we would never reach Strahan in time, and that instead we would have to try to catch the train in Queenstown. I stepped up the pace a bit, and the tyres began to squeal as we tore over the final pass and headed back down the endless switchback down into town. Suddenly the mobile reception, which had been dead all over the bush-filled centre plateau, sprang into life, and Patrick was shouting over the sound of screaming rubber as he tried to get them to hold the train for just another few minutes, and yes of course we wanted first class tickets, as I floored it and drifted sideways down the tiny mountain road, finally pulling up beside the train in a triumphant cloud of burning rubber.

Then suddenly we entered another age, a lovingly restored Premier Class train carriage with a wooden viewing balcony and Julie, our laughing conductress, welcoming us aboard with a glass of champagne. We settled back into the seats as the old locomotive whistled and chuffed gently out of the station.

The train used to haul copper ore from the mountains down to the town for processing, and the track was hacked through the rainforest, occasionally criss-crossing the heavily poisoned vividly yellow river over high wooden viaducts. Now the train carries tourists on a beautiful journey through the enormous ferns and palms, the river no less vividly yellow, but forming a beautiful counterpoint to the lush green of the recovering bush. I’m not sure how the they fared in Tourist Class, but for us the trip was lubricated with as much wine as we could drink, and an endless supply of snacks and fruit and cheeses, dotted all the while with Julie’s tales and jokes.

Eventually, however, it had to come to an end. The steam locomotive was pushed around on a turntable and coupled to another set of carriages travelling in the opposite direction, and a less exotic engine took us down to the bus back to Queenstown.

Everybody we’d spoken to had said that if we were staying in Queenstown, then we should stay at the Imperial, which turned out to be a wonderful colonial structure of carved dark wood, stained glass and sweeping staircases, and of course a bar.

Bonarong Wildlife Sanctuary

The next morning, the plan was to drive to Hobart, third apex of the Tasmanian triangle and southernmost point of Australia. It was Patrick’s turn to drive, so off we set up that same vertiginous switchback that I had so precipitously descended. The tyres started to scream again… and unfortunately we overcooked it on a bend and slammed sideways into the rock wall. Ouch. Luckily one of the wheels took most of the damage, so we changed that and kept going, and although the transmission was crunching quite alarmingly, we reckoned we would probably get there in one piece.

Finally we rolled into Hobart, once more surprised by how long it took to drive anywhere. Just outside the city is Bonarong Wildlife Sanctuary, a zoo that specialises in Tasmanian Devils. They have loads of them, and despite their fearsome reputation, they look really, really cute. In common with most Australian zoos, you are encouraged to feed the animals (although not the Devils, which despite their innocuous looks would be unlikely to give your hand back), and we had a fine time feeding the roos and emus.

Climbing in Launceston Gorge

We had hoped to do some climbing in Hobart, but they weren’t able to take us on short notice, so we booked a session back in Launceston, climbed back into the car and headed northwards, back to the gorge where it all started. There we met Bob from Tasmanian Adventures, who took us for a very enjoyable clamber in the sunshine.

Finally, tired and happy, we returned to that first Launceston hotel for a last night of excellent Tasmanian beer, tall tales, and dreadful games of pool.

On an otherwise normal day at the office, Bronwyn filled in a company profile questionnaire for the in-house magazine. Among the usual questions was “What would be your perfect first date?”. Her answer was, to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

This triggered off some intra-office discussion on how she could find anybody crazy enough to do this with her, and of course as soon as I heard about it, I booked it.
It was a three hour drive to Sydney after work on a Friday, so we found ourselves a nice hotel and had a gentle night on The Rocks, a particularly happening area on the Sydney Harbour waterfront. Then, after a decent late morning breakfast, we headed for the Bridge itself.

The worlds largest and widest steel arch bridge, it still dominates the Sydney skyline seventy years after it was built. Its 49-metre deck is wide enough for eight vehicle lanes, two train lines, a cycle path and a pedestrian walkway, and the top span, at 134 metres above sea level, was our destination that sunny morning.

Our hosts, the Bridge Climb Company, turned out to be a very slick operation indeed. In their warehouse-sized office inside one of the minor approach support towers, we climbed into our bridge-grey jumpsuits and fitted our safety harnesses, which were cleverly designed to run along a continuous safety rail on the bridge.

Add some sun protection, radio headsets (bone-conduction: a weird feeling), some safety instruction, a final set of metal detectors to ensure we weren’t about to drop coins or cameras on the traffic below, and we were out onto the approach span.

Out onto the body of the bridge itself, we were walking up and along the outer spans above the water. The views were tremendous, from the Blue Mountains on one side to the ocean on the other, and down onto the rooves of downtown Sydney and of the Opera House itself.

The whole tour, led by a knowledgeable guide and punctuated by the occasional historical titbit, bad joke, and photo shoot took over three hours, walking all the way up the seaward span to the very top of the bridge, across beneath the flags and aircraft warning lights, and then down the other side back to base.

Surprisingly tired, we divested ourselves of our gear, bought the photographs that you see here, and stumbled out into the late afternoon in search of coffee, before driving to the coast to go scuba diving.

Overland to Narooma

Teun and Loes had managed to get hold of a holiday home for the weekend, down on the eastern coast of Australia near to Eden.

It was possible to get there from our home in Canberra by road, but it was also possible to draw a straight line diagonally across the map and travel through the bush, so of course this is what we did. Loes’ sister Nienke happened to be in Australia at the time, and at the last minute she decided that rather than travel in the back of the characterful but somewhat uncomfortable Wahoo, she would hitch a ride in our slightly more comfortable Nissan.

It is a good many hours of off-road driving from here to there, and we convinced Nienke that it would be a great idea to learn to drive the truck, since in Holland all the cars are tiny. She ended up having a lot of fun, and although on a couple of mountain passes Bronwyn and I were wondering whether the nearside wheels were actually hanging over the edge, we thought it best not to mention it until later that evening.

