Innholdsfortegnelse for August - October 2022 i Australian Traveller

THIS IS A LINE-IN-THE-SAND MOMENT for Australian Traveller, the moment we go all-in with our commitment to approaching travel within Australia in a more conscious, sustainable, ethical and responsible way so that our readers know they are making the best choices when exploring this amazing country of ours. Rather than positioning this as a one-off ‘Green Issue’, we have approached this edition as a launch pad for an editorial approach that will continue in every issue to come. As a result of this we will be making considered choices about the content we include, ensuring that it features and celebrates Australian businesses and destinations that are making real efforts to operate in a more sustainable and conscious way. We are not alone in prioritising this focus. On the eve of…

QT NEWCASTLE QT Newcastle gives back to the community by virtue of the fact it’s housed in the iconic 113-year-old former David Jones building, which Novocastrians have a high degree of ownership over. As well as respecting the elegant bones of the building, the luxury hotel has widened the lens to include a contemporary modern Australian bar and grill (Jana) and sky-high izakaya-style bar (Rooftop at QT) that celebrate NSW producers. The hotel uses refillable Kevin Murphy dispensers in its bathrooms, offers free bike hire and features upcycled materials throughout. qthotels.com VOCO BRISBANE CITY CENTRE In keeping with IHG’s burgeoning brand, voco Brisbane City Centre is filled with edgy artworks and warm, playful interiors. The design of the 194-room hotel was influenced by its riverside location with a mostly neutral…

Rewind THE ROMANCE OF THE MOMENT was not lost on Charmaine Ingram when she discovered several boxes of photographs during a clean-up of the Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA) office headquarters in Darwin in 2020. As ALPA’s media and communications specialist, Charmaine had been trying to think of ways to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Aboriginal-owned organisation and was stumbling for a reference point. “When I first opened the boxes, I knew I’d discovered something significant,” says Charmaine. “The photographs had been taken by missionaries who had worked in partnership with Yol u people at a time when farming, fishing and a range of other industries flourished, from the ’30s to the ’70s,” she said. The importance of these historic photographs was also evident to staff at the Museum…

As a child, our family holidays were always to… We used to live in a place called White Rock near Vancouver, on the West Coast [of Canada] and right on the border with America. It was an easy drive into Washington to a place called Chuckanut Drive (1). As a family we spent many summers camping, swimming and boating. It was magical. Now if I have time for a short break, I head straight to… I used to travel south to Kangaroo Valley, but now I love Sydney’s Northern Beaches (2), specifically Clareville. I have realised that there are a lot of similarities with Chuckanut Drive. My local’s tip for my hometown Sydney is… Walk more. You see so much when you walk around the city. A major new addition…

Warrior woman JESS TAUNTON HAS BEEN AT THE LEADING edge of the conscious travel movement for about a decade. After helping to establish Swell Lodge, the eco-lodge retreat on Christmas Island, in 2018, the young eco entrepreneur reached a turning point in her life and relocated to Australia’s east coast. Jess based herself on the NSW South Coast during lockdown in 2021 when she says she gained a fresh perspective of the ‘jewels of the Sapphire Coast’ and the direction she wanted to head. “After running Swell Lodge for five years, and photography tours around the world, I decided I wanted to get back to nature and create experiences in my own backyard for people so they feel like they are leaving nature better than when they found it. I…

Credit where credit’s due GREEN. SUSTAINABLE. ORGANIC. The buzzwords of our earnest efforts to do better as we finally start to understand the consequences of our collective global actions over the last few centuries are increasingly attached to everything from our morning coffee to the cars we drive to the energy being pumped into our homes. They are also being liberally bandied about within the tourism industry, which, thanks to air travel and the over-tourism we were witnessing before the pandemic hit, has been left wanting when it comes to making substantiative efforts to adapt and change. According to Professor Tim Flannery, whom we spoke with in late 2021, we haven’t reached the overall tipping point when it comes to climate change yet (scientists view climate change as a series…

