MOOBALL, NSW – Jeff and Jodi Pryer were looking for something to do. The two met in Newcastle, and liked the idea of a semi-tropical retreat. Suddenly, in 1998, the Ampol in Mooball bobbed up, and the rest is bovine bohemia.
Cow-mad, the entrepreneurs painted every pole in town black on white. They camouflaged the garage, [...]
LATROBE, TAS – Meet Montezuma, the former emperor of Mexico. The Aztec isn’t tall, five feet in the old money, but he’s exceptionally sweet. Totally made of chocolate in fact, and carrying a cacao pod – much as he was when he met Cortes, letting the flavour loose on the chocoholic west.
Monty was crafted by [...]
KANGAROO ISLAND, SA – Honey is forbidden on the incoming ferry across Backstairs Passage. As the oldest bee sanctuary in the world, established in 1885, Kangaroo Island has been the exclusive home to the Ligurian bee, a golden Bologna-based bee that first arrived in 1881.
KI, as islanders know their home, is the last remaining pure [...]
Lilliputland (in Jervis Bay, ACT) has the longest N-gauge railway system under the sun. With more than 40 scale-kilometres laid out, and up to 14 locos chuffing about at once, Lilliputland is model mayhem.
The display was built during the 1970s, and toured the country much like a Barnum & Bailey freak, but this little [...]
IDERAWAY, Q – An orchard patch northwest of Gayndah, Ideraway doesn’t get a lot of passing traffic. No doubt you’ll double the annual mean if you pay a visit to its remarkable bridge.
Technically, the bridge is listed by architectural historians as a ‘steel/timber deck-type with pin-jointed fishbelly trusses’ but the good folk of Ideraway prefer [...]
HAHNDORF, SA – Emil Buring, a dentist from Adelaide, started collecting pipes back in the 1930s. A different type of nicotine addiction, the habit grew quickly into a career. Emil became hooked on hookahs, amassing up to 700 specimens, from corncobs to crab-claw pipes.
A fraction of the frenzy appears in the Hahndorf Academy, an excellent [...]
GOSTWYCK, NSW – Debate surrounds the actual architect of the woolshed, yet nobody argues the building’s uniqueness. The likely culprit is John Horbury Hunt, a Canadian maverick who happened to be working up the road in 1872, designing St Peter’s Cathedral in Armidale.
Hunt lived in Watson’s Bay with his elder bride and a house full [...]
FITZROY CROSSING, WA – Shade is a type of common room where Aboriginal people from different Kimberley regions, and different language groups, come to shoot the breeze.
The same trees, in the last few years have become condom dispensaries, a step implemented by the Nindinlingaari Cultural Health Centre to combat the surge of sexual diseases in [...]
EDEN, NSW – Regardless of the hour, the Australasia Hotel is always full. Why? Because every regular has been painted in a crowd scene behind the public bar, better known as The Pit.
Brett Ralph, alias Ralphy, is the Michelangelo behind the fresco. (He’s the suave dude at the rear left with a paintbrush behind his [...]
DAMPIER, WA – Red Dog is the spirit of every restless male. Born in Paraburdoo, the result of a kelpie and heeler consummation, his real name was Tally-Ho, which his owners shortened to Tally.
After a family move to Dampier, neither the name nor the ownership lasted much longer. Red Dog, as his new town would [...]