The Wildlife Retreat at Taronga (4 min read)

After three sleep-overs on three different occasions at Taronga’s Wildlife Retreat, I’d go back in a twinkling. It’s only a 20-minute drive from my house, but the moment I step in to the sensational circular bar and lounge I’m on holiday. Aperol Spritz? Yes please. You need a fancy drink to match the breathtaking view from the Retreat’s broad deck: Sydney harbour is just so damn glorious on a sunny day with the Opera House shimmering under the iconic Bridge. But the heady feeling you get on walking in to Reception is also inspired by the interior design of the space.

June 2021 (3 min read)

What kind of music do a certain generation in the Arab world like to listen to in the morning? Why, the songs of the beautiful Lebanese-born Fairuz of course. Check out her “morning songs” playlist on YouTube if you want to hear for yourself, or, better still, book in to a Taste of Syria and Afghanistan Tour in Merrylands and listen to Fairuz while eating the special breakfast of Damascus.

November 2020 (3 min read)

Let me say straight up that this is a fat trek, to borrow a phrase from my generally inert teenage daughter. We used the WildWalks website to plan our trip and their timing is spot on.

October 2020 (3 min read)

My friend Mary raved about the Playhouse Hotel and the man who owns it. He has become the reason people want to visit Barraba, a tiny rather nondescript town an hour’s drive north of Tamworth (six hours from Sydney).

October 2020 (2 min read)

My family of five share a sense of foreboding as we arrive at Maitland Gaol on a sunny school-holiday afternoon. The jail was open from 1848 to 1998, which makes it the oldest working prison in Australia. The notorious prisoners who did their time here include the backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, and the Murphy brothers who murdered Anita Cobby in 1986, a terrible event I recall clearly.

January 2020 (3 min read)

“Guess how many people in Japan are a hundred years old or more?”, asks Andy Kenji Marsden, the founder of Osaka Backstreet Tours. Banjo, who is nine, thinks there could be 20 million, I guess a 1,000, Nick says 10,000 and Iris, our teenager, is the closest at 100,000. There are in fact almost 70,000 centenarians in Japan and the number is rising each year.

January 2020 (3 min read)

Money, money, money. At the Ebisu festival in Osaka, Japan’s city of merchants and its third largest, you got to spend money to make it. Ebisu is the rotund, smiley-faced God of fishermen, commerce and luck, and during the Festival the Japanese buy offerings that will help guarantee a prosperous year ahead.

January 2020 (3 min read)

The cavernous lobby of the Marriott Miyako Hotel in Osaka is exhilarating. Something wild about the soaring view and lobby makes your heart race. The rooms occupy floors 38 to 57 of Abeno Harukas, the tallest complex in the whole of Japan. We could have stayed in ours all day, sipping coffee, and taking photographs of the changing light on the city.

October 2019 (4 min read)

Come twilight at the property of Ambledown Brook, on the outskirts of Canberra, and the slumbering bush bursts in to life. “I often see a row of echnidas out in the paddock at this time of year”, says Jenny Kilby, our amiable hostess.

October 2019 (4 min read)

In the old town of Hoi An, Madam Khanh sells the best pillowy baguettes stuffed with chicken, cucumber, pate, special sauce, and chilli on request. Our teenage daughter, Iris, scoffs every last crumb.

September 2019 (4 min read)

At the Top of the Mark bar in San Francisco, a chip is not a chip, it’s a crisp, the kind you get in a packet. We were salivating at the thought of the hot fat variety with the truffle dip, but so be it, the panorama is what matters in this stalwart of the San Fran cocktail scene since 1939.

September 2019 (5 min read)

With only one full day in San Francisco, Linda the Loquacious (LL) and I intend to start early, despite getting to bed so late and after so many samples of the excellent Californian wine and a gin martini. But it’s not until 12.22pm that we raise our sore heads off the pillow and begin the afternoon with a Berocca.

September 2019 (4 min read)

“San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories”, wrote Jack London on April 18, 1906. The author of Wild Fang and Call of the Wild was born in the city in 1876, and experienced the earthquake that struck at 5.12am on Wednesday.

July 2019 (2 min read)

Rows of blue and white coffee cups line the length of a 50-seater long table in Hopewood House on a blazing July Saturday. The ladies, and a few blokes, of Bowral and beyond have turned up in force to hear Nadine Ingram talk about her passion for baking.

July 2019 (5-min read)

The locals in Wanaka have a wee saying: snow in July you can’t rely. And that proves true for our 9-day visit in early July.

June 2019 (2 min read)

We’re in the town of Kangaroo Valley (population 879 at the last census) on a sunny Sunday market day. In the large backyard of the Friendly Inn, 2 stocky, middle-aged gents under an awning knock out songs from the 1980s.

January 2019 (6 min read)

Barrego Springs is a small town in the middle of the Anza-Barrego Desert State Park that is often ignored in favour of the more famous Joshua Tree National Park, a 90-minute drive north.

January 2019 (4 min read)

There’s a louche feeling to Palm Springs, even if it’s raining so hard the road is starting to flood and the water is threatening our parked car.

January 2019 (2-min read)

Before our visit to the Californian town of Palm Springs, I rashly and naively envisage it as a centre of glorious Modernist architecture in sandy isolation.

An essay on Mozambique, published in the Age, 2005 (20-minute read)

I was 27 and at a crossroads in my life, when a redundancy payment unexpectedly afforded me the ticket and time to be in Mozambique with my sister, who was working there with Save the Children Fund UK.