Reviews YOU COULD FORGIVE Two Good Co. a lot when it comes to dining at its first cafe, tucked into a leafy pocket of the inner-city Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. The social enterprise, which sprang into action when co-founder Rob Caslick and a few friends set up a barbecue in Kings Cross to cook wholesome food that was big on flavour (and ‘anything but snags’) for those sleeping rough, has built a solid reputation on striving to do good and enrich the lives of those who need help. Its buy-one-give-one (B1G1) model of creating and selling healthy salads and meals in a jar, and donating the equivalent to shelters and charities assisting the homeless and victims of trauma and domestic violence has expanded over the years to include its successful…

IT’S 4PM ON A FRIDAY afternoon and I’m standing in torrential rain on 75 Mile Beach on K’gari (Fraser Island), with the wind whipping sand and rain into my face. After southern Queensland’s recent deluge of rain, the water is choppy and the brown, foaming crests of the waves are tumbling along the beach. It’s like the staging of The Tempest. In the distance, I can hear the melancholy caw of a crow as I bend, lunge, stoop and plough my way along the sand, racing against a ferocious incoming tide that threatens to swallow the rubbish that it so recently spat onto the shoreline. For all the bleakness of the moment, the fact that I’m walking alongside 25 like-minded individuals as part of an epic Eco Warrior Experience designed…

READY TO TAKE IT SLOW? Congratulations! Booking a Slow Stay is the first step in the right direction when it comes to slowing down. How you actually spend your time while there, however, can be a challenge – especially if you’re not used to sitting still or being untethered from technology for more than five minutes. It might seem ludicrous but the truth is, doing nothing can actually be much harder than churning through a to-do list. The trick is in being able to switch your focus to quality experiences over quantity, and allowing yourself to savour languid hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Slowing down is a choice, one you can make a little easier by using these tips while you’re away. SWITCH OFF YOUR PHONE (DON’T…

THE SPRAWLING Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert National Park covers an area that is full of contrasts and incredible natural beauty. The desert sands here are home to the longest parallel dune systems in the world, stretching for hundreds of kilometres and straddling three states. And while the Munga-Thirri-Simpson desert reaches into Queensland, the Northern Territory, and South Australia, the area declared Australia’s newest and biggest national park in 2021 – after a decade-long campaign by The Wilderness Society to protect it from the interests of fossil fuel companies – is located within SA’s Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre basin. For context, its now 3.6-million hectare footprint is almost twice the size of Kakadu National Park and about four times the size of Yellowstone National Park. The park is on the Traditional Lands of the…

WALKING TOURS ARE A GREAT WAY to get under the skin of a city, exploring its streets with a local to get a real sense of place and find out how those who live there interact and engage with their surroundings. In the case of Ryan Mossny, director and co-founder of Two Feet & a Heartbeat, it also gives an insight into the diversity of Perth’s population. Ryan is a native of Canada who travelled the world before landing in Western Australia and deciding to make it his home. His award-winning tour company offers up a selection of Perth itineraries, from exploring the city’s arcades and laneways to navigating it via its whisky-serving bars to progressive dinners that sample the wares of some of the best chefs working the pans…

8–12 SEPTEMBER Broken Heel Festival OUTBACK BROKEN HILL, NSW Expect a lot of sequins, feather boas, glitter, disco balls, divas and drag queens inspired by the cult movie and stage musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at this outback festival, which includes comedy, cabaret and live music.bhfestival.com 10–25 SEPTEMBER > MARGARET RIVER REGION OPEN STUDIOS MARGARET RIVER REGION, WA A record number of artists will open their studio doors in 2022 for the Margaret River Region Open Studios event. All up, 168 artists will exhibit in mediums as diverse as pencils and paint, metal and millinery. mrropenstudios.com.au 14–16 OCTOBER CHEESEFEST RYMILL PARK MURLAWIRRAPURKA, ADELAIDE, SA Gather and graze at Australia’s largest cheese festival, which draws a mix of cheesemakers, fermenters, food producers, winemakers, brewers, and restaurateurs from all around the…

