Consequently, I wanted to avoid the frustration of the country’s restrictive speed limits. There’s little pleasure — for me — in rubbing up against unreformed Aussie policemen. So, instead of renting a car, I boarded a CountryLink XPT at Central Station. From the outside, the XPT, based on the familiar British Intercity HST, brought to mind the whiff of chips and the hiss of earphones — a raw assault on the senses. Once settled into my ergonomic TGV seat, however, very different sensations took hold of me. The under-crowded, air-conditioned train departed on time. Sunlight caught the top of the Harbour Bridge. Pumpkin ravioli and Thai chicken curry were served in the buffet car.
Two hours’ ride north of Sydney, the Hunter Valley is Australia’s second most visited tourist spot — and undoubtedly the tastiest. The Barrington and Broken Back ranges encircle the rich, rolling countryside. King parrots perch in wild olives and kangaroos spring through the vines. Most importantly, more than 100 wineries are concentrated in the area, and most welcome callers at the cellar door. Ben Lewis, whose Grape-X-pectations specialises in “boutique ” tours tailored to his clients’ taste buds, collected me at Maitland station.
“I’m passionate about Michael Winbourne’s cabernet franc,” enthused Ben, driving along a gravel road to the Valley’s smallest hidden vineyard. I’d asked Ben to introduce me to his favourite Hunter wine. “It’s seriously like an angel pissing on your tongue.”
Winbourne once built power stations in the Yemen, making his own wine in the bath to circumvent the strict alcohol ban. The experience ignited a passion for wine-making, and on his return home, he and his wife established Jackson’s Hill vineyard: planting the vines themselves, pruning them by hand, drafting in help only during the harvest. Their eight acres produce less than 1,000 cases a year, which sell out in weeks to devoted customers from as far afield as Edinburgh and Alaska.
In his earth-brick cellar, he decanted a glass of his 2002 vintage, a few weeks from being bottled. It roared with that “full-on” Hunter taste, cinnamon, nuts and spices, a subtle oak enhancing the fruit and hiding the burn of the alcohol.
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“Wine-making is never going to make me wealthy,” Michael said, “but it’s enriched my life. It’s given me 20 or 30 extra years.”
BACK IN Maitland, tucked away between a Goodyear Tyre Centre and the Henny Penny Drive-thru, is another of New South Wales’s luscious secrets. Twenty-one years ago, the rotund English chef Ian Morphy, a former Michelin Guide inspector, and his Australian wife, Jenny, bought the dilapidated Old George and Dragon hotel. Among the colony’s oldest coaching inns (its liquor license is no 4), the beautiful sandstock building had fallen on hard times. The Morphys restored it, decorated its historic rooms with 18th-century antiques and oil paintings and created one of the finest restaurants in the state.
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“When we started, locals couldn’t see the value of what we were offering,” said Jenny. “When we introduced foie gras, they thought we were crazy.”
Ian soon earned a reputation as the “fussiest” chef in the Hunter Valley. He created hearty, adventurous dishes suited to country appetites and won over the sceptics. On the evening that I visited, the menu included feuilleté of Balmain bugs — a kind of succulent, meaty lobster — in a vanilla butter sauce, kangaroo steaks with green peppercorns, and poached Tasmanian salmon cooked in oysters and champagne.
At the next table, a herd of cattlemen raved about the roast Woodville duck. In the adjoining dining room, a flock of sheep farmers, holding hands with their wives, discussed the merits of the truffle risotto with fennel and Harvey Bay scallops. The pleasure shone in their faces.
“Our local vintners eat with us too,” said Jenny. “But they need a driver to take them home after negotiating Ian’s wine list.”
The next morning, I was in need of exercise. In New South Wales, there are 193 national parks and reserves, from deserted beaches to desert landscapes, fur-seal sanctuaries to the Blue Mountains. I set out to find one spectacular example, no further than a kookaburra’s flight from the railway line.
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Beyond Maitland, the train skirts the Great Dividing Range, with its sweep of temperate rainforest, then snakes down through the snow-gum hills to the north coast and Coffs Harbour. Here, you might spot the Gladiator catching rays on Jetty Beach — this is Russell Crowe’s home town. Or a Wallaby — it is also home to Australia’s rugby union side. Or a concrete Big Banana, Australia’s silliest tourist attraction.