Eventually after a long day in the bush, we arrived in Narooma, finding the house to be an enormous property with a verandah looking out over the sea. We soon got down to some beer and food and some serious partying, some time next day on the beach, local seafood – including the famous Moreton Bay Bugs which taste fabulous but which look like nothing on this planet.

Whale Safari

Next morning it was time to head down to the beach to board the Whale Safari. When we arrived, though, the operators were looking pretty glum. The early voyage had come back empty-handed, and the signs were that the whales had moved on. We’d still see seals, they said, but they were more than happy to refund our money if we wanted to cancel, because they reckoned we only had about a 10-15% chance of seeing anything bigger.

Never mind, we boarded anyway. The boat was going to take us to Montague Island, a local tourist attraction, and look for whales on the way, so we thought we’d go along for the ride.

Once out of the fierce harbour exit, it was a pleasant summer’s day cruise, although Nienke was looking a little green from the motion. Then, suddenly, a humpback whale surfaced, and within moments we realised that we were right in the middle of an entire pod, all apparently delighted to see the boat. We were then treated to nearly an hour of the whole gamut of whale behaviour: showing heads, showing tails, breaching, tail diving, swimming upside down, diving under the boat, and generally having a pretty wild time. The boat operators were ecstatic, they said they’d never seen a display like it. Then a second pod turned up to join in the fun.

I did take quite a few pictures, some of which grace this page, but really I spent most of the time staring at them in wonder. I’ve been on whale safaris before, seeing Sperm and Minke Whales in Norway, and Blue and Beluga Whales in Canada, but I’d never before seen them playing around and having such a great time, just like enormous dolphins.

Seals at Montague Island

Eventually it was time to move on, to nearby Montague Island, home to generations of lighthouse keepers and also to a thriving seal colony. They lay like huge sacks of lard over the sun-baked rocks, bulls guarding their harems and staring haughtily as our boat chugged by, pups off to the side on their own rocks, looking incredibly cute but stinking of stale urine, wet fur, and rancid fish.

To finish off the evening, we sat and watched as the islands colony of little penguins waddled up the beach, a much smaller and more intimate display than the huge tourist attraction at Phillip Island. I can’t show you any photos here, because they are startled by camera flashes, but suffice it to say that watching them climb out of the surf and amble up to their nests is always an edifying and somewhat comical experience.

Home through Kosciuzco

All too soon it was time for the long drive home, but our wildlife experience wasn’t yet over. Partway up a bush track we came across a goanna, a huge lizard, rooting about in an old log.

Somehow or other we got separated from the Wahoo, which wasn’t carrying a radio, so we decided to drop down to Cooma for a bite to eat before getting thoroughly lost in the dark while attempting a short cut through the Kosciusko National Park, finishing off the holiday in unseasonal rain with an entertaining slide around through muddy dark outback farms, avoiding randomly scattered white goods which looked suspiciously as though they contained the body parts of the last visitor, while trying to simultaneously get off private land defended by Keep Out Or Else signs, dark and sinister deserted buildings, and once the suspended body of a dead kangaroo, in an attempt to find the national capital.

My attempts at entertaining the girls with a selection of late-night horror stories didn’t seem to go down enormously well, and Bronwyn and I got very wet climbing in and out of the car opening and closing gates as we worked our way across the bush. All in all, I doubt that Nienke will forget this trip for quite some time.

Five in the morning, pitch black, nothing stirring in Canberra apart from a mismatched pair of four-wheel drive vehicles heading purposefully westwards into the Australian outback. Although we’d travelled quite widely in New South Wales, the south-eastern corner of the island continent, it is all comparatively lush, and we were keen on seeing some of this famous outback desert that wed been hearing about. However, the nearest example was about a thousand kilometres to the west, and although my modern air-conditioned Nissan could do it in comfort, Teun and Loes were in their twenty-year old Land Cruiser, the Wahoo, so we had to take it gently.

After climbing out of the vaguely hilly bowl that forms the Australian Capital Territory, we rolled down to the flatlands of the Murrumbidgee River and the town of Narandera. Every small town in Australia struggles to be the home of some unique feature, whether it be the biggest merino sheep in the world (made of concrete, in Goulburn), or the biggest trout in the world (made of fibreglass, in Adaminiby), or the oldest continually licenced premises in Australia (one of at least three similar claims that we have found, this one in Berrima). Narandera is no different. As we turned onto the arrow-straight Sturt Highway, road signs sternly admonished us that we had missed the opportunity to see The Largest Playable Guitar In The World.

We were the only vehicles on the highway. Ahead of me, all I could see were the dull red tail-lights of the Wahoo, and a bright blue backlight on Teun’s dashboard, which appeared somewhat bizarrely to be a GPS navigation system. I made a note to ask him about it later.

Dawn rose in the rear view mirror. The night slowly faded to grey and then fled into the usual gorgeous blue of another perfect Australian day. The occasional trees on the horizon became shorter and stubbier, the earth by the side of the road became noticeably redder, starkly contrasting with the green of the grass being grazed by the thin and hardy Australian sheep.

The road continued on, and on, ever westward, past another sign proudly proclaiming that we were driving through The Best Wheat-Growing Country in Australia. Back in lofty Canberra, the days had been getting mild, even a bit chilly, but out here on the plains we started slathering on the lotion as the morning sun scorched through the open sunroof.

Six hours in, I needed a coffee, so we pulled over in Hay, pretty much the only town on this part of the Sturt, and stoked up on the things that we thought we needed; several pints of caffeine, some baling wire, a roll of gaffer tape, and a spade. Remembering the glow of the Wahoo’s navigation computer, I asked Teun for a demonstration. He looked somewhat sheepish as he showed me the screen. He’d forgotten to load in the map for this part of Australia, so the screen showed a huge featureless field of blue with a small “you are here” cursor flashing in the centre, and far far off at the bottom of the screen, a little dot that said “Melbourne”.

Actually, back on the Sturt, driving across the endless red terrain, that felt about right. Emus wobbled humorously by the side of the road. Hours passed. Finally we arrived in Balranald, the last fuel station before the Mungo and the point at which we finally left the Sturt and headed north.

