Helen Lyndon Goff is no household name. Nor does PL Travers warrant a special cranny in every librarian’s heart. But Mary Poppins? That’s different. The nanny with the aeronautic brolly is a worldwide legend.
Helen Goff, soon to be Pamela Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, grew up in a cattle town on the Darling Downs [...]
A pelican stands at the knee of a novelist. The pelican is called Mr Percival – star of the book and movie, Storm Boy – while the writer is Mr Colin Thiele, the story’s creator.
Born in 1920, and sadly dying just a month ago, Thiele was a literary pioneer who gave rural Australia a [...]
Sam Sawnoff the Penguin has a pudding that never runs out. He shares his perpetual snack with Bunyip Bluegum the Koala, and a sailor called Bill Barnacle.
Add a parrot, a bandicoot and Henrietta the Hedgehog, and you have the recipe for The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay, a kids book as lasting as the pudding [...]
High jump and rowing are not the only sports where contestants compete backwards. To the list you can add backstroke – and trugo.
Tru-who, you ask.
Trugo was born in 1924 in Melbourne, a quaint mix of croquet and lawn bowls. Played with mallets and a little rubber tyre, the object of the game is to wallop [...]
Ray Myers is a farmer with a sense of the ludicrous. Exposed last month in Time magazine, the ex-Sydneyite cultivates flamingoes, wombats, pixies and kangaroos in the smelting heat of Port Pirie, at the southern edge of the Flinders Ranges.
Nicknamed a Gnome Farm, the Myers property is lousy with concrete warriors, toadstools, dwarves and lizards, [...]
Not sure if joy flight is the right term. Screaming above Tasmania at 700 clicks, the G forces tearing at your goggles, a whirl in a Jet Provost Mk5 goes closer to fear flight, but a must-fix for any adrenaline junkie.
Nicknamed the Strikemaster, this British jet carries a Rolls-Royce engine – and 72 rockets in [...]
Gardeners hate ’em. Grocers hate ’em. Barbie-hugging girls hate ’em. And my Aunt Maggie can’t abide ‘em. But snails are making inroads into epicurean restaurants around the country, albeit slowly.
Snails Bon Appetite is Australia’s first and only snail farm, set up in 2000. This hothouse industry makes it home in Congewai, a short drive from [...]
There’s half a dozen edible Australian towns, from Orange to Berry – with a bit of Jabiru as bush-tucker. (We may need to hire an adjudicator to rule on the Victorian town of Speed.)
Yet one bankable example – the sleepy burg of Banana in central Queensland – is not as surefire as diners may think. [...]
A pub-crawl with a difference, the Windorah International Yabby Race is a 2-metre amble from a No-Parking sign to a line of chalk on the road. Forty yabbies competed this year, cheered deaf by scores of investors with too much time on their hands.
Stewards have yet to report whether Santa Claws beat Van Dam by [...]
In the deep dark canyon David saw
A living breathing dinosaur”¦.
Above is the opening couplet of a poem composed by kids at Canowindra Primary School, 330 kays west of Sydney.
Such high-quality verse-mongering saw the school snag a remarkable prize, a two-metre sapling no other school on Earth could boast.
Known as a living dinosaur, the Wollemi pine [...]