Travel

Nicholas Shakespeare on Tasmania

The Quiet Peninsula

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Joan Masterman’s matchless four-day walk, the Freycinet Experience, turns 20 this year. For her traditional end-of-season party, she has invited the guides, lodge co-ordinators and office staff, plus Gil the bus driver and Shep the skipper, to fit into clothes they might have worn back in 1992. But unknown to Joan, her guests are hatching a surprise counter plan – one that may involve les

Rodney Hall on Mali

To Timbuktu and Back

By Rodney Hall

The greatest ancient library in the world is being unearthed and reassembled at Timbuktu – an astonishing archeological discovery – so I set out to see for myself, travelling with my daughter Cressida. Mali is poor – very, very poor. Countless catastrophes have struck since Mansa Musa, Emperor of Mali, made his famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 attended by an army of 500 slaves loaded

Janette Turner Hospital on Central Park, New York

Wanted for Loitering

By Janette Turner Hospital

From the NASA space shuttle, Central Park is visible to the naked eye as a bright emerald bar on the fat knuckle of Manhattan – index finger of New York, principal of the five boroughs that make up the city, indisputably the dominant digit as it pokes the soft underbelly of the Bronx while giving the finger casually, insouciantly, to everything west of the Hudson. If an astronaut were to plunge by re-entry capsule into the heart of th

Letter to a Bulgarian Friend

By Alex Miller

Dear Boris, You tell me you are living in Chirpan again, the town where you were born. That you have returned there after 35 years away. I still see Chirpan, low to the horizon and far to the west across the plain as we drove on our roundabout route through Dimitrovgrad to Stara Zagora – finding our way back to Sofia by a route no Bulgarian would ever have

Linda Jaivin on Harbin, China

Holiday on Ice

By Linda Jaivin

“Five bus tickets, one turkey and one lamb, please.” My friend then turns to the rest of us: “Karmically speaking, we’re going to hell.” That may well be so. In the short run, we are cramming into a small armoured bus along with a crowd of palpably e

Drusilla Modjeska on Tufi, Papua New Guinea

In the Fjords

By Drusilla Modjeska

Back from Tufi for less than a month, I find myself thinking I should cancel this article, keep the place a secret and let those who think Papua New Guinea is a dangerous place of dark spirits continue in their ignorance. On the first morning of this most rece

Craig Sherborne on Hiking the Milford Track, New Zealand

The Sound of Silence

By Craig Sherborne

Bliss can never happen of its own accord. When it has been years-long away it needs some outside intervention. Narcotic versions were never for me – look at those grey-faced zombies stumbling down Fitzroy Street in Melbourne. That’s not bliss, that’s blankness. Th

Sonya Hartnett on Animal-Watching Abroad

Beastly Travels

By Sonya Hartnett

I was 21 when I first went to London, and impoverished, as a travelling kid usually is. Soon enough I would be afflicted by that fragile homesickness that preyed upon the traveller in those days when the planet was still big. I liked travelling – that floati

The New Castrati

Too Much Heaven on their Minds

By Paul Kelly

Ever since the world began, I suspect, men have been showing off to women and to other men by singing high. Sure, the manly stuff – hunting animals, smashing enemies, guarding the fort, singing baritone – has always played well, identifying a fella, in the words of

'Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Battle for Supremacy in the 21st Century' by Hugh White

By Hugh White

Monsoon melds two very different books into one. One book is a geopolitical treatise, conceived on a grand oceanic scale. It argues that global power shifts mean the Indian Ocean is becoming again the fulcrum of world power and will be the main theatre of stra

Aravind Adiga on VS Naipaul’s 'The Masque of Africa'

Magical Thinking

By Aravind Adiga

For over 40 years now, VS Naipaul has met, interviewed and annoyed people in dozens of countries to produce a body of travel writing that challenges the basic tenets of a liberal world view. Multicultural democracies such as India and the UK treat binary disti

David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art

High Priest

By Amanda Lohrey

The Moorilla estate is set on a peninsula of sandstone cliffs that juts out into the Derwent estuary on Hobart’s northern fringe. Framed to the south-west by the looming grandeur of Mt Wellington and to the east by Mt Direction, the slopes of the peninsula are planted

The Glory and the Madness of being a ‘60s and ‘70s Australian Pop Singer

Scream

By Robert Forster

It begins in Brisbane in the late ’60s, when I was 11 and 12 years old. The Saturday afternoons were never-ending and on some of them, because of rain or there being no friends in the neighbourhood to play with, I’d lie on the floor of my parents’ lounge room, my chin cupped in my hands, looking at young men sing songs on TV about girls they loved, or

First-Class Passage

By MJ Hyland

UPDATE: A version of this piece by MJ Hyland, shortlisted for a BBC National Short Story award.*It’s not even eight o’clock and already the sun’s burning bright. Trudy and I stand in the shade of the Orient Line ticket-booth at Circular Quay and watch the passengers leave the Oriana.Trudy’s always talked about how we’re going to be millionaires, how we’ll take a journey on a

Learning to Swim

An Otter's Life

By Kate Jennings

For our summer holidays, we surfed every year for six weeks at Narrabeen. My brother and my city cousin, Stephen, and I formed a feral and fearless trio, always making for the furthest wave and beyond. We didn’t know Pindar from Pinocchio, but we would’ve

Sharia Law

The Way to the Watering Hole

By Sally Neighbour

Meanwhile, in a tiny office in Lakemba, south-western Sydney, with prayer beads hanging from the bookshelves and Islamic texts stacked to the ceiling, the Muslim minister and police chaplain Sheikh Khalil Chami quietly and methodically administers sharia law.

Liu Xiaobo

A Nobel Affair

By Linda Jaivin

When I last checked, over 1 million readers had viewed this cryptic message. Among the more than 25,000 comments, the multiple effusions (“Love you!”) and myriad confusions (“Huh?”), was one that quoted from the first volume of Marx and Engels’ Collected Works

Lest We Forget

By Peter Conrad

Hugh Lunn, vegging out as he sunbakes in his popularity, has come up with an unstrenuous new method for manufacturing a book: why not anthologise your fan mail? In Lost for Words (2006), Lunn assembled a chatty glossary of Australian lingo or ‘slangwidge’ that has died out, only to be replaced by a world where everyone speaks a glib, streamlined Americanised English. His book summoned up memor