WARRANDYTE, VIC – Australia may have changed to decimal currency forty years ago, but we still have Pound Bend in Warrandyte, roughly 24kms east of Melbourne. The name is a reference to £-like loop in the Yarra River. Loopier still is the tunnel that the Evelyn Tunnel Gold Mining Company drove through the intervening buttress [...]
The Junkyard Café Flame ‘n’ Grill of Stratford (Vic) is not longer. That once distinguished diner famed for its egg-burgers and Bill Clinton’s underpants, has shut its flyscreen door for the last time.
Offbeat traveller, you’ll need to take your peculiar palate a few blocks closer to Melbourne, and graze at the Mad Cow Cafe – [...]
Here are two make-believe maladies I wrote for Focus, a leisure magazine for the frazzled Australian doctor. Feel free to suggest any more current-day diseases we should warn our population about.
REMOTORRHEA – Impatience has long been ascribed to these fast times, manifesting in the psychosomatic fevers of road rage, air rage, checkout rage ad nauseam. [...]
Two days before Prime Minister Harold Holt drowned in a snorkeling mishap – in 1967 – he composed a letter to Ben Cropp, a well-known undersea film-maker. The letter describes the beauties of the Barrier Reef, as well as the coral-eating threat posed by the crown-of-thorn starfish. Eerily, Holt never got to sign the letter, [...]
A wine-maker near Cessnock (NSW) has dropped us a line at the website. He reports the Hunter Valley, an area noted for its alluvial soil and velvet cabernets, is not to be found beyond the back of Bourke, as falsely suggested on page 406 of the Regional Guide.
Bad news for Bacchus, I suppose. He’s the [...]
This is a story of two towns – Eden and Merimbula. Both stand on the Sapphire Coast of New South Wales, close to the Victorian border, and both have different blessings to count.
Eden is a fishing town. It works hard, plays hard. Twofold Bay is alive with trawlers and mussel leases. Just as the pubs [...]
For much of July, Column Eight in the Sydney Morning Herald, has been harvesting weird street names around the state. Among the winners are No Name Street in Basin View (south of Nowra) and Wild Goose Chase (a dead-end) in Woombah, near Yamba, on the northern coast.
In a separate quest, readers have been scouting Sydney [...]
Travel and danger seem to go together, like fish and chips, or Black and Decker. As soon as you leave that door, say the insurance brochures, a piano is liable to fall on your head, or a bloodless coup in Eastern Europe might cancel your raft trip.
Somehow I survived researching this offbeat guide, driving around [...]