Better off drinking Adelaide’s famous beer, than the city’s infamous tapwater. To see the plight played out, take a trip to the SA Brewery where a dozen citizens will be collecting water from the coin-operated spigot.
Four wells lie beneath the brewery, drawing off the Wilunga Aquifer. The bounty used to be free, but nowadays every [...]
Botticelli didn’t paint The Birth of Venus, not above the Palace Hotel’s foyer anyhow. That gal-in-the-clam was the brushwork of Mario Cellotto. The Broken Hill publican toiled for weeks with eyestrain and an itsy-bitsy postcard of the original canvas. But the vistas don’t stop there.
Gordon Wyen, a student of indigenous painter, Albert Namatjira, arrived at [...]
Quick – you have another five weeks from the time of posting to hear the mobiles phones ringing in Melbourne.
Wait, wait – before you start carping – I know we hear a mass of Motorolas bleeping any day of the week – but these phones are very different.
Suspended high on a cement wall, the eight [...]
The Djab wurrung people once camped on the slopes of Mount Langi Ghiran, Victoria. While their dreamtime links to the land have been frayed by time, one dreaming image remains.
Locals call her the Sleeping Princess, the regal silhouette cast by the Langi Ghiran ridgeline. The best spot to see this supine maiden is from One [...]
Elizabeth Gold ran across the tennis court with a bullet in her breast. She was trying to escape her lover called Russell Snodgrass. This was 1897, and the period gown wasn’t helping her dash one jot.
The trouble started a year before, in the gold town of Coolgardie, when her first husband, Captain Charles Gold died [...]
Tasmania’s only ski resort takes three big zigs and three major zags to reach. The only road into Ben Lomond National Park, about 60 kms northwest of Launceston, travels from Upper Blessington, up.
The zigzag takes the name of Jacob’s Ladder, a 225-metre stretch of unsurfaced road that climbs at a 70-degree. (For the mathematically minded, [...]
When the tide is low, you can clamber down from the prefab lighthouse on Moreton Point, in Ulladulla (NSW), to reach the large rock platform edging the sea. Those scattered cannonballs are made of cooled lava, spat from a prehistoric volcano. They fell back to earth so heavily they’ve glued themselves among the rockpools.
Howard Springs (NT) is a cool oasis off Gunn Point Road. In a blatant abuse of homophone, the sign for Gunn Point Road is blistered with buckshot.
Shades of another message, further south, in Coober Pedy. Beside the town’s giant winch on the plain’s only hill is a sign reading: Stop Here Only If Your [...]
‘Band of gold’ is the literal translation of Ora Banda, a prospecting town in arid WA, though ‘town’ itself is a loose translation.
Ora Banda is one pub, a gold battery, a few open craters and a naked racetrack. Mind you, the pub is lucky to be still standing.
The place was twice bombed in 2002 by [...]
Japanese bombers, in 1943, never had much luck bombing Onslow. Navigators mistook the glitter of the salt marshes as civilization, and proceeded to blast the vacancy with incendiaries and several 500-pounders.
As if that lunacy wasn’t enough, some 10 years later, the Australian government glad-handed plans for the British to detonate atom bombs on the Monto [...]