If you have a TV, you will have most likely seen Sydney Harbour Bridge. On either 31st Dec or 1st Jan, news programmes across the English speaking world always show the massive fireworks display that erupts from the Harbour Bridge! If you are not sure what I mean, you will then undoubtedly recognise the famous shells of the Sydney Opera House. So unique are they, that when the Danish architect who won the contract to design them, presented his design, he was laug...

When you leave Alice, you leave the Outback and the desert. When you arrive in Darwin, you hit the tropics. Where Alice weather is hot and dry, Darwin's is hot and very humid! Up here, in the Top End (as it is affectionately known), the seasons are divided into the Big Wet, the Little Wet and the Dry. So when it is not rainy, you know that it will rain some time soon! Ten years ago, Darwin was a place where Croc Dundee characters actually did exist. I was here...

If you are crossing Australia by road, at some point you have to pass through Alice Springs. But if you are coming from the South, you first have to pass through Stuart's Well and there is a trivial pursuit question that asks about a singing dingo and a little place called Stuart's Well's in the geography section. There is, in fact, a singing dingo who lives at Stuart's Well in the Northern Territories, but you will never hear him sing like Pavarotti or Bono thou...

The first inkling of what Ayers Rock-Uluru might look like is actually from a mountain you pass on the way there. Here the country is flat. Dead flat. The only undulations in the landscape are from sand dunes that have been blown hither and thither, so you can see for miles in any direction from the top of one of these dunes and in amongst those dunes are huge large white sun-baked pans. Here is a flat flat landscape with not much to break the monotony, but for t...

This is a place where the Law arrived, unwanted and unbidden, 10 years ago. And it definitely arrived with a bang! When the new police station was built and ready to be occupied, it was destroyed in an explosion, later attributed to mining explosives! According to an old timer that we met, there was a Law, but it was Coober Pedy Law and it was meted out, as and when necessary. Those that lived here knew where the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable w...