Category: Australia

  • Smitten With Australia

    Smitten With Australia

    We were so smitten with Australia it is hard to write about our time there without sounding like a Chamber of Commerce travelogue. There was Brisbane, a charming city with a marvelous ferry system on its lifeblood, the Brisbane River, that winds its way through the city. It has one of the best outdoor spaces…

  • Uluru Is Way More Than Ayers Rock

    Uluru Is Way More Than Ayers Rock

    The idea of Uluru/Ayers Rock genuinely appealed to me. I love rock formations and deserts (in either order), and Uluru is one of the most impressive of them all, with a circumference of 9.4 kilometers, rising 348 meters above a featureless desert — higher than the Eiffel Tower or the Chrysler Building. It is in…

  • Tasmania’s Darker Past

    Tasmania’s Darker Past

    Yes, Tasmania is beautiful and interesting, and the people we met were delightful, but there is a dark background to all this beauty that you can’t, or shouldn’t, try to escape. Most people are aware that Australia started life as a penal colony, where (mostly) the poor and unconnected were shipped for (mostly) trivial crimes.…

  • The Beautiful Side of Tasmania

    The Beautiful Side of Tasmania

    Most of my life I had no idea where Tasmania was, much less any thoughts about going there. In my ignorance I had thought it was somewhere in, or off the coast of Africa — mostly a jungle full of weird animals. But in late 2009, I ended up with two very smart software developers…