downunder update

No one ever forgets Monkey Mia. The tiny town on the shores of Shark Bay is famous for its dolphins.

Dolphins that swim up to greet you, bump your legs, splash you and, let’s face it, laugh at you. After a day with the dolphins you can easily imagine them trilling, in chorus, ‘so long and thanks for all the fish‘.

For more than forty years the bottleneck dolphins have been visiting and interacting with us, and we still don’t know why. Maybe they just like to play with us, as we do with them.

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Rottnest Island is a special destination for interstate and international visitors. The whole island is a Nature Reserve of indigenous flora and fauna, including the curious Quokka, and no public vehicles are allowed.

Rottnest Island was named in 1696 by Navigator Willem de Vlamingh after the many large rats that he imagined he had found there. The island is still full of the marsupials he thought were rodents, the friendly little Quokkas, setonix brachyurus.

Their name, in one of the Aboriginal languages of southwest Australia, is gwaga. Read the rest of this entry »

Sovereign Hill

You never find me at home in the first week of December. I’m up in Ballarat. My grandparents used to take me, way back in the 1950s, for Nana had a particular tie to the town, her grandfather was there, at the barricades, in the bloody days of the Eureka Stockade. I still attend the annual remembrance of the only armed uprising in Australian history. White history, that is. Read the rest of this entry »

Travel on the ferry, the Spirit of Tasmania

Bass Strait separates Tasmania from mainland Australia. Sailing vessels once fought their way from the Southern Ocean through a treacherous passage, losing many sailors to the waters, and today, storms whip up massive seas claiming lives from modern racing yachts. The seas in the Strait produce huge waves which crash all along the south-west coast of Victoria. Read the rest of this entry »

Tjapukai is a dream. It showcases the culture of the rainforest people from the Dreamtime through to present reality, it’s the most awarded attraction in Australia, an international benchmark in Indigenous Tourism where you sense the real spirit of a 50,000 year old society and it’s set in lush tropical forest that must be the original Garden of Eden. Read the rest of this entry »

Content written by Reuben Duffy

A lot of attention is paid to Australian beaches along the Pacific, but there is a lot more coastline than the East. The South West of Western Australia has natural beauty, real remoteness and miles of and miles of fantastic beaches. Read the rest of this entry »