TUMBARUMBA MAKES YOU HUMBLER It is possible to get to Wagga Wagga from Tumbarumba while also passing through Book Book and along the way you also will fly through a two horse and one shop town called Fortune. I did exactly that – based on the names alone – only to find it is a trip best done […]
ABBOTT PROOF FENCE The ACT is a place where prostitution is legal but, the Supreme court says, gay marriage isn’t. Continuing in the fine tradition that a marriage is between a man, his Supreme Court, his wife and his escort service, Canberra has sanctity of traditional marriage well covered. Perhaps it is little wonder there […]
VIVA BRISVEGAS! As modern cities go, Brisbane is hard to beat. Any city which has turned a treasury building into an inner city casino has also paid solid tribute to the remarkable fact that voting in governments who then spend the public’s money is so very much like gambling. Especially in a unicameral parliamentary system […]
THE TOP END – THIS WAY UP Heading into the North from the South is a little like leaving one world and entering another, not just like crossing the tropical line, entering the tropic of Capricorn really means changing country. Heading South from the North is much the same only in reverse. The Top End […]
THE GREAT DIVIDING STRANGE Geographically the Northern end of the Great Dividing Range separates the coastal tropics from central Queensland. From a photographic and videographer’s point of view it means tremendous natural beauty and in all directions. On both sides of that range the problem can be which direction to point the camera, a really […]
CATTLE AND DINOSAUR COUNTRY Some of the small Western and central Queensland towns look like rural places hit so hard by drought that they’re going to become smaller towns before they get to be larger towns again. There are quite a few of these smaller towns in the NT which already rely heavily […]
THE TYRANNY OF DISTANCE AND THE CURSE OF TEMPERATURE One of the strange features of trying to escape the Northern Territory by heading towards Queensland is that you have to head South not East for a long, long way. Even stranger though is that once you have successfully run through a gauntlet of […]
DON’T FORGET TO PACK THE BEANS This stunning national park was recommended to me by a family of Territorians on their way from Darwin to Katherine. We met at the Pine Creek lookout which has a commanding view of an old mine site, now a man made lake. I was warned not to expect […]
LORD ALFRED RUSSELL WALLACE WHO? For a nerd, arriving in a city named after a scientist is kind of a fun moment. We, the confused and bewildered people of Earth, live in cities named after emperors like Constantinople, gods like Athena, we have cities named after other cities or towns, like New York or […]
NATURAL BEAUTY FALLS FROM THE SKIES The Katherine region is, quite simply, one of the most stunningly beautiful places on Earth. The largest region in the NT it covers most of the Top End and what is sometimes called the lower top end. The stunning Katherine Gorge is so breath-taking that it would rate as […]
KATHERINE GORGE A tropical oasis, a sacred place, a place for anyone to see and a world heritage listed national park (Nitmiluk). It doesn’t get a lot better than that in terms of a huge build up. Hopefully you can get an idea from this vignette why Katherine Gorge really is just a little bit […]
GROGGY TERRITORY . The first thing which seems obvious when entering the Northern Territory at the top end is the change of road quality. The roads local to the border are pitted with potholes but only on the NT side. There are regular, new kinds of quarantine signs, the speed limit changes from […]