Australia Travel Guide

Best Australian wildlife encounters Australia’s wildlife has a reputation problem, mostly built around the handful of animals that can genuinely hurt you. What gets left out of that story is how many of the country’s most iconic animals are gentle, strange, and completely unlike anything else on the planet, and how easy it is to…

Best stargazing spots in Australia I grew up in a city bright enough that I genuinely thought the Milky Way was a myth, something from old photographs rather than something you could actually see with your own eyes. Then I spent a night in the Flinders Ranges, lay back on a swag, and watched an…

Best luxury train journeys in Australia Flying across Australia is fast and, frankly, a little wasteful of what makes the country interesting. You spend two hours staring at seatback screens and miss the exact thing that makes this place worth visiting: the sheer, uninterrupted scale of it. A long-distance train solves that problem entirely, and…

Best Australian island getaways Mainland Australia already has some of the best beaches on the planet, so it is easy to forget that the country also has over 8,000 islands scattered around its coastline. Most travellers only ever hear of two or three, which is a shame, because the range is enormous — tropical reef…

Best wine regions to visit in Australia Australia makes more good wine than most people outside the industry realise, and it makes it in a genuinely wide range of styles, from bold Barossa shiraz to crisp Tasmanian sparkling that regularly beats Champagne in blind tastings. I did not understand any of this until I spent…

Best glamping sites in Australia I used to be firmly in the “real camping only” camp, mostly out of stubbornness, until a friend talked me into a night in a safari tent in the Grampians with an actual bed, an actual shower, and a fire pit someone else had lit for me. I have not…

Best whale watching spots in Australia The first time I saw a humpback whale breach fully out of the water, I actually gasped out loud, which is embarrassing to admit but true. It happened off Hervey Bay on a boat full of strangers who all did the exact same thing a second later, so at…

Best hot air balloon rides in Australia There is a particular kind of quiet that only happens 1,000 metres above the ground, drifting rather than flying, with nothing but the occasional burst of the burner breaking the silence. I did my first sunrise balloon flight over the Yarra Valley almost by accident, tagging along with…

100 Australian bucket-list travel experiences Australia is not a country you tick off in a single trip. It is a continent, and every state hides a different version of the place: red desert in the middle, rainforest in the north, snow in the south-east, and more coastline than you could drive in a year. After…