Exactly 53km up the road toward Ivanhoe, according to the directions we’d found on the web, we turned left onto a sandy track. Loes compared it to Africa; beaten sand, low scrub, and emus running here and there in the bush. I gave the Nissan its head, hammering down the trail at 140kph, blowing away the cobwebs of the miles and miles of tarmac, finally arriving by the public lodges in the Mungo National Park. According to a sign on the door, in order to get the key we had to telephone the Parks office. When I called them, I got an answering machine; the office was closed.

On, then, to the camp site, which had an honesty box system for the pitch, and another one for firewood. We had no tents as such, but we’d come prepared to sleep in the vehicles if necessary. While Loes unloaded the Wahoo’s excellent cooking range and rustled up a meal, the rest of us cracked some welcome beers and got on with some vehicle maintenance. One of my tyres was running a bit bald and needed replacing, and Teun needed to pump diesel out of his second fuel tank because it didn’t seem to be properly connected.

A superb dinner, then a fire, more beer, wine, laughs. It was the first time I’d burned Eucalyptus gum, and I was impressed. The bark makes excellent tinder, and the wood itself is incredibly dense, lights easily, burns hot but slow with no smoke or spitting, and then settles down to perfect red embers.

A comfortable night in the cars, then up with the birds – particularly the cheeky Apostle birds which had their noisy beaks in everything – and onto the circular track around the Mungo National Park.

First stop, the amazing Walls Of China, an enormous lunette dune stretching from horizon to horizon and moving slowly across the outback at several metres per year. At its leading edge, it slowly smothers the scrubby bushland. At the other end, thousands of years later, it spits out all the things it has consumed; kangaroo bones, the remains of aboriginal fires, the odd artefact. As it moves, it carries with it a population of contorted Bluebush whose roots hold it together as the wind sculpts and ripples its upper surface.

A wedge-tailed eagle soared above as we took the cars up a small track over one end of the dune, stopping to wander through the extensive complex of beautifully carved gullies formed by the heavy water erosion of the hard-packed sand.

Beyond the dune is the Mallee, an area of unusual multi-stemmed eucalypts indicative of the most dry and barren conditions. There was, however, still plenty of life to see, from the beautiful emerald green Mallee Ringneck parrot to the myriad red and grey kangaroos hopping over the red red earth under the startingly clear blue sky, pausing now and again to stare at the metal interlopers into their domain.

The mallee part of the national park is just as interesting as the lunette, home to specially adapted birds, lizards and plants, particularly the rather astounding Porcupine Grass, probably the sharpest and most uncomfortable ground cover in the world. It is dotted with huts and tanks left over from various attempts at grazing the arid land, including the interesting Round Tank, which had been completely fenced in with a small access ramp leading to a steep drop down to the water; in fact it was a trap for wild goats, a pest in this area, which could jump down to the water but which could not then get out again. A scattering of skulls were testimony to the efficacy of the system.

Finally, as the end of the weekend drew near, it was time to head back to Canberra. Before we left, we climbed up to the Mungo Lookout, where the full extent of the bluebush scrub was visible from horizon to horizon, all the more astounding because when the settlers, who were the source of all the abandoned buildings and sheep stations that we had seen, were trying to make a living here, all this was just a huge lake.

Having recently become addicted to the peculiarly Australian sport of “canyoning”, I jumped at the chance of a midwinter abseil down the Kalang Falls. Situated in the Kanangra-Boyd National Park in the Blue Mountains near to Sydney, the falls drop for a vertical distance of about half a kilometre into a deep canyon, after which you have little choice but to clamber the same distance back up along the aptly named Murdering Gully.

Thus it was that early one Saturday morning, a group of Kanangras black cattle, waiting patiently for the first dawn rays of the sun to evaporate the frost from their backs, were surprised to see nine enterprising adventurers heading out into the still darkened wilderness. Led by the highly experienced duo of Andy and Andrew, we planned to tackle the eleven abseils of up to sixty metres each, and then begin the three-hour scramble up Murdering Gully in the fading afternoon light, finishing up back at the top by mid-evening, hopefully still in posession of an eclectic selection of silly hats.

The sun lifted gorgeously above the canyon as we clambered to the head of the falls and began our first descent.

The falls drop in a series of steps, with enough room on one side or the other to abseil without actually getting wet; a so-called dry canyon, handy for tackling in the middle of the winter without the need for wetsuits and swimming. No problems with the cold here, however; soon we were stripping off the early-morning layers, chattering happily and basking in the sunshine during the inevitable waits for the ropes to become free.

On the third drop, we couldn’t find the anchor point. It soon became clear that an earlier landslide had changed the shape of the canyon, and it took an impromptu food break, some precarious hopping from rock to rock, and a good deal of sliding through uncertainly shifting underbrush before, about an hour later, we eventually found it and could continue down to the visitor’s book which was bolted to the cliff. The previous entry was about one month before.

The day progressed down a series of drops, giving fabulous views across the Kanangra-Boyd to the matching cliffs on the other side, and down to the sunny green treetops far, far below. Presumably in order to keep us entertained, Steve, who seems to have a remarkeable affinity to water, took the occasional impromptu bath.

As the day wore on, and we sometimes found it necessary to descend on only one rope instead of two at a time, it became clear that what with the landslip and everything we were going slower than expected and would have to do Murdering Gully in the dark.

Not to worry, though, we had come well equipped with torches and extra snacks, and we still had our cool-weather gear from the frosty morning, so we expected to emerge at perhaps nine oclock in the evening. Then one of the ropes got snarled, and by the time we’d untangled it, we had three more abseils to do and dusk was already falling.

Out came the head-torches, ranging from the positively ancient to futuristic hi-tec, except for Cath who had to borrow a hand-held maglite. Never mind, Cath, I said as I duct-taped it to her wrist. For the rest of the descent, she loomed periodically out of the darkness like a cyborg.

The head torches introduced another problem; what to do with Andys hat. This enormous wicker lampshade affair, all the way from Thailand, had bounced and scraped its way this far down, had been periodically retrieved and repaired, and now we had to find some way to carry it. Maria saved the day, volunteering to have it strapped to her pack, which gave her an interesting ninja turtle profile. The show went on.

