Organisers of the four-day grapefest are expecting 25,000 people through the door (26-29 November at Sydney’s Darling Harbour, .au).. We were a motley bunch assembled on the quay at Abel Point harbour in the midday sun: a middle-aged English family with two teenage children, a pair of young honeymooners from Nottingham, a Dutch couple with towering backpacks, an Italian rugby player, an English gap-year student, a schoolteacher from the Isle of Man, an astronomer from Oxford, and me. Wine aficionados visiting Sydney in November could do worse than drop into Wine Australia 2004, the biggest wine festival in the southern hemisphere and the local industry’s national showcase. For the fortnight that I stuck it out, I’d get shipped out to Coburg, Essendon and Moonee Ponds with a perma-grin and a clipboard. The job was grim but the insight into provincial Australia was fascinating. For someone who’d watched far too many episodes of Neighbours in their youth, the suburban hell of Madge, Harold, Mrs Mangle et al came alive before my eyes.

This was pure Erinsborough country where clipped lawns, oversized dogs and complex security systems are de rigueur Everyone lived in great, sprawling bungalows. The sense of space may be tremendous, but the distance I had to trudge between houses annoyed me intensely.Back in the city there’s no need to concern yourself with what’s going on in its exterior, unless of course you’ve read, and were taken in by, Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach about a nuclear holocaust creeping towards the city. Ava Gardner or Gregory Peck descended on Melbourne in 1959 to make a film of the book. It was a huge novelty for Melbournites at the time who weren’t accustomed to have such Hollywood A-listers in their city.

But more famous than the resulting movie was Ms Gardner’s opinion of her host town. Melbourne, she is reputed to have said, “is the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world” Oh how times have changed.. We were warned when we called in at the mother of all outdoors shops in Perth: “You don’t wanna go up there for long, mate – 50 degrees, 98 per cent humidity, and if the mozzies and sand flies don’t get ya, the crocs will.”

We were warned when we called in at the mother of all outdoors shops in Perth: “You don’t wanna go up there for long, mate – 50 degrees, 98 per cent humidity, and if the mozzies and sand flies don’t get ya, the crocs will.”
Yeah, yeah, we’d heard it all before. We had travelled in the Northern Territories and North Queensland and lived to tell the tale – now we were heading off on a camping trip to the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia. So it was torches, Leatherman tools, all-weather matches, folding shovels, fishing lines, tropical-strength insect repellent and the bare minimum of clothes.We had a rendezvous with our friends in Broome and planned the next day’s first-light start on the drive north. We had planned to “do” the Gibb River and Tunnel Creek Roads, visiting Mount Hart and the Bell River, Lennard River, Windjana and Brooking Gorges.