High up up along Cape York near Australia’s north-east tip, some 40 kilometres north of Cooktown where the Carroll Creek feeds into the Endeavour River, Esme Bowen from the Hopevale Aboriginal community is preparing an irrigation system that will nurture her colourful heliconias, which she hopes will find markets in the cities of the south. The heliconias are a striking decorative...

 The easterly wind hangs heavy with the musty, unmistakable smell of goats a good mile out from Lloyd’s windmill on Wynyangoo Station. At 11am it’s already 40 degrees Celsius in the water bag and the mercury is headed north at a rate of knots. From the driver’s seat of the aptly named Mack truck ‘Goat Dog’, Gary Scott reaches for the two-way radio to respond to...

Monique Rayment and Tommy Hoad are great mates. She runs the Jundah Pub, in central western Queensland, and he drinks there. Early last year, a couple of blokes pulled into the pub for a drink and a yarn on their way around outback Queensland while finalising the details for a car rally. Aptly named the Outback Trailblazers, the rally was designed to raise money for Angel Flight, an...

In the Tasmanian town of Beaconsfield, 40 kilometres north of Launceston, the phrase “sitting on a gold mine” is more than a metaphor. Directly beneath its streets, more than a kilometre underground, miners burrow through the hard earth in search of gold, working tunnels that, for two weeks in 2006, turned this small community into the most famous town in Australia. On Anzac Day...

 CRACK! The air shudders with the sonic boom of a lightning bolt that splits the sky, terrifyingly close. Eight startled camels unfold gangly limbs and scramble to their feet, eyes rolling wildly in fear. Mountains of flesh beneath a shagpile carpet hide, they dwarf the people who had been frantically unloading them in an effort to escape the storm.  Everybody darts backwards, away...

Charlie Blake sits among a vast array of leather goods, from harnesses to plaited greenhide ropes, stirring his own recipe for leather dressing – a concoction of beeswax, mutton fat and Sunlight soap. Packsaddles hanging from the rafters are testament to the magical brew; they’re as soft as butter.   When Charlie was born in the early 1930s his family lived on a share farm...

Fred “Tommy” Thompson, bundled up against the morning chill, took aim, kicked the rear wheel and dislodged a dusty, yellow clod. There were only a few of Yuleba’s 300 residents up and about in the still minutes before dawn; this part of southern Queensland could be cold enough to keep anyone, bar a sheep farmer, firmly in bed. Tommy would have preferred a nice, hot mug of tea...