If David Goodfellow is feeling the pressure from suddenly emerging as a major player in Australia’s northern cattle industry and having the spotlight trained on him, he isn’t showing it.  Cool-headed and modestly self-assured, the 42-year-old part-time Victorian farmer with a string of degrees, who spends his working week in Sydney and wherever else his powerful job takes...

“If we didn’t have that main in, we’d be buggered by now. We would have had to sell all the stock.” Zane Austin, second -in-charge of the 4000-hectare beef and cropping farm “Yalkuri”, is talking about the arrival of the mains water pipeline at the Narrung Peninsula in South Australia’s Coorong earlier this year. Although it is too expensive to irrigate...

As the Ghan rolls through Australia’s red centre celebrating its 80th anniversary, it provides a striking contrast to the first Ghan service in 1929, which comprised a single-steam locomotive and 12 wooden carriages. Adding to the gold service and the red service (popular with backpackers), the new Platinum service allows passengers to make the 2979-kilometre journey between Darwin and...

The stainless steel sculptures, tall and slim and glinting in the sunlight, are easily recognisable. There’s a fettler, a shunter and a fireman, a signalman, a gatekeeper and a flag lady and they have all been expertly crafted by artist Dominique Sutton, whose work was showcased during the Sydney Olympic Games. Three metres high, they look down onto a specially landscaped amphitheatre...

Cantaur Park has been on the edge of a monsoon trough playing havoc in far north Queensland for a month. Unlike further north, Cantaur hasn’t been receiving torrential, flooding rain, but the days have been grey and misting with enough rain to intensify the green landscape, heighten the grass and soak the ground. Today, there’s a break in the weather. Sun streaks are casting shades of...

Lisa Willems clearly remembers calling into the Noojee Hotel as a young girl during regular snow-skiing trips to Mount Baw Baw, Vic, with her parents. “Mum and Dad always made a point of dropping into the Noojee Pub after skiing,” Lisa says. “Dad would drink in the bar, but Mum and I would have to wait in the ‘Ladies Room’. I got to become very familiar with the...

Traditional wisdom holds that the best time in the Top End is the dry season, when humidity is low, temperatures are moderate and access to most places is easy. Indeed traditional wisdom holds that there are only two seasons – the dry (roughly May to October) and the wet (November to April). If you want to cast further back in time for your notion of what constitutes traditional wisdom,...

The handsome creamy mare in the roundyard fringed by stringybarks is wary, her ears back, her eyes watchful. She turns sharply in the soft dirt, darting left, then right, anything to avoid contact with the neatly bearded man leaning on the fence. His body, in sharp contrast, is relaxed; his jeaned legs are still, his steely blue eyes downcast beneath a buckskin hat. The thick summer air is...

Every year people perish in the outback, their vehicles bogged or broken down, and left as they search for help. Few people can understand why they wander off from their cars, often leaving water behind and stripping off clothing. Bob Cooper, who’s been in that position himself more than once, can explain it. “Fear overrides your rational thoughts,” he says. “They’ve...

In 1914, a prominent Geelong barrister and amateur ornithologist, Charles Belcher, self-published The Birds of the District of Geelong. In the book he eloquently describes his first sighting of Lake Connewarre, near Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, in 1886. “The lake would have been beautiful enough under that cloud-flecked sky of itself alone, but our boyish vision was closest held by...

Robert Groth is a drover. Hugh Possingham and Henry Nix are professors. Cecile van der Burgh is a Wilderness Society campaigner. John Williamson is a well-known country-music singer. Allan Scammell is a ranger. Collectively they form what may seem a most unlikely alliance. Despite such diversity, they are working together on a common cause – to protect the ‘long paddock’,...

When John Murray was in his early thirties he flipped a coin, the outcome of which changed the course of his life. He wanted to get out of the city and see more of Australia but he wasn’t sure which direction to go. It was a 50-50 choice: he had one mate in Tasmania and another in Lightning Ridge. Those who know anything about his iconic outback artwork will already know he chose the latter...

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II regretfully declined an invitation from Diana Parsons to officially open the Hear the Bush Beat Festival in Condobolin, NSW, this September. “She sent her apologies, in a very personal letter, saying that she recognised how bad the drought was and wished us a great weekend,” Diana says. Undeterred, the festival organiser has a few more cards up her...