I am sitting in a 4WD, belting along the dirt road which heads west from Uluru. I am taking it all in: the remoteness, the redness, the harshness. I am excited, and apprehensive. The photographer Dave Callow drives. He has been to the desert country many …

The politics of water in the sunshine state

Manning Clark, historian, writer and lover of the Carlton Football Club, was convinced that sport mattered in Australia. “Football,” he wrote, “is like going to a play about the wilder passions of the human heart, or hearing the coda of Sibelius’s …

In the Cricketers Bar at Melbourne’s Windsor Hotel, shortly after the Swans’ AFL grand final victory, a bloke from Sydney told me the ABC was doctoring the weather. He claimed he had heard from an impeccable source that some towns never ever appear …

To understand the place you must first understand the Bundaberg Bear

To understand the place you must first understand the Bundaberg Bear

It’s raining at last in the bush, where there is no confidence, only hope.

On the cover of the first Australian edition of Vice, a free street magazine published about once a month, a bloodied rat lay dead on a metal floor. Inside were lots of cool ads – for Pants General Co, Zoo York, K-Swiss, freedom.of.choice and Asahi …

In The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams’s book of words that should exist but don’t, he proposed the term “sheppy”: the closest distance, equal to approximately seven-eighths of a mile, at which sheep remain picturesque. Someone should invent an …

Ken Trewick and the amazing race sting