The penultimate drop is, at sixty metres, the longest possible single abseil in the Blue Mountains. Well prepared, of course, we were actually carrying a sixty-metre rope rather than the usual fifty, which made it a bit easier, but we were also doing it in pitch darkness, which made it… interesting. I can absolutely recommend abseiling by starlight down the side of a waterfall. Suspended in space, I kicked out to bounce off a rockface invisible but for the small circle of light from my headtorch. Pausing halfway, and looking up toward the sky-spanning crystal arm of the Milky Way, I could see a pinprick of light that was Andrew far above, and turning my head, another pinprick of light far below that was Andy. All else was pitch darkness, apart from off to one side, the eery white thundering glow of the waterfall. Marvellous, just marvellous.

To commemorate the moment, as each climber reached the bottom, Andy solemnly handed them a lighted sparkler.

Finding the last pitch in the dark was nigh-on impossible. For a long time, most of us huddled on a rock ledge in the trees while search parties ranged through the forest below, little flickers of light appearing and disappearing between the steeply sloping trees. Time passed. We weren’t going to get out of Murder Gully until midnight. We thought about Lyn, waiting patiently at the top with the cars, and expecting us out by nine at the latest. There’s no mobile coverage out in the bush, but she had a car and sleeping gear, so we knew she was OK and hoped she wouldnt worry. Then finally, a triumphant call; the route had been found, but there had been another landslide, requiring the construction of a rope safety rail to clip onto as we crossed the rubble-strewn and uncertain slope, mere feet from the edge of the steep drop into the falls, before shimmying down a knotted rope and back onto the trail.

The last drop is entertaining. If you just abseil straight down, you end up floating in the deep plunge pool at the bottom of the falls; not ideal. What you have to do is get nearly to the bottom and then, shrouded in the thundering spray as the Kalang falls finally touch bottom, you have to swing and hop yourself round a big slippery outcrop, fighting against the weight of fifty metres of wet rope above you, onto a mossy little ledge. By torchlight. And, in Allans case, with a twisted ankle. But we all managed to stay dry; apart from Steve, of course, but he was getting used to that by now. Now for the strenuous but simple clamber out of the gully, and home to the waiting caravans.

It was not to be. It was, as I may have mentioned, seriously dark. We were at the bottom of a half-kilometre deep canyon, thickly surrounded by gum trees. Bush paths are always precarious things, it is hard to tell which are made by humans, and which by roos and wombats, but we figured we were heading in roughly the right direction – ie, upward – and so started to climb.

The going was tough, sloping at about forty-five degrees, and deeply littered with fallen leaves and branches. I was scouting ahead, following whichever of the many crisscrossing trails seemed to be heading most upward, and was beginning to get a little disillusioned when I found some taped markers on some trees. Hoorah! We were saved!

We climbed onward. Murdering Gully is supposed to take only a few hours at worst, so we should have been about to reach the main trail soon. Hours passed. We climbed. Midnight ticked by. The slope steepened. We climbed.

At one o’clock in the morning, we gave up. Clearly, markers notwithstanding, we were on the wrong ridge, but how to tell which was the correct one? We’d have to wait until morning. Australians have a word for this: we were benighted.

Tired but cheerful, we squatted on the 45 degree slope, passed around muesli bars and considered our situation. We were in dense bush without camping gear, but we had plenty of food and water, and enough spare clothes to go round for those who needed them. Despite the fact that it was midwinter, we didn’t expect the temperatures to drop much below zero. Our main concern was not for ourselves, but for the people waiting for us back in civilisation; Lyn in the car at the top, and Andrews wife in Sydney, who was expecting a were back call. An expedition into the bush is not to be treated lightly, and we had followed usual practice in leaving our itinery and instructions to alert the emergency services if we didnt make it back. One or both of the girls would certainly call the rangers if we didn’t show up by morning, and we didn’t want to cause an unnecessary furore. Still, there was nothing we could do about it, so we wedged a few fallen trees across some stumps to stop us sliding downward, and variously huddled together in a pile, or strapped ourselves to comfortable-looking trees, and dropped off to sleep.

Before very long, the sun came up, and we lit a small fire and took stock of where we were. Or rather, we tried to; even in daylight it wasn’t really clear where we’d gone wrong the night before, and as we munched our way through breakfast we contemplated the unsavoury idea of climbing all the way back down to the valley floor, and starting up again.

At this point we started hearing cooo-eees of rangers on the cliffs high above; clearly one of the girls had sounded the alarm, and our fire had been spotted. Before very long, two SES Rangers turned up to see if we were OK.

They seemed a little put out to find a cheerful, well-equipped group eating breakfast; we suspected that they’d been looking forward to an exciting spot of rescuing, but they bustled about anyway strapping up Allan’s ankle and handing out chocolate bars. They made an amusing pair, Matt a big cheerful guy who knew everything about the Kanangra-Boyd and imparted that knowledge accompanied by heavy swearing, and Ewan, younger and wiry, who seemed to have a personal ambition to carry the heaviest load out of Murdering Gully; he stuffed his pack with our spare ropes and fleeces, and would have been delighted to carry all our packs if we’d let him. Apparently he was locally famous for once lugging a car tyre all the way up to the top.

Most importantly, they knew the short cut out, which involved a bit of a traverse through the bush, but thankfully no downhill backtracking. As we walked, the pair regaled us somewhat wistfully with stories of the idiots they had rescued and the bodies they had carried out, admitting now that they would much rather that we’d been trapped halfway down the falls so that they could have done a bit of abseiling themselves.

Murdering Gully was a steep climb even in the winter sun, and we really appreciated a pause at a cave with a freshwater spring (we’d used most of our drinking water that morning to make sure that our fire was really extinguished; one thing the bush really does not need is more fires), and then, finally, we all climbed back up to the outside world.

