Australia

Australia is unique. If you travel only the tourist groove between Sydney and Cairns, you will not really appreciate the uniqueness and the beauty of the country. All around the eastern coast, and other coastlines too, lie pristine beaches, coral reefs, surf and diving opportunities.

Yet Australia is not just a country but almost a whole continent. By all means explore the coastline, but try to get to the interior also, for there you will discover a land as different from the east coast as anything to be found anywhere in the world - and just as beautiful in its own way.

In Australia you will find flora and, particularly, fauna, different from those in the rest of the world. You will find those beautiful beaches and coral reefs. You will find lush rainforests and rugged mountains. You will also find deserts and dusty wide open spaces where nature still remains strongly in control.

Australia is huge. The most common mistake made by visitors is to underestimate it. To fly from Perth to Sydney takes four hours. To make the same journey by train or bus takes nearly three days. Perhaps even more important, though, is the distance between towns. The east coast is the only really populated area, and even there towns are often a hundred kilometres apart. Once one moves west, though, the meaning of isolation becomes apparent. Places along Australia’s Highway Number One across the Nullarbor Plain can be found marked on globes of the world, but when you reach them,you find that the name is actually that of a roadhouse or sheep station, and that the next similar concentration of population is a further hundred or hundred and fifty kilometres on. Imagine the situation, then, when you move off the main highways.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
(Dorothea Mackellar)

Experiencing the geography of Australia is a major part of the attraction of the country, so make sure that you do see it. There are beautiful and almost deserted beaches all round its shores. There are the mountain ranges which run down the east coast and occupy the north-west. There are the deserts of the interior. There is the fascinating oxidised soil of the ‘Red Centre’. There is the tropical north with its lush rainforests. There is the unparalleled bushwalking country of Tasmania. There is so much variety that unless one has visited every state and territory, one cannot really say that one has seen Australia.


Australia history	Australia tourist information and Essentials