Australian Traveller
Australian Traveller magazine is totally objective (read it's not a freebie-fest) so here's a taste of my latest regular column . . .
It’s not that she doesn’t want to, it’s just AT’s style-meister Melissa Hoyer doesn’t know whether her version of Aussie outback . . . is quite the same as yours.
I have nothing against the outback. Really. I just need to know how to add just a few of the more civilised part of vacation-living into it.
Don’t get me wrong and assume I’m some city-slicking wanker whose never gone 20 kms within a CBD (hey, I grew up in government housing in Sydney’s southern ‘burbs and yes, while it’s wasn’t quite the outback . . . it nearly was) and I do admit that yes, one of my ultimate dreams really is to drive around our fare isle.
Sure, it may be in a top-of-the-line Winnebago. The four-seater, Spartan Summit 252, worth around $600K (that I recently spied at one of those caravan and camping shows) looks darn good with its compact, petite and dynamic proportions (it would fit in a small tribe of folk very comfortably) but so far, my outback experience has been embarrassingly limited.
The one time I went to Uluru/Ayers Rock was for the red carpet premiere of the Cats musical, where we stayed at the Ayers Rock Resort, where we did ‘dine under the stars’ and where I made friends with some of the most genuine and heat-warming indigenous locals I’d had ever met.
Problem is, us city folk get so used to the brashness and brazen attitudes of fellow city-dwellers that we forget the fantastic stories they have to tell, which are usually a helluva lot more interesting than me talking about my latest celebrity interview or giving fashion week critique. But come to think of it, I’m maybe not as outback-challenged as I think. I did do a three day walk through Tasmania’s Freycinet Peninsula, entering the exquisite beauty of Wine Glass Bay and, quite genuinely, was left gasping for breath on seeing the pristine bay in all its glory. Hey, I was so intoxicated by it I even threw off the backpack, ripped my clothes off and jumped straight in.
I’ve done the Daintree Forest. Well, when I was in Port Douglas, and we drove to the Daintree, walked across a very shaky, rope-bridge with my then 2-year old son, but made sure we and came back to PD via the Silky Oaks Lodge . . . just for a few cleansing ales.
I’ve been to Wilson Island. I’ve done Western Australia. Well, to a degree. I was part of the small travelling PR road show, on tour with Elle Macpherson when she was a WA ‘ambassador’. We ‘did’ the whale-watching town of Albany as well as Geraldton, Exmouth, Broome, and flew over the mind-boggling Bungle Bungle ranges. Yes, it was in the comfort of a light aircraft and even an old-school butler, but it was still ‘outback’. I also ‘did’ the outback when I was a back-up cabaret dancer (prior to finding my career in journalism, I might add) to a singing, piano accordionist by the name of Joseph Fimmano.
Another dancer and I would traipse to the likes of Wagga Wagga, Albury-Wodonga and Griffith, where we would pop on our feathered costumes to do our renditions of Peter’s Allen’s Copacabana, Donna Summer’s Macarthur Park and that all-time fave, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumble Bee. True story.
I think one problem I have is that I tend to labour over the ‘outback wardrobe’ scenario. In fact, even more so than I did when I attended this year’s nuptials of uber-Queensland-born model, Kristy Hinze, when she married the Netscape founder, Jim Clark, in the Caribbean. Alright, I admit to verging on tragic. I picked island kaftans, slinky Dinnigan frocks and strappy pairs of Sergio Rossi heels quite easily for that wedding, but get me working on an outback ‘look’ and I turn to diesel. And dust.
I have the RM Williams walking boots; the brand’s signature belt buckle (although mine happens to be studded with diamantes); the thermals; a few trusty, padded jackets and a couple of fetching ‘outback’ hats, but when it comes to pure outback travel professionalism and expertise, I have always left that to my big brother, Shane.
Basically, he is everything, in the outback travel sense, that I am not. He has done 7 solo rafting trips down the Franklin River (during one trip, he lost the raft after being sucked under a log, so he took a few days to walk out); he has scaled waterfalls on the Herbert River in Queensland; has been confronted by feral pigs on the North Johnstone River; has done around, well, about 40 river trips on the likes of the Nymboida, Murray Gates and Colo; paddled the length of the Katherine River Gorge and was stuck in a tent for 7 days during a white out while he walked the Western Arthurs Range in Tasmania’s South West Wilderness. Oh, and that’s just the start. But my wish-list? Apart from my Winnebago fixation? I want to go the the eco-minded Longitude 131; I would adore to go to El Questro in the Kimberley region; would kill to get my body into shape at Gwinganna in Queensland and can’t wait for the Emirates-owned Wolgan Valley Resort, near the Blue Mountains, which is a conversation-based resort boarded by two national parks, to open.
But perhaps, to many of you, none of these constitute real ‘outback’. Well, they do for me. They’re all at least 100km from a serious city, so anything that takes you out of the freneticism of city life and into the real heart and soul of this country would have to have to meditative, if not cathartic. So if you have some great ideas as to how someone like me can discover the outback – with just a few creature comforts still intact _ please let me know on . . . . . asap.
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