It wasn’t quite what we’d expected…

A second truckload of rangers had set up an urn with tea and biscuits, and Lyn had brought a load of meat pies and sausage rolls, which was nice. However, we were also greeted by a brace of ambulances, a policeman, and a TV crew. Disregarding our somewhat amused protestations that we were all fine and had merely been caught out by nightfall, the TV crew homed in on Allan, now decked out with a nice big photogenic ankle bandage, and I guess it was a slow day because he ended up on the Sydney news.

Thanks to Andy and Andrew for guiding us, to the ladies who worried at the top, and to the whole crew for being so buoyantly cheerful in what were occasionally adverse conditions. In addition, its nice to know that if we had really been in trouble, then there are all these dedicated, professional and above all cheerful people willing to give up their time to help. Thanks, then, to Matt, Ewan and the other SES rangers and emergency services at Kanangra-Boyd.

It started, as these things so often do, with a chance meeting in a bar. Mike, who was sitting next to me, happened to mention that he was part of the Australian free fall team, one thing led to another and without too much more ado I found myself clambering into a jumpsuit at Canberra airport. Next to me was Lyn, who to everybody’s surprise – particularly her own – had decided to jump too; an interesting decision for somebody who has trouble looking down over the edge of a kerb.

First came a couple of exercises, demonstrating the positions that we should adopt while plummeting from the heavens.

Then six of us – Lyn and myself, our two tandem instructors, the pilot and Bruce the cameraman – piled into the tiny aeroplane and headed for the wide blue yonder.

The single-prop plane clawed slowly for altitude. Canberra drifted away into the distance, revealing the harsh bush land beyond. Little green tempered the raw rock and earth, and from our vantage point the sun reflected off the only water; the glittering snake of the Murrumbidgee River, and the tiny rainwater dams hacked from the land by generations of sheep-farmers. From ground level, the bush seems lush. From the air, you see it as it really is, hard-baked and dry.

It was loud in the little plane, and we were packed in like sardines, shifting occasionally to ease sleeping limbs, but it was a beautiful day and we were gently lulled by the land dropping slowly away. Suddenly Graham, my instructor, poked his altimeter over my shoulder so that I could see it. “Four and a half thousand feet,” he said. “This is where the parachute opens. Everything above this is free fall.” I nodded, and looked down through the clear piece of perspex that constituted the door. It didn’t seem so very far down.

The plane clambered higher. Some time later, we turned round and headed back to Canberra, still climbing. We had clearance to jump from ten thousand feet, and we were due to land on the cricket oval by the Australian Mint. The earth continued to drop away. And then, suddenly, we were there.

Lyn was due to go first, and had been psyching herself up, doing breathing exercises, preparing for the moment when she had to confront her worst nightmare; voluntarily jumping from an enormous height. She was calm, calm, calm, and ready for anything… until they slid open the perspex door, and an icy wind howled through the tiny cockpit. Lyn screamed and screamed. We managed to get her wedged into the doorway, and then while her instructor shuffled his legs underneath to get a purchase, we peeled her fingers off the airframe, and she was off. The scream trailed away…

Bruce the cameraman was already clinging to the fuselage. I was next. Laughing like a madman, I was launched out into the clear blue sky.

The feeling of speed was astounding. Somehow I had not really thought about just how windy dropping at terminal velocity was going to be. Even so, above the howl of the wind, I could faintly hear Lyn screaming as she plummeted away below me. Bruce, with helmet cam attached, arrived in front of us, filming. I tried to explain how fantastic it all was, but it was impossible to talk against the blast of the air and anyway I couldn’t stop laughing.

Some thirty seconds and around five thousand feet after leaving the aircraft, Grahame pulled the ripcord. I had expected a violent tug when the parachute opened, but in actual fact the only real sign that something had happened was that Bruce and the camera abruptly vanished. And then… from manic howling madness to gentle floating peace, drifting like thistledown above the bush city and Lake Burley Griffin. Gently we twisted and turned, coasting slowly lower, until eventually we could make out the green cricket ovals, and finally the watchers waiting beneath.

The landing was quiet and serene; we simply lifted our legs up and slid along on our backsides, and the ride was over.

And Lyn? She had screamed for the whole free fall, and was hoarse for days afterward. Would she do it again? Absolutely.

Phillip Island, situated in the Bass Strait between Melbourne and Tasmania, was clearly settled by people from the Isle of Wight in England. Approximately the same shape, it boasts the Wight towns Cowes, Rhyll and Ventnor, and even tails off into a crescent of rocks where The Needles would be, only because these are rather more stumpy, they are here known as The Nobbies. It is also something of a retirement and tourist resort; in short, it’s pretty much a perfect match.

None of these facts figured among the reasons why we chose to go there on Easter weekend. Newly arrived in Australia, we wanted to see these famous Australian animals that every schoolchild learns about, and Phillip Island is not only home to a number of native Australian animal sanctuaries, but also has an unrivalled position as a fertile piece of coastline poking out into what is effectively the Southern Ocean, thus attracting a number of creatures that you would perhaps be more likely to expect to find in the Antarctic. Its also a convenient days drive away from Canberra, and, if you ignore the highway, you can take an entertaining 4WD route through Kosciuszko National Park.

After an exhilarating nine-hour drive into Melbourne, we stopped at a convenient hotel and went out to check the local night life. A bar with a pool table caught our attention, and before long we’d met any number of local people, staggering eventually back to our beds in the small hours of the morning.

A few hours later, fortified by immensely strong coffee, a pile of fried food, and hiding behind dark glasses, we set off once more for the southern coast.

There is a stretch of toll road that takes you through Melbourne, but there are no toll booths. Officious signs warn you regularly that Your Car Has Been Photographed, and If You Have Not Paid Then You Will Be Fined, but there was no way of actually purchasing a toll ticket.

Eventually we saw a sign that said Ring This Number For Queries, so I called it on my mobile. I explained to the nice young man that I was a stupid tourist from Canberra and that I was driving on his motorway without a permit, and he told me that I could pay by credit card. There followed a selection of voice-activated automated instructions, number of credit card, registration number etc – how the hell are you supposed to do this while simultaneously driving on the motorway – after which I was dumped into Please Wait For Operator Assistance. The same man came back on, and said laconically, Oh yeah, the automated system doesn’t recognise out-of-state number plates. And this in one of Victoria’s premier tourist regions…

Our hotel turned out to be a typical leisure complex fronting onto the beach, with buckets and spades, frisbees and sandcastles. After a restorative bite to eat, we headed off to the koala sanctuary.

