Take an armchair tour of Australia
Some of Australia’s best-loved destinations are within reach this weekend from home.
Some of Australia’s best-loved travel destinations are within reach this weekend from the comfort of your couch.
Starting from 7am on Saturday on Tourism Australia’s Facebook page and Youtube channel the Live from Aus program will stream everything from fitness sessions, pub trivia and wine and whisky tastings to outback crocodile wrangling and scuba-diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
Virtual travellers can have breakfast at Bondi Beach, go behind the scenes at Canberra’s Questacon and watch the sunset at Uluru (without those pesky flies) to an indigenous soundtrack.
Sunday’s line-up includes early-morning yoga at Elements of Byron, brunch with the crew from Three Blue Ducks in Sydney, wine and art pairing at the d’Arenberg Cube in South Australia and the penguin parade on Phillip Island, Victoria. It’s all designed to whet our appetites for domestic travel once restrictions are lifted.
The roll-call of participants includes Outback Wrangler Matt Wright, Kimberley guide and author Scott Connell, The Wiggles, fashion editor Laura Brown, celebrity chef Jock Zonfrillo, and radio personality Michael “Wippa” Wipfli. Tourism Australia managing director Phillipa Harrison says the event aims “to help regional tourism businesses and communities get back on their feet after what has been the most challenging period the industry has ever faced”.
PENNY HUNTER
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Forward planner
Since January, the Stay With Them AU initiative on Instagram has been drumming up interest in tourism regions affected by summer’s devastating bushfires. The account was set up by former Batemans Bay resident Sally Aksenov, whose relatives in the coastal NSW holiday town were lucky to retain their homes when the flames drew frighteningly close at the end of December.
Aksenov, who has 10 years’ expertise in the hotel industry, has recently been working with more than 50 boutique accommodation providers to offer a range of giveaways for use when regional travel becomes possible again.
The month-long Give a Stay aims to put the destinations back on the map and inspire travellers to visit. The competition is in its third week and has already awarded, among others prizes, a two-night stay at Bo Farm in Berry, and three nights at the historic Lotte’s Hjem cottage in Pambula, both on the NSW south coast.
Participants for the third round of the competition have been revealed this weekend and include three in NSW — Paperbark Camp in Jervis Bay, Nightcap Ridge (pictured) in the Byron Bay hinterland, Cumberland House in the Blue Mountains — and Abalina Cottages in Bright, Victoria. Prizes range from three-night stays to partial-stay vouchers, welcome gifts and zoo tickets.
To enter, Instagram users simply follow Stay With Them and the other accounts involved, like the post and tag a friend. Winners are drawn on the Friday of each week and notified by direct message.
PENNY HUNTER
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View from here
Ones for the road
Australia has more than 700,000 recreational vehicles champing at the bit in garages, their owners eager to hit the highway. The Caravan Industry Association of Australia estimates about 300,000 camping trips failed to eventuate this Easter, and the earnings of RV parks have plummeted 90 per cent, or $208 million, in the past month. Sooner or later — let’s plump for sooner — border restrictions will be lifted and all those happy campers will be on the move again.
With that in mind, let’s hitch our cinematic caravan to the tow bar and take a look at how some nomads, grey and otherwise, have fared on the big screen.
First stop en route is 1954, and real-life couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are getting married in The Long, Long Trailer. I love Lucy but even I can see the flaws in her plan to buy a 10m-long lemon yellow New Moon caravan in which to spend their honeymoon crossing the US. Poor Desi has problems parking the beast, and his wife’s penchant for collecting canned goods and hefty rocks as souvenirs causes hair-raising moments as they cross the vertiginous Sierra Nevada.
Into the Wild (2007) takes the back-to-basics philosophy of RV life to excruciating extremes. It tells the true story of Christopher McCandless, who rejected the trappings of modern life and ended up “camping” in an abandoned bus in remote Alaska. Sadly, his realisation about what matters came too late.
Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren dust off their vintage Winnebago in 2017’s The Leisure Seeker ostensibly to remember the good times and live a little before John (Sutherland) sinks under the fog of Alzheimer’s. Those infuriating rows peculiar to couples on the road ring plenty of bells, but this is a tender portrayal of a pair driving towards their final sunset.
Some camping trips have happier endings. Look no further than Wes Anderson’s wonderful Moonrise Kingdom for a life-affirming depiction of young love, adventures in the great outdoors and practical packing tips (leave the portable record player at home).
PENNY HUNTER
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Book club
Unsuitable for Ladies, by Jane Robinson
This 1994 anthology, with many editions since, is a digest of the exploits of unorthodox female travellers, mostly European, and the accounts they wrote of their often perilous journeys.
Some of the almost 200 inclusions are well known, such as Freya Stark, Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, Isabelle Eberhardt and the politically influential Gertrude Bell, mountaineer, archaeologist and cartographer of the Arab world. “The place smells of blood … The air whispers murder. It gets upon your nerves,” Bell wrote in The Arabian Diaries (1913-1914).
There are contemporary examples, too, including that most devoted of cyclists, Dervla Murphy, who pedalled alone from Dunkirk to Delhi in 1963 and is now “reluctantly retired” at age 88 in the Irish village where she grew up.
Jane Robinson compiled the tales as a follow-up to her compendium, Wayward Women. She has divided the writers geographically and she skilfully links passages extracted from their works, covering multiple centuries, reaching a peak in the golden age of the Victorian era.
“If you ever thought women travellers were just taggers-along or tourists, or even fierce Victorian viragos too eccentric to stay at home … think again,” she implores the reader.
What’s clear, too, is that women of the past travelled differently to men, not in any real physical sense, but free of the patronage and reputations of professional explorers. “Women can be more discursive, more impressionable, more ordinary,” claims Robinson. They could also slip into places forbidden to men, such as a Turkish harem, its hammam simmering with steamy secrets; conversely, a few, including Eberhardt, disguised themselves as males to be accepted on tough expeditions.
But oh, what ridicule and opposition those doughty females and their “trifling accounts” faced. When they were finally allowed to broach the “forbidden frontiers” of the Royal Geographic Society in London, in the 1890s, Punch magazine published a little ditty declaring women should “stay and mind the babies, or hem our ragged shirts”. The sisterhood, thankfully, wasn’t having a scrap of that.
SUSAN KUROSAWA