MIKE SMITH moved to the Northern Rivers region in 2020 to set up Zero Co, the company he founded as part of his mission to stop single-use plastic packaging in every kitchen, laundry and bathroom in Australia. After selling his stake in Cake Wines, the brand he co-founded in 2011, Mike and his wife Alyssa spent 18 months travelling to the most far-flung reaches of the planet where they saw the extent of the Earth’s plastic pollution problem first-hand. Since launching Zero Co, the big-picture thinker and his team have prevented more than one million water bottles’ worth of plastic rubbish going to landfill and removed about the same amount of rubbish from the ocean. Here, Mike shares his perfect day in and around Mullumbimby. zeroco.com.au THE NITTY-GRITTY: Where exactly:…

East Coast Tasmania SPINDLY COLUMNS OF DOLERITE TOWER hundreds of metres above me, the dark-grey igneous cliffs slicked with a fine mist of sea spray. To my left a pod of whales breaks the surface, one by one, plumes of air spouting from their blowholes and mixing with the sea haze as shearwaters wheel and dart above the waves. Looking ahead, I see a small gap in the wall of rock where the water is churned into a maelstrom by powerful swells that detonate with a boom at the base of the cliffs on either side. Hikers on the Three Capes Track regularly cite Cape Pillar as one of the highlights of the walk and, from the top of the tallest sea cliffs in the southern hemisphere, it’s easy to…

FROM THE YARRA RIVER, THE GREY SPEARS of Melbourne’s skyline shrink behind us, replaced by open water with a handful of distant container ships resting on the horizon like tiny caterpillars. Within an hour, a new horizon comes into view, low-rise and lined with palm trees and the masts of a few hundred yachts. Laid-back and with its face turned to the sun, Geelong is a world away from its big sister, and it comes as a surprise to many – Melburnians included – that there’s ‘public transport’ across the bay to reach it (and to Portarlington on the Bellarine Peninsula). The next surprise is just how much there is to explore there, much of it easily accessible on foot. With Port Phillip Ferries departing from the dynamic Docklands, a…

YOU WILL HAVE a front-row seat of the sun painting the landscape at dawn and dusk each day from the comfort of the infinity pool at the Northern Territory’s newest wilderness retreat, Finniss River Lodge. Owner Robert Venturin believes there are few better places to bask in the grandeur of the dramatic landscape that surrounds the 200-square-kilometre working farm. “The infinity pool overlooks a natural floodplain that holds a lot of water through the wet season. It’s part of the Finniss River and, when it’s in flood, it’s spectacular. It’s also home to a huge arrangement of bird species, and saltwater and freshwater crocodiles, too,” says Robert, who grew up on the property, 90 minutes south-west of Darwin. Robert, a second-generation pastoralist, says what he loves most about the working…

IT IS OFTEN OUR PAST EXPERIENCES that influence our future choices. In the case of designer and business owner Emily Riggs, her determination to “design a life with purpose” was informed by both triumph and loss. “When I was 10, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Shortly after my diagnosis, my mother lost her own cancer battle, passing away from breast cancer aged 43. During the hardest time in my life, I found myself turning to fashion for comfort and to express my creative flair,” she explains. “Years later, I fell in love with and married a fifth-generation merino sheep farmer; our family run merino sheep across our four properties in Burra, South Australia.” Emily’s love of fashion, and her desire to chart a purposeful course in life gelled when…