Koala

Now, everybody knows what a koala is supposed to look like, a kind of sleepy cuddly teddy bear, right? So, obviously, the real thing must be completely different. Er, no. A koala genuinely is a sleepy cuddly teddy bear.

Their chosen foodstuff, the eucalyptus leaf, is so indigestible that they spend several hours stuffing themselves, and then a load more hours just sitting there asleep, waiting for their stomachs to get enough energy out to enable them to wake up and stuff themselves some more. Its a pretty sedentary life, which means that each morning the sanctuary staff can go out into the forest, and underneath each koala high up in its tree, place a sign that says “Here’s One!”, secure in the knowledge that its unlikely to move very far in the coming day.

We also saw a load more classic Australian animals…

Penguin

In the evening, it was time for the Penguin Parade. Every night at dusk, a colony of Little Penguins, who have been out all day chasing fish in the Southern Ocean, swim back to their rookery on Phillip Island.

In order to get from the safety of the water to the safety of their dune burrows, however, they have to cross an open expanse of beach, and this is where a stepped auditorium has been constructed so that the public can sit quietly and watch.

It really is an amazing and extremely amusing sight. The birds swim lithely into the shallows, and then attempt to struggle to their feet. Bearing in mind that they can’t use their short flippers to aid them, this is something of an effort, and since they don’t dare go out onto the sand – where a predator may be waiting – they do it in the waves, using the momentum for one wave to stand them up, only for the next one to knock them down again. More and more penguins gather in little clumps, appearing in flashes of white and then tumbling like dominoes, making occasional forays onto the shore but always chickening out and running back into the waves, until suddenly a group will seem to get a quorum and all head up the beach together in a purposeful waddle. Although it really is comical, their persistence is awe inspiring.

The influx lasts for hours, and if you follow the birds up into the dunes, you can see them determinedly heading up through the dunes, pedalling their little bodies through the undergrowth, and issuing plaintive little brrrrp? noises and then listening for a reply in an attempt to find their mates and their nests. To think that they go through this every night!

Seal Rocks

The following day, we caught a boat out beyond The Nobbies to Seal Rocks. It was a pleasant ride, with the crew telling tales of the local people, and rich kids on sea-doos buzzing in our wake. In the distance we could see the Rocks sticking out of the sea. “You can’t see them,” said the nearest crew member, “but I can see about ten thousand seals right now.”

He wasn’t kidding. When we got closer, we realised that what we’d thought was rock was practically all occupied by seal, and all around were more seals playing in the waves, swimming out and then surfing in on their bellies, leaping out of the waves in gay abandon. The boat was an instant hit, too. Around us, the sea boiled with eager brown faces, a veritable seal soup. I’ve seen seals before, but never like this.

French Island

There was an agricultural show on neighbouring French Island, so we spent some time admiring the working horses there.

Back on Phillip, we took a stroll down to The Nobbies to see the sunset.

Having just bought a shiny new 4WD, it seemed rude not to take it out somewhere. Up until now, we had been using hire cars which restricted us to the state of Australian Capital Territory. Since the ACT is only about 50km across, we had found this somewhat limiting; now, with our very own vehicle, we could venture into neighbouring New South Wales. Hurrah!

The plan was to set out after work from Canberra in an easterly direction until we hit the sea, then to follow the coast southward for an unspecified distance before turning back inland and then finally north back up to Canberra, a long weekend’s rectangular journey in the south-eastern corner of New South Wales (and indeed of Australia).

Once out onto the Kings Highway, just across the state border, we encountered our first examples of Australian Sign Humour: enormous billboards for a Bungedore turf grower stating such gems as “Our Grass is Legal”, and “The Secret of a Good Root is in the Bedding”. Onward, though, to the coast.

Batemans Bay

Batemans Bay is, frankly, a tourist and retirement resort. It does, however, occupy a lovely stretch of coastline, and is home not only to a huge fleet of pelicans, but also to a particularly good fish and chip shop. Positioned on stilts in the waters of the bay itself, the shop has mooring for its own fishing trawler at one end, a central curtained area where the fish are gutted and prepared, and a scattering of tables and a door to dry land and passing customers at the other. It is difficult to see how you can buy fish that are any fresher. The blackboard tells you what they caught that morning, and whatever it is, it can get battered and fried. As poms accustomed to cod and chips, we were a little surprised to find battered yellow-fin tuna on the menu; and very succulent it was indeed.

However, night was falling, and we needed somewhere to stay. A little way down the coast was the town of Moruya, and after checking into a convenient motel, we ventured out to see what it had to offer. The answer, it appeared, was very little. It was only early evening, but everything was closed, apart from a couple of pubs and a Chinese restaurant. Undaunted, we popped in for a nice meal washed down with decent Australian wine, and headed back to the motel.

The whole of that eastern seaboard is littered with National Parks. Not only do the enormous Morton, Budawang, Dua and Wadbilliga parks form a thick green belt some thirty kilometres inland, but also the actual coastline itself is almost all protected environment. Once heavily logged, the government has tried very hard to maintain these fertile forests, criss-crossed by numerous dirt tracks leading apparently to nowhere but suddenly emerging onto spectacular headlands or winding their way between the enormous trees themselves.

We spent the day bouncing randomly along these tracks, never knowing where we were going but always sure that the next view would be as wondrous as the last, passing names steeped in probably forgotten history: Potato Point, Mystery Bay, Disaster Bay; until finally we fetched up in Bega.

Bega

We’d figured that since Bega was quite a large town with some local industry, there might be a little more in the way of nightlife. However, after hopefully walking up and down the main drag a few times, we came to realise that there were only a couple of pubs and no restaurant at all. One of the pubs, however, advertised food, so we wandered in and found that along with our pints we could order some pretty decent Chinese cooking, so we sat down and tucked in.

