Category: Sydney

There are two ways to leave Sydney for a weekend. You can take the freeway south and arrive in the Southern Highlands two hours later — at Bowral or Mittagong, in a landscape of rolling paddocks and English garden villages that has been serving as Sydney’s wee

The sand at Hyams Beach has been tested and classified as the finest white quartz on earth — the silica particles so pure, so precisely formed, and so thoroughly separated from any impurity by the geological processes of the Shoalhaven that they reflect light

There is a theory, held by most people who have sailed Sydney Harbour, that the city is only fully intelligible from the water. From land, Sydney presents itself in fragments — the bridge as a destination, the Opera House as a postcard, the suburbs visible onl

The Japanese have a word, 湯治 (toji), for the practice of travelling specifically to immerse in healing waters — a medical and contemplative tradition that predates formal medicine and persists alongside it. The distinction between onsen and sento is not merely

The Byron Bay story has been told so many times, from so many angles, for so many categories of visitor, that it has ceased to describe anything useful about the actual experience of being in the Northern Rivers. The serious traveller arriving in this region i

There is a version of Sydney that belongs exclusively to those who are in it before six in the morning. It is not a secret, exactly, but it functions like one: the people who occupy it at that hour — the swimmers lowering themselves into tidal pools while the

The Hume Highway is efficient, but efficiency is the enemy of the weekend. The correct exit from Sydney toward the Southern Highlands — if time is the asset rather than the constraint — is the Grand Pacific Drive, shifting the geography from the urban to the d

The Bondi to Coogee coastal walk is a victim of its own perfection: it is so geographically spectacular that it has become an international thoroughfare, crowded to the point where the act of walking becomes an exercise in pedestrian traffic management. For th

There is a particular quality of release that arrives on checking into an exceptional hotel in a city you already live in. The familiar grid of the streets outside, now seen through different glass and from a different elevation. The removal of the domestic —

The picnic is one of the more forgiving luxuries: it requires no reservation, no dress code, and no service. What it requires is good ingredients, a correct vessel, and a location with something extraordinary to look at. Sydney provides the third element in ab