Nomadics - PacificEdge

Lost in the highlands

It was in 1978, after a late night start and very little sleep, that a search party set out on Tasmania's Central Plateau looking for a missing boy...

Figure in a landscape—walking the Tasmanian high country

Solitude and reverence for the mountains experienced on a solo walk along the Overland Track in the Spring of 1980 is tinged with a sense that the journey is also a saying farewell to the beloved high country...

To the summit, one last time

It was a grand weekend adventure to climb Mt Anne but, unknown to the climbers, it was to be their last as a group of friends...

Home from the mountains— a stopover in Ouse

I remember her then. Checked wool shirt of the kind favored by bushwalkers and outdoor types. Warm wool trousers, dull khaki in colour. Petite wire framed glasses balanced on a delicate nose. Blonde hair tied back I'm bunches. Chunky leather boots. Pack on back...

Troubled paradise: Byron Bay faces change

This is an article I wrote around 2005 and which was republished in Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper. It was stimulated by the social dynamics I found in Byron Bay while living there then. I suspect much I wrote remains true...

Two families, two lives… so similar but so different

HOW DO YOU ACCOUNT for the different way that life turns out for people, even when they share much in common?

Solitary, long ago

Story & photos: Russ Grayson IT’S PERVERSE, REALLY. To walk these mountains you start by descending rather than climbing.

Less a town than a landscape

It's not the town, its the landscape it is set in that gives the Byron region its spectacular character. This I was taught by a sea eagle and by quietness as I gazed over coast and ocean to a northern horizon bounded by mountains...

Going to Launceston? Just don’t breathe too deep

CAUGHT BETWEEN rapacious extractive industry on one hand and the sublime beauty of nature on the other, Tasmania remains a paradox in the Australian political landscape. Now, there’s something else to add to the offshore contradiction that is this southern island state—Launceston’s air.

City in memory

We inhabit our own geographies... geographies formed by patterns of movement from home to work, from home to our recreational haunts or to the homes of friends. But geographies remembered and real do not always accord...

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