The Gordon River

The Gordon River is Tasmania’s longest river. It cuts through an area of incredible wildness—an area that has in fact been designated a World Heritage Wilderness Area. Then, near the coast, the river empties into the broad expanse of Macquarie Harbour.
While the history surrounding this river dates back to Tasmania’s days as a convict settlement, [...]

Strahan

The Roaring Forties is the name sailors gave long ago to the latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere from the fortieth to fiftieth parallel. It is the same latitude range in which one finds South America’s rugged Patagonia. It’s well south of Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. It is also the latitude range in which one [...]

Tiagarra

The Tassie devils were not the only ones to get pushed southward by the arrival of the ancestors of today’s Australian Aborigines. There was an even earlier Aboriginal people group, a different race from the newer Aboriginal peoples, who were pushed off the mainland. By the time Europeans arrived, this other race survived only in [...]

Tasmanian devils

Okay—here’s the one you’ve been waiting for: the Tasmanian devil. Echidnas and wallabies are all well and good, but it was the Tasmanian devil that we grew up watching in cartoons. While the whirling of the cartoon character is entirely fictional, the snarling/growling sound is anchored in reality—though real Tasmanian devils sound much worse than [...]

Entally House

Our next stop, Entally House, is one of the oldest mansions owned by Australia’s National Trust, and is the most historic of the Trust’s holdings in Tasmania. It is part of a story that is so Australian, it would be unbelievable if it weren’t true. While my book details the numerous fascinating buildings and remarkable [...]

Good-bye, Hello

After the riding trip, I had only one more day in Victoria before I boarded a plane heading for Australia’s island state, Tasmania. I was leaving behind the free-settled gold-rush state for the convict-settled apple state. (Tasmania has traditionally been the location of most of Australia’s apple growing —an industry founded when the Bounty’s famous [...]

The Man from Snowy River

In my comments about the riding trip, both here on the blog and in my book, I mention “The Man from Snowy River.” This may not have a huge amount of significance for readers outside Australia, so I thought a little additional information might be helpful.
First it was a poem written in the late 1800s [...]

Into the High Country

If you’re reading my book, or if you’ve been reading this blog for long enough to have seen the post where I included a book excerpt about this, you’ll know that I had a pretty wild horseback adventure in the High Country, the rugged mountains of eastern Victoria. If you’ve seen the movie The Man [...]

Melbourne Architecture

Each city in Australia has a very distinct personality. Someone once told me that, in Sydney, they want to know where you work, in Melbourne, they want to know where you went to school—and in Brisbane, they want to know if you’d like a beer. This humorous comment is a gross oversimplification (especially since anywhere [...]

Flinders Street Station

When arranging a rendezvous, it is common for a Melbournian to simply say “Meet me under the clocks.” For locals, this can mean only one thing—meet below the row of clocks that are perched over the main entrance of the Flinders Street Station, Melbourne’s imposing, Edwardian baroque railway station. This railway station is the oldest [...]