Above the glitz and kitsch rises luxuriant Dorrigo National Park, a World Heritage rainforest with hundreds of miles of trails for overfed travellers. Its dramatic Skywalk reaches above the canopy of palms, strangler figs and thick woody vines to command a breathtaking 40-mile view to the ocean. Whipbirds crack their long, rising “whip” cry. At the Canopy Cafe, I managed not to eat a second plate of kakadu plum bush tucker.
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BY DAY three, my appetite had returned, so I let a bronzed Aphrodite buy me a glass of Tyrrell’s semillon in the buffet car.
Generations of surfers have trained, hitched or flogged the Combi north from Sydney to reach the endless string of superb beaches beyond Ballina. This is — as Aphrodite explained — the Land of the Long Right-handers, with some of the best surfing in the world.
Byron Bay, a vibrant meeting place for alternative cultures since the 1960s, revealed itself as a sensualist’s Eden. Beneath Cape Byron — Australia’s easternmost tip — million-dollar villas rise above simple beach huts, athletic surfers mix with dreadlocked greens. Beach boys and babes stretch and preen and wait to catch the next, best wave. Watego’s Beach offers soft, easy right-hand breaks protected from messy southern swells. Lennox Head presents long, hard-core waves with lashings of “grunt”. The temptation to drop one’s clothes, sprint along the sand and leap into the sea is irresistible, regardless of whether or not you’re clutching a board.
In this Paradise Found, more touching goes on than almost anywhere else in Australia: at the energetic clubs and bars, in the Aveda Day Spas, at the Ambaji Wellness Centre. New-age therapies abound, as do more traditional physical activities. Visitors can learn to surf, kayak with dolphins and scuba-dive in the Julian Rocks Marine Reserve. But most Australians come to Byron for sex, in their intimate, lustful, relaxing utopia of glorious sea and sand.
After a day in Byron — or was it four? — I planned to go straight on to the Gold Coast, or Miami-on-the-Pacific, but I was waylaid by an earth mother. The bumper sticker on her rainbow-painted Honda read: “Gone Crazy Be Back Later.” Inland from Byron, the high ridge roads offer spectacular views of lush hidden valleys. Beyond Dunoon — the macadamia capital of Australia — unfolds a rolling dairy country of tin-roofed homesteads surrounded by dusty purple mountains. Every third Sunday of the month, the children of Aquarius soak up the vibes at the “Nearly Normal” Nimbin village fair. On sale at the psychedelic stalls are magic crystals and tie-dye frocks, cosmic did- geridoos and cuttings of grow-your-own Buddha’s Belly bamboo. An odd-bod acoustic band play Santana beneath a huge Moreton Bay fig tree. The aroma of local Mullumbimby Madness marijuana lingers in the air.
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Thirty years ago, Nimbin played host to Australia’s Woodstock, the 10-day Nimbin Aquarius Festival. Ten thousand young people arrived in the town for “a mind blast on a national scale”. Hundreds of them stayed on, establishing the Tuntable Falls Co-operative, with an aspiration to fulfil their “vision quest for a world of caring and sharing”.
Today, Aboriginal dreamtime murals adorn the village shop fronts. The Hemp Embassy works to create “a safe, fair dealing place where buyers and sellers can relax together, sampling and trading their wares”. The magic-mushroom-inspired Nimbin Museum, with a camper van crashing through its front door, is probably the world’s most chaotic, eclectic and unfocused museum. But nobody seems to mind. Legal Happy High Herbs are sold inside. Outside, illegal varieties are on offer.
Gloria Constine, the barefooted, long-limbed earth mother, assured me that what makes Nimbin special is the villagers’ ability to sense the needs of the planet.
“Just touch it,” she said. “Take off your shoes and feel the life energy of the earth.”
The CountryLink XPT runs through plantations of sugar cane and passion fruit. Beyond the gold-tinted windows, the sun reflects on glassy black creeks and banana farms, broad seascapes and hidden coves. Then an unbroken line of high-rise hotels and suburbia announced our arrival in Brisbane. For this would-be sensualist, it marked the end of the line — and a last embrace — with touchy-feely Australia.