Dutchman Renee Boissevain has farmed mink in Norway and hunted crocs down under. But the wild life needed the wondrous too. So Renee has created his own universe in the shape of Crystal Caverns, an artificial grotto that extends beneath the streets of Atherton, in far northern Queensland.
Using egg-cartons for insulation, polystyrene for stalagmites and […]
While most Australians were thinking ‘bicentenary’ in 1988, the people of Hervey Bay had ‘tercentenary’ in mind.
They wanted to make a time capsule and fill it with the patriotic tie-ins that littered the present tense. What’s more, they wished to use a horned sea-mine as capsule, to fit in with the maritime feel of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Emperor Dale Anderson is the merry olde soul ruling the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom (GLK) in the sunstruck Coral Sea off midcoast Queensland.
The empire arose in 2004, the year the Oz government offically failed to recongise same-sex marriages.
Connected by a 50-minute charter flight form Hervey Bay, the kingdom operates on the pink dollar, banana daiquiris […]
Eromanga is an oil-and-opal town in the Queensland outback, clinging to the edge of the Eromanga Inland Sea - which is bone dry.
Plenty of bones in fact - of the dinosaur kind. And no end of irony too, since this waterless sea marks Australia’s furthest point from the sea in any direction.
Proof of the claim […]
Andrew Bain, a freelance travel writer, recently asked me to write on my favourite small-town in Australia.
And no small task, either. A dozen secret names went tumbling through the skull, but in terms of outright offbeat, Winton in outback Queensland is hard to pip.
For those of you who missed the snapshot in the Age […]
In the PubTab wing of the Courthouse Hotel in Port Douglas (Q), a horse’s head pokes from the wall above the cashier’s window. The barman calls the horse Pharlap, and says he’s been on the wall for donkey’s years.
Readers of this site have noticed a pattern. After writing up two astonishing women of Cooktown, I should add a third.
This one belongs in the Tough section of Cassowary Crossing, and warrants a reappearance:
Call her Thora, and Toots Holzheimer would mow you down with a semi-trailer. Mother of eight, Toots was a trailblazing trucker of […]