The meal was very nice, but after a while we realised that the eatery was already closing, and we had now exhausted the cultural delights of Bega. Another beer, and out into the outside world.

An enormous electric storm blew up. Great sheets of lightning hurled themselves across the darkened skies. Forks set out in three directions at once from a single locus, pounding into cloud-heads and into the ground. We stood in the motel car park, awestruck. You really don’t get storms like this in Europe, especially without any rain.

Eden and the Whaling Museum

In the morning, with dark clouds still louring overhead, we headed on down the coast until, topping a rise, we were confronted by golden columns of sunlight pouring through a ragged tear in the cloud layer, illuminating the little town of Eden. Immediately we could see how it got its name. We were in the middle of one of Australia’s worst droughts, but here all was a promised land of lush and green. Apart from the heat, we could have been in the original South Wales rather than its eponymous antipodean counterpart – although, to be sure, there is some historical doubt whether Cook, who named the area, had ever actually visited Wales. I like to think, though, that there was a Welshman in his crew who looked out and saw a vision of home.

Eden was once considered as a suitable site for Australia’s capital city, in a move to restart its then moribund economy. For some fifty years it had enjoyed the status of Australia’s premier whaling centre, almost the country’s sole source of whale meat and products until the coming of offshore factory ships and a decrease in the need for whale products.

The families that ran the whaling operations were greatly dependent on a pack of local killer whales. These orcas would round up other whales and herd them into the bay. Then their leader, Old Tom, would leap up and down in the water outside the whalers lookout, until the men noticed and got their boats out and rowed with their harpoons to the luckless prey. Occasionally in his excitement, Old Tom would despair of the whalers’ slow rowing speed, and would grab hold of the painter and tow them out.

Then, once the target had been harpooned and killed, the whalers would buoy it and leave it overnight. Old Tom and his pod would just take the lips and tongue, and leave everything else for the men in the morning.

Eventually Old Tom died, and a local landowner built a museum to house his skeleton. This museum has grown somewhat organically into a fascinating exhibition accommodating everything from whaling to local tree-felling to stories of the sea, but the central piece is still Old Tom himself. If you look at his teeth, you can clearly see where they have been worn away by pulling on the harpooners’ tow ropes.

Australia's Strangest Shipwreck Saga
A story from the Eden archives, confirmed by Lloyds of London.

On the 16th October 1829, the schooner Mermaid left Sydney bound for Western Australia. Four days later, while lying becalmed in the Torres Straits, an unexpected gale blew her onto reefs bursting her hull. The twenty-two people aboard were marooned on some rocks for three days until rescued by the barque Swiftsure.

Five days later, the Swiftsure was caught in a strong current off New Guinea and was wrecked on rocks. All hands, including those rescued from the Mermaid, made it to land. Eight hours later they were all rescued by the schooner Governor Ready, which was already carrying 32 people but which managed to cram the other two crews aboard.

Within three hours, the timber cargo caught fire and the combined crews took to the lifeboats. The cutter Comet picked them all up without loss of life.

A week later, the Comet ran into a squall that snapped her mast. Her crew took the only serviceable boat, leaving the formerly rescued crews, who they regarded as being jinxed, to their fate. For eighteen hours the survivors fought off sharks as they clung to the wrecked ship, but they all survived to be rescued by the packet Jupiter.

By a strange coincidence, a passenger on this last ship was an elderly lady from Yorkshire who was on her way to Australia to seek her son who'd been missing for fifteen years. She found him amongst the survivors - he was a crewman from the Mermaid, the first of the vessels wrecked.

Cooma

Westwards, then, into the setting sun, along a dirt track connecting to the Monaro Highway, and then northward to Cooma, a mere hop skip and a jump from the southernmost borders of ACT. A little sensitive to the fact that most of the towns we were passing could justly be described as one-horse, and a little tired of Chinese food, we’d set on Cooma as our destination because it is a major tourist area in the ski season. Surely here there would be some night-life. There was, in fact, a tourist centre, and we went in and explained our plight.

The woman scratched her head. A restaurant? She took us outside, and pointed at the building next door, indisputably a restaurant, but just as indisputably closed. She shrugged.

Perhaps one of the motels did food? We took directions to the largest, parked in relief under the huge RESTAURANT OPEN sign, and checked in. When could we eat? we asked. The young Canadian girl (“I married an Australian so I could move to Sydney, and we ended up in this godforsaken place”) shook her head. Their restaurant was closed. She rang around some of the other motels, but no, their restaurants were all closed too. Then she brightened. “If you cross the road, over by the ski shop, in a few moments the Chinese will be open. Best restaurant in town.”

Arrival in Canberra

Many moons ago, the Australians decided that their newly formed Federation of States needed a proper capital. The individual state capitals – Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart – fought long and hard for the privilege, until everybody got fed up with the bickering and decided to put the capital somewhere else.

A few sites were considered, but in the end the Australians took a patch of unremarkable sheep-farming land spanning the borders of New South Wales and Victoria, and made a new state, Australian Capital Territory, in which to build their new city. After some more in-fighting, during which committee-generated names such as SydMelAdPerBrisHo were suggested, the city was named Canberra.

The architect, something of a visionary called Burley-Griffin (or possibly his wife, but that’s another story), knew from the start that this city was going to be different. Rather than clear-fell and sterilise the area before putting up the buildings, he decided to insert the city into the bush itself. A lake was required as a focal point in this waterless wilderness, so he created not one but two by the judicious use of dams. Seven separate centres were built scattered about the new lakes, each with their own shopping malls, business zones and housing. Building plots were sold with the understanding that, once you’d built your property, the government would stock the garden with mature local trees and shrubs, and much of the land between the centres was designated as national parkland, forming huge stretches of green-belt wilderness criss-crossed only by cycle paths.

