Nothing like a ‘baptism by fire/nature’ experience, barely one month after moving up to Far North Queensland – the very thing that we dreaded, but knew that we’d inevitably encounter.  A cyclone.  Jasper moved into the Coral Sea as a Category 4 and quickly became one of the strongest and largest cyclones to ever form this…

We’ve been in our Clifton Beach home for almost 3 weeks now and  we’re absolutely loving life here! It’s a tropical paradise – the heat is constant and, at this time of the year, a reliable sunny 29 degrees every single day. It’s still the ‘dry season’ even though we’re in mid-November, with little to no…

We finally made it up to FNQ after a mammoth 2,851k drive up from Sydney to Wonga Beach, slightly overshooting our final destination, Clifton Beach, but just for a few days R&R before moving in day on the 1st November. We are beyond excited!  We drove up in our little town car, a 15-year-old Suzuki Swift,…

Yet another really long drive up from Hervey Bay this morning, some 5 further hours of Bruce Highway straightness all the way up through the Tropic of Capricorn to the surprisingly elegant (steamy hot) and bustling city of Rockhampton.  I’m afraid Hervey Bay and its endless flat suburbia didn’t do it for us. Understand of…

Long drive today from Byron Bay to Hervey Bay. Over 6 hours all up. But at least we’re now in Queensland! Yay! Traffic snarls entering Brisbane at rush hour, forgetting that we’d lost an hour by crossing the border. Then the endless roadworks on the notorious Bruce Highway, made marginally easier by the regular ‘fatigue-busting’…

Yet another four-hour drive northwards along the seemingly endless Pacific Highway, past  impenetrable Eucalypt bush, although it’s gorgeous in its vastness and emptiness. It’s a wonder how the early settlers traversed this unforgiving dense terrain – I mean, it’s fine doing 110ks an hour along a modern freeway in air-conditioned comfort, listening to Spotify playlists (Guy’s…

It’s the end of an era. After a night in a local hotel, we tearily closed the door on Little Selwyn Street. We packed up the car (that’s Boswell to those in the know) and headed under the harbour (tunnel) towards the impressive 9-kilometre NorthConnex tunnel and beyond. It was an almost 5-hour drive to…

A Farewell To Sydney Well, that’s a wrap. After 15 years in our gorgeous Little Selwyn Street house and 38 years in Sydney all up, it’s time to go – and off to FAR FAR North Queensland we head. We’re driving up and taking seven days to reach our final destination, Clifton Beach. It’s a…

There’s a little town called Stanley (population 595) on the north western tip of Tasmania at the edge of the Tarkine Wilderness, the greatest expanse of temperate rain forest in Australia and one of the largest expanses of temperate rain forest in the world. (The Tongass National Forest in Alaska being the largest). It’s a…

We spent five glorious restorative reading days at a friend’s ‘shack’ at Bull Plains in the remote Cradle Mountain Valley in Tasmania – just twenty minutes by car down the road from Cradle Mountain itself. And a couple of hours drive from Launceston. It’s referred to as a ‘shack’ as, in essence, it’s an old…