Junker - Insight Guides: Australia

How To Use This E-Book

Getting around the e-book

This Insight Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration for your visit to Australia, as well as comprehensive planning advice to make sure you have the best travel experience. The guide begins with our selection of Top Attractions, as well as our Editors Choice categories of activies and experiences. Detailed features on history, people and culture paint a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Australia. The extensive Places chapters give a complete guide to all the sights and areas worth visiting. The Travel Tips provide full information on getting around, hotels, activities from to culture to shopping to sport, plus a wealth of practical information to help you plan your trip.

In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

Maps

All key attractions and sights in Australia are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map] just tap this to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

Images

Youll find hundreds of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of Australia. Simply double-tap on an image to see it full-screen.

About Insight Guides

Insight Guides have more than 40 years experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce 400 full-colour titles, in both print and digital form, covering more than 200 destinations across the globe, in a variety of formats to meet your different needs.

Insight Guides are written by local authors who use their on-the-ground experience to provide the very latest information; their local expertise is evident in the extensive historical and cultural background features. All the reviews in Insight Guides are independent; we strive to maintain an impartial view. Our reviews are carefully selected to guide to you the best places to stay and eat, so you can be confident that when we say a restaurant or hotel is special, we really mean it.

Like all Insight Guides , this e-book contains hundreds of beautiful photographs to inspire and inform your travel. We commission most of our own photography, and we strive to capture the essence of a destination using original images that you wont find anywhere else.

2013 Apa Publications (UK) Ltd

Introduction: Down Under

You can call it the worlds largest island, or the Earths oldest continent. Either way, Australia is a place like no other.

D.H. Lawrence once said Australia is like an open door with the blue beyond. You just walk out of the world and into Australia.

Australians like to think of their country as Gods own or Godzone in the vernacular. Since the turn of the millennium this philosophy has taken on a new resonance as a whole series of travails (of almost biblical proportions) has assailed the country. There has always been fire, but in February 2009 it took on a tragic dimension when bushfires destroyed a great part of the state of Victoria and took scores of lives. The heatwave at the start of 2013 cause more fires across Victoria and New South Wales, and forced the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to add another colour band to its temperature chart for temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). There have always been floods, but they attained a new scale when the fatal inundation in January 2011 affected 75 percent of Queensland. Even plagues of locusts have been sweeping the land. This might cause some to question the purpose of living at the far ends of the Earth, but for most Australians it provokes only a pause for thought to cherish their unique challenges.

Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, towers above the flat lands of the Red Centre.

This country of extremes is used to doing things the hard way. People have been inhabiting this daunting continent for around 50,000 years, and they know that for every down, theres an upside to living in one of the most remarkable places on Earth. Try waking up to the bush dawn, as the kookaburras begin their maniacal laughs and the golden light pierces the gumtrees. That is one of the great outdoor experiences in Oz. In Sydney, a dawn stroll along the harbour as the first ferries roll past the Opera House will convince you that this may well be the most gorgeous city on Earth.

Sydney Opera House and harbour.

Glyn Genin/Apa Publications

Australia is a long way from anywhere else, which makes it a unique land with a people used to standing alone. The very differences that permeate the land, culture and history of Down Under have also given the place a singular strength and durability. Australians will most likely agree with Mark Twain that Australia is a rip-roaring good time, although it wasnt always so colourful. When the British colonists and convicts first arrived in the 1780s, they attempted to re-create the places and cultures of their homeland on the other side of the world, but the strangeness of the landscape, including the heat, rain (or endless droughts), expansive landscape and the otherness of it all meant that they could only ever be partially successful.

An Australian kookaburra.

iStockphoto

Today, Australians tend to be thankful for their distance from Europe and the United States, and embrace their (relative) proximity to Asia. The quirks of their homeland the egg-laying mammals, the ghostly trees, the savage deserts, the spiders, even the menagerie of deadly snakes have become a source of endless fascination.

Australias Top 10 Attractions

Discover Australias unique attractions exciting adventure activities, absorbing museums, vast empty landscapes, and indigenous culture... here, at a glance, are our top recommendations.

Top Attraction 1

Sydney Harbour . The Opera House is deservedly on everyones list as a must-see attraction in Australia its on the Unesco World Heritage list, after all and when you combine it with the iron bulk of Sydney Harbour Bridge, you have one of the great vistas of the world. For more information, .