Tag Archives: National Park

California’s Eastern Sierras are a jaw-droppingly beautiful outdoor playground. How lucky was I to have a photography-friend with not one, but two bases in this rugged and gorgeous area! Like me, she is a fan of mountain walks and flowers, and we had timed my trip to line up with the best of the mountain […]

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It’s an incredible landscape. Red, flat, and empty as far as the eye can see, except for two remarkable – and remarkably different – ancient rock formations: Uluru, the 348 m (1,142 ft) high sandstone monolith, and Kata Tjuta, the 36 domes of conglomerated sand, pebbles, and cobbles. This is a living, culturally-rich topography, home […]

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“Send us more camels!” Last year when I was in Jordan, that was the exhortation of every second person I met, once they heard I was from Australia (see: Desert Rains and the Seven Pillars). Who knew we actually sell camels to the Middle East? I knew there were feral camels – at least 300,000 […]

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Fraser Island is a unique and wonderful place; it is a poem in sand, punctuated by the occasional sculptured rock. I’m not much of a geology student, but the landscape of Fraser Island is a living, pulsing thing that transcends time. As written in the UNESCO-World Heritage listing, the “immense sand dunes are part of […]

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Paradise. That’s what the Butchulla people, the Traditonal Owners of what is now Fraser Island in Southeast Queensland, called it: K’gari, Paradise. According to the Aboriginal Dreamtime story, the great God in the sky, Beiral, created all the people, but the people had no lands. Yendingie, a messenger, was sent down from the sky to […]

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