On our arrival some fifty years later, it was clear that the vision was still working. One of the first things any visitor should do is drive to the top of nearby Mount Ainslie, and look down over central Canberra. In front of you, you see the lake, the two parliament buildings – the old and the new – with the famous flagpole standing above them, and off to one side, a small cluster of office buildings that constitutes the centre of Civic. Everything else is bush and trees. But wait, just stand and concentrate… amongst the trees you see a house. And then another one. And another. Until you realise that what at first glance seems to be forest horizon to horizon, is actually all the living, breathing city of Canberra.

We arrived by train from Sydney, on the basis that after twenty two hours (with only a one-hour break in Kuala Lumpur) on a plane from Holland, we couldn’t face even the local internal hop or another moment in an airport. It turned out to be an excellent decision, as well as an introduction to Australia in microcosm. Sitting in our air-conditioned first class seats, sipping local Chardonnay and dining on roast chicken, we soon found ourselves involved in numerous of conversations with passers by, interested to know who we were and what we were doing; imagine this happening on an intercity train in any European country.

Half way to Canberra, the train stopped unexpectedly. After about five minutes, the attendant (who up until now had mainly been saying things like “Next station is Wogga, population 12, the platform is very small and we are only stopping for two minutes, so please do not go wandering”) came on the tannoy to announce “We apologise for the fact that the train has stopped. The driver is now trying to restart the engine. When he succeeds we will be on our way…”

In the distance we could faintly hear the grind of an enormous diesel turning over; we could almost picture the driver standing on the track, winding a huge starting handle. Meanwhile, nobody so much as glanced at their watch or frowned. Conversations continued without interruption, and when the engine eventually shuddered into life and the train restarted its journey, nobody thought it worthy of comment.

Our arrival in the capital city was surreal. It was built to house a million souls, and so far only about 350,000 have moved in, so there is practically no traffic on the huge 3-lane highways, no public transport to speak of, and only one taxi company. Canberra International Airport is an airstrip borrowed from the air force, and when we arrived at the train station, it was like something out of a Western; a simple platform, baking heat, and nothing at all moving. All it needed was eerie harmonica music and a bouncing tumbleweed.

What traffic there is in Canberra, is mainly utes, what other cultures would call a flatbed or a pick-up. However, no bashed about working vehicles these. It is the dream of every young lad to own a ute, with darkened windows, pearlescent paint job, wide alloy wheels and a thundering exhaust. In fact, Ford and Holden (the local name for Vauxhall/Opel/GM) make hot utes just for this market, great for cruising in the evenings but not enormously useful for actually carrying stuff to market. For a moment I toyed with the idea of owning one myself, cruising across the red desert with arm on window ledge, stereo blaring… but then I realised that the other main vehicle here is the four wheel drive, somewhat more practical for the intense touring that we intend to do, and so off we went looking for a twin-cab Toyota Land Cruiser.

However, in a dusty corner of the Toyota dealership they had a part-exchanged Nissan Pathfinder, with electric everything, CD player, aircon, and for two thirds the price… after a test drive, I fell in love with it.

After the bush fires

Once you’ve got yourself a set of wheels, it is only an hour or so from Canberra up into the Snowy Mountains, which (like much of the ACT) is mainly national parkland. Much of it is natural bush, but great swathes of it were until recently experimental plantations of imported pine. These famously exploded into a firestorm shortly before our arrival, wiping out around four hundred houses in one of the outlying suburbs, and forests as far as the eye can see.

The pine plantations are all dead, mile upon mile of burnt sticks projecting from crumbly scorched earth, eerily silent apart from the buzz of flies around the occasional charcoaled animal corpse.

The local flora, on the other hand, is well adjusted to regular burning. Without an oily carpet of pine needles to keep the heat in, the earth below the native forest is unscarred, still healthy and brown, and heat-triggered seeds, dormant for years, spring into life to take advantage of the cleared growing conditions.

Native grasses burn back to a central nub, but soon sprout a short green felting of fresh tips. Up in the highlands, a ranger shows us a banksia, which has stubbornly refused to flower for the last fifteen years, covered in new buds triggered by the heat of the fire that has turned the surrounding limestone ash-white.

The ubiquitous eucalypt’s flaky bark burns but then peels off, revealing fresh wood beneath, and hidden buds push their way through the charcoal, sprouting fresh and green against the black, all silhouetted against the stunning blue of the sky. So striking is this landscape – the 2003 firestorm notwithstanding, bush fires are a fact of life here – that I reckon that the Australian national colours should be black, green and blue.

Pine burns and is forever charcoal. In contrast, local plants such as this eucalypt pause for a week or so and then burst forth with new life.

Somewhere to live

After a few weeks in a hotel, we managed to find a house. The rental industry here is certainly interesting; each property is made available for viewing for a single hour. In that time, as many hopeful renters pack in as possible; afterward, you all fill in your application forms. These forms are then shortlisted according to how much the agent liked you (chatting them up works wonders here), and then – get this – the short list is sent to the actual owners, who get the last word. If they don’t like foreigners, or people with odd names, or whatever, then out you go. Whether you’re the best tenant in terms of past history or income level is at this point completely irrelevant. Very strange.

After going through the mill a couple of times, we rented privately, which made a lot more sense, and we ended up with this vast (by European standards) 4-bedroom house practically on the shores of Lake Gininderra, and a short cycle ride to work.

And what a cycle ride! To commute to my office, I cycle down a mud track to the lake, and then pedal around the shore, past the pelicans and cormorants, with parrots and cockatoos flying overhead, swerving to avoid bright blue swamp-hens, until I arrive at the office. How cool is that?

On the way home from work, I often meet Lyn by the lake-shore and we feed the pelicans, swans and ducks. You get a few scratches – they’re big creatures, and wild and excitable – but smart, the way most Australian bird life seems to be smart, and easily taught which bits are food and which bits need gentler treatment.

Back at the house, I built a bird feeding station, in an attempt to attract some wildlife, with extraordinary results; we regularly see twenty parrots, a dozen cockatoos, as many bronze-wings (sort of pigeon-like with dinosaur crests), magpies (big smart piebald birds), sundry smaller critters, and even a goshawk that catches prey and then nonchalantly plucks it on our lawn.

Australians often tell you that Canberra is boring. They are wrong.

No worries. No worries at all.