IS IT ANY WONDER WE’RE YEARNING for the pure escapism of travel? The sobering realities of life in 2022 – from catastrophic floods to coral bleaching to the ongoing spectre of COVID-19 – are enough to send even diehard optimists scurrying for their suitcase. But when the act of escaping can also contribute to the very problems causing our hopelessness – particularly when it comes to the health of our planet – future-minded travellers are right to be asking: is travel in Australia sustainable? How does our country measure up? To be frank, in general, Australia needs to pull up its socks. The country’s embarrassing (lack of) progress on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals saw it ranked dead last in an assessment of 60 countries for its policy response…

Kimberley Horizontal Falls Considered one of the Kimberley region’s most spectacular attractions, no less than Sir David Attenborough has been mesmerised by the spectacle of the fast-moving tidal current of Talbot Bay being squeezed through two of the narrow gorges of the McLarty Range, forming frothy, surging rapids. In fact, the legendary broadcaster anointed them as ‘Australia’s most unusual natural wonder’. King Cascades Located on the Prince Regent River, the waters of King Cascades pour down over ancient stepped rock formations that resemble a giant’s staircase. The allure here is that small-ship cruising with the likes of True North allows for unfettered access; ships can get close enough to allow guests to stand under the cool, fresh waters while on deck. Mitchell Falls Known as Punamii-Uunpuu to the Wunambal people,…

“THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE when you go hiking is that it’s a mistake.” So said American comic Jim Gaffigan while delivering one of his pithy observations onstage. “There’s nothing at the end … no bar, restaurant, or even a vending machine. We’re just idiots.” Gaffigan’s ‘bit’ soundtracks an avalanche of TikTok hiking fails and, by default, splits the world into two camps: those who hike and those who find the very idea preposterous. But it may have given guided-walk specialist Life’s an Adventure an idea. Perhaps there is indeed middle ground – if you dangle an appropriately seductive hook, like South Australian riesling. An Ecotourism Australia-certified company with a light footprint, Life’s an Adventure fosters close working relationships with local businesses that share the same environmental ethos, dovetailing us…

SPRAWLING OVER 14 hectares in an area known as East Lake – industrial Fyshwick on one side and a precious wetlands on the other – 1 Dairy Road is an intriguing neighbourhood emerging on the edge of the city. It’s home to an eclectic collection of creatives and startups: roasters, distillers, printers and producers, small offices and even a small boat builder, relishing in their environment and getting on with business. On Ngunnawal land, the area around Dairy Road by the Molonglo River served as a soldier settlement in the 1920s, with parcels of land gifted to returned soldiers later converted to small dairy farms as ‘Dairy Flat’. But the farms struggled to survive and the area filled with large industrial warehouses and car fleets instead, seemingly forgotten by planning…

Daintree Rainforest THERE’S A TRANSFORMATIVE MOMENT that happens for each guest during a stay at Silky Oaks Lodge. The moment they feel their shoulders soften and residual stress wash away. You might recognise it by their espousal of the ‘river look’ at pre-dinner cocktails: sun-dried hair still a little damp from a late-afternoon dip and teased by the humidity of the tropics. But you’ll definitely know it by the easy and irrepressible smile that spreads across their face in a way that betrays pure relaxation and acclimatisation to this rainforest realm. A smile that says, categorically, “I live here now”. You can trace this to the DNA of the Baillie Lodges brand: its properties each bottle a distinctly Australian laid-back luxury that invites you to feel part of the fabric…

ON CHRISTMAS ISLAND THIS YEAR, the price of a single imported lettuce hit $20, but there’s no catastrophic floods or sudden inflationary pressures driving the eye-watering cost. “Lettuce has been $12 to $15 for the past decade or more,” says regenerative farmer, Mark Bennett. He’s sitting across from me in the dark, as fairy lights strung in banana palms cast a warm glow over his first long-table dinner. On the inaugural Indian Ocean Fest menu are snake beans, sweet potato leaves and passionfruit, all sourced from his organic Hidden Garden Sustainable Farm. At first glance, it might not seem like a big deal, but for the remote Australian Territory, where up to 98 per cent of the food is imported, supplying home-grown produce is a seismic shift from the norm.…