TRAVEL

A gentle hidden gem: a visitor’s guide to the NSW far south coast
First published in Guardian Australia, January 2022
About six hours drive from Sydney and seven from Melbourne, on Thaua Country in Yuin nation, are the small towns of Pambula and Merimbula. This is not your stereotypical Australian coast of bold, gold beaches and “aparthotels” with salt-smeared glass balconies. The far south coast of New South Wales has a gentle, hidden gem feel. Ringed by national parks and nature reserves, solitude is easy ...
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Trekking the Great Ocean Walk: ‘Stand with no land mass between your sweaty skin and Antarctica’
First published in Guardian Australia, November 2021
Darting and bobbing on spindly pink legs, the hooded plover places pebbles, seaweed and other beach debris around its nest at the high water mark on Johanna beach. The decorations will do little to deter birds of prey, off-leash dogs, human feet and other threats to the eggs and to the fluffy, sandy-brown juveniles that hatch. There are just 1,000 or so hooded plovers left, ...
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TWA Hotel at JFK in New York City
First published in The Australian, November 2021
I am not a happy flyer; it’s merely a means to an end. Neither do I like airports where I soak up the surplus anxiety with the porosity of a deep-sea sponge. Only one place has changed my mind and it was neither a flight nor an airport but a New York hotel. Our JetBlue plane from Florida lands at terminal five, which means TWA ...
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Hunters and Collectors
First published in T Australia: New York Times Style Magazine, June 2021
“YOU CAN FILL up there,” says our guide, Nic. Several members of the group are already crouched on the creek’s mossy banks to bottle its flow. “Is here OK?” I ask, dunking my flask into a rocky pool. We’re mere hours into the six-day Overland Track and a bout of gastro would be calamitous. Renowned Tasmanian landscape artist Peter Gouldthorpe, here to paint en plein ...
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Cape Naturaliste to Cape Leeuwin walk
First published in The Australian, September 2021
When our guides leave late on day one, it’s as if they fade into the scrub. That’s how tightly tucked Injidup Spa Retreat is in the acacia, pig face, kangaroo paw and beard heath that carpets the coastline of Leeuwin-Naturaliste national park. And yet. “I go past 16 wineries, four breweries and a chocolate place on my way home,” says our Walk Into Luxury guide, ...
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Gone to seed in Tasmania
First published in The Australian, July 2021
Botanists are always in the mood. Especially when they are in the Tasmanian wilderness world heritage area with permission from Parks and Wildlife to go off track if a “target” species is spied. I’ve joined eight walkers on a botany-themed version of the Overland Track run by Tasmanian Walking Company, the only operator with private huts on the 65km trail. The Overland, on Palawa country, ...
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Sprouting new life
First published in The Saturday Paper, June 2021
It’s foolishly late to be fuelled by coffee and cortisol, bumping down a dirt road in a national park full of suicidal marsupials. An owl glares at us from a bough. Strange things are happening in the trees. Eucalypts wreathed in regrowth is nothing new but a charred stump covered with clusters of white blossoms? We stop to look at it and hear the ocean ...
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Around the traps
First published in The Saturday Paper, January 2021
The swiftest way to interest people in Baiame’s Ngunnhu (the Brewarrina Aboriginal fish traps) is to state, as many have, that the stone traps are the oldest surviving human-made construction in the world. It’s some elevator pitch. But superlatives such as ‘oldest’ “don’t come from us,” says Ngemba man Bradley Hardy. “That’s not us competing, it’s the archaeologists,” he says. “Within our nature, within our ...
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Hot bore baths, ancient traps and chaotic courtesy buses
First published in Guardian Australia, November 2020
Borders are closed but Australians are still travelling, swapping our top three destinations of New Zealand, Bali or the United States for our own backyards instead. Yet in this year of domestic travel, Australia’s majority non-Indigenous population should remember these aren’t “our” backyards. Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded, though this truth is not made plain. In preparation for our trip around northwest NSW, and on ...
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Valley of the god
First published in The Australian, July 2020
The ‘paparazzi free’ hashtag on Hermes Estate’s Instagram page is not ironic. The pre-COVID plan for this private retreat on NSW’s north coast was to entice international elites who’d be more dissuaded by a drone-operated camera than an $11,000 per night price tag. Originally slated to open in March and still faced with closed borders, Hermes Estate’s husband and wife team have swung open the ...