Aussie Travels 2017

Home again after our five-week holiday trip to the Land Down Under, during which we celebrated a mid-summer Christmas and New Years (2018) and explored several off the beaten path areas of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Tasmania. ​Most of our time we were traveling with Aussie friends, meeting their friends and relatives, and looking around places that seemed less frequented by tourists (with the exception of the Great Ocean Road crowded with big white tour buses at major sites), including a couple of wilderness reserves in Tasmania, gold fields, and opal mines, as well as small towns like Tenterfield (a couple hours west of Brisbane), Warnambool (on the coast between Melbourne and Adelaide), and Clunes (north of Ballarat) on either side of the Great Dividing Range. Although we didn't always seem to speak the language as our hosts, we had great fun and did gain at least a sense of two Australian obsessions--cricket and horse racing. I find it difficult to put the experience into just a few words. Suffice it to say Australians have a great sense of humor, and live in a land that despite many similarities to countries in the northern hemisphere looks and feels very different: different flora, different birds, different animals.

Many discoveries regarding things Australian. Here are a couple of novels we really enjoyed--"Autumn Laing" by Alex Miller, "The Narrow Road to the Far North" by Richard Flanagan, "Carpentaria" by Alexis Wright, and Tim Winton's "Cloudstreet" and "Island Home"; also Robert Hughes "Fatal Shore" (a history); and the movie "Oddball" (about the survival of Warrnambool's tiny penguin reserve).