Felix Lowe, a freelance travel writer and photographer, explores Australia’s interior in style

UPDATE: 5 Nov. Qantas is now offering free tickets to anywhere in Australia to those who were caught up in the shut-down. If you were involved and haven’t been contacted by the airline, do so yourself. Passengers entitled are those with bookings between October 29-31st.
It’s been a week from hell for Qantas.

If you are in Australia and in Sydney, a great and inexpensive day away from the centre is to catch the ferry and spend a day in Manly

You might wonder what I was going to write about. The beaches, the Opera House, the harbour, the scenery – all of which are magnificent are nothing compared to the memory I have of one day in the centre of Sydney. No this is a moan about a common sight that puts tourists – at least the ones I have spoken to – off. Grafitti.

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With its sprawling desert bush, thick rainforests and white sandy beaches, Australia is an exciting and fascinating holiday spot. But how do you see as much as possible in 10 days? Laura gives you a busy itinerary to see as much as you can

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We are all used to pub crawls. The concept of visiting a few pubs, having a pint in each and catching up with friends is popular. In Australia I have found a different version which could even be added to the tourism brochures. In Sydney, there is a pub crawl by ferry that my nieces and their friends have introduced me to. It makes for a long day but you do some different places that normal tourists probably wouldn’t see. But it does require timing otherwise the ferry times are lost and you can’t afford to wait 30 minutes for the next.

Australia is known for more than just its famous exports: Fosters, XXXX and Neighbours. CD-Traveller gives you an overview of the land down under

Last month CD Traveller reader, T Fleetwood, wrote in for some recommendations on what fifty somethings should see and do Down Under. Always aiming to please, we asked the experts –Tourism Australia and Tourism New Zealand –for a few ideas. Here’s what they had to say…

New Year’s Eve and the first day of the New Year have become tourist attractions in their own right. Television has magnified it by capturing the moment when the New Year begins in a number of places. Around lunchtime on New Years Eve, the new year is heralded in Sydney in Australia with a huge firework display and winds down about 24 hours later with the display from Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In between, there is the traditional gathering in London at Trafalgar Square, in Princes Street in Edinburgh, the swinging of fireballs in Stonehaven near Aberdeen (quite a sight if you’ve never seen it) and the counting in of the new year in Times Square in New York. As well as that a large number of towns and cities such as Nottingham and Carlisle will have firework displays.

Like every city in the world, Sydney can be as expensive as you like or be seen on a budget. Assuming you are already in Sydney, all the things I am going to suggest will cost you nothing.

Let’s start with two iconic sites; the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. If you want to climb to the top and be led across the bridge it will set you back over $A180 (say £90) but you can walk across it for nothing.

In the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, Australia are 20,000 bats that roost in trees for most of the day. At night they fly round feeding on the fruit in the trees that the considerate gardens have provided for them. Some say they have been a nuisance for years and certainly what attracts them are those same fruit trees that were grown to show a range of Australian trees.

A newsletter I get called Hotel & Resort Insider has issue its list of top 5 holiday spots in Australia. I can quite believe that it is a hard job because, let’s face it, Australia has a heck of a lot going for it. Even if it does take 24 hours plus to get there. [...]

Last December the state government of NSW in Australia decided to launch Family Funday Sunday. The idea was to bring more people onto ferries and into the city. To do this it cut the price a family ticket to just $2.50 (about £1.20). The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Sunday was already the most crowded [...]