| Writing about Australia is not the same as writ-ing about other countries. It suffers from whathas been called the tyranny of distance. WithinAustralia the distances that need to be travelledfrom one place to another are immense andpresent great problems for a travel writer. Air travel made this book possible. To get toPerth I could have driven from Sydney upthrough Broken Hill and then down to PortAugusta, across the Nullarbor Plain and downinto Perth. It sounds an interesting drive - it isand I have done it more than once - but it isroughly the distance from Oslo to Madrid andin between the centres of ci~.lisation there iskilometre after kilometre of nothing. So empty,so fiat that you can see the curvature of the earth. Although for the last three years I seem to have been perpetually travelling Australia, the fact is that it would take me a lifetime to explore it properly. It would take me ten years of constant travel just to see all of the local museums. But I have been to every town in Australia of any size at least once recently. My judgement of size is based on sacred and pro- fine. If a town does not have a church and a pub it is, in my opinion, not a real town. Thus, though there are 4700-odd - some of them very odd - towns legally listed in Australia, using my test there are just under 1000. I have written this book for as wide-ranging a bunch of travellers as I could. The typical reader might be someone who has visited rela- tives or friends before, but now wants to get out and about and see some of the country beyond the city they nomaally visit. Or you may be a younger traveller with a serious amount of time to devote to a visit and intent on seeing and doing as much as possible, albeit on a tight budget. Or you may just have a nor- mal two weeks holiday to spend, and want to venture beyond the main tourist sights. The routes in this book are mixture of fairly short drives from the major population centres, which could be done in a day in some cases, |
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