Travel Features

Go West: Australians rediscover the bush

May 20, 2008, 14:41 GMT

Dubbo, Australia - Visitors to Australia like the locals themselves tend to stick to the coastal fringe rather than striking out inland after sightseeing in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and taking dips in the Pacific Ocean. A century ago more Australians lived inland than on the periphery, but the demographics have changed and three-quarters now call the coastline home. While it's customary for people in the United States to want to travel coast to coast to see the middle of their country, Australians in their cars and campervans tend to hug the coast and go around instead. The rewards of driving towards the centre are the empty roads between country towns, a different lifestyle and vistas so vast they both delight and give you a queasy feeling. Natasha Besseling, a civil servant in the farming town of Dubbo, 400 kilometres north of Sydney, is happy away from the big cities and suburban sprawl of the east coast. 'Rent is cheaper and it's easier to buy a house, plus it's easier to get to work,' Besseling said. To get to what Australians call the bush, you don't need to be an intrepid traveller or have a four-wheel-drive. You don't need to book accommodation or make elaborate preparations. From Sydney, there are paved roads and lots of handy towns for stops along the way. Cross the Blue Mountains, part of the Great Dividing Range, and a visible backdrop to Sydney, and on and on through Bathurst, Dubbo, Gilgandra, Coonamble, Walgett and Lightning Ridge. The western plains beyond Dubbo, a city of 40,000, are not desolate. It's farming country all the way to Lightning Ridge. Wheat, cotton, wool and cattle are the staples of agriculture, but there are groves of olives, pecans and oranges too. 'The big change is the grey nomads,' says Phillip Malone, who grows wheat near Gulargambone. 'They sell their homes, invest the capital, and live on the road.' Malone estimates that of every 20 vehicles that passes up the Castlereagh Highway, one is driven by a tourist - most likely a retired person from the coastal fringe off to see parts of Australia previously only ever read about or seen on television. Allan Karanouh, who left Sydney a decade ago and now runs the Global Village cafe and restaurant in Coonamble, a city of 3,000, says tourists are a small but growing addition to his business. His head cook is from Thailand and some city-slickers are amazed they can get espresso coffee and a Thai meal in Coonamble. 'We called it the Global Village because we intended to have Thai, Chinese, Australian and Lebanese cuisine, but the Thai food is so popular that we've just stayed with that,' Karanouh said. And even right up there in the frontier town of Lightning Ridge there's a supermarket that wouldn't be out of place in Sydney. As well as a roadside hot spa fed by waters from the great artesian basin, there's also an Olympic-size swimming pool, an art gallery and a golf course. You don't have to be brave to take the road-less-travelled and venture into the bush. It's not scary; there are no real privations or special rules to follow. Mobile phone coverage might be patchy and petrol stations a long way apart, but it's easily manageable and very rewarding.

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