Dear all, Well, loved and loathed as I am, I am shortly to undergo another Odyssey to unchartered lands. Yes, that hotbed of ingrown slack-jawed and recidivist peoples otherwise known as Orstralians. Or Oz. I'm going hiking in the Tasmanian interior for a few weeks, a holiday in Sydney watching the World Cup, have a few weeks to kill thereafter until I leave for Thailand early in December. Then I plan on an intial foray into the sub-continent. I haven't yet worked out the India...

To the Tasmanian Mercury Newspaper Dear Editor, Just under three wekks ago I found myself here in Hobart wondering what the hell I was going to do in Tasmania other than hike, climb and watch the game I adore, Rugby Union. It was a Thursday, a public holiday, everything appeared closed and the fear that I had arrived at a ghost town began to gnaw at this lonely traveller, new to Australia let alone Tasmania. Three weeks later I now wonder what on earth I was worried about. ...

Well I had a bloody rotten Christmas, full of flu and cold in a damp Melbourne hotel. I even wrote a song about it (Cud, we're putting the band back together for the fourth time): Something I penned while full of cold and squeezing my breath out through my lungs. 'On a damp Melbourne eve still unable to dream, where even the songs have grown quiet, going through hell in my stop-gap hotel, it's the silence that makes me run riot. Thinking of you as I chew on cold stew, that I save wh...

'And Christmas trees in summer sigh with withered bough and leaf....' It really is the oddest thing of all for a Welshman to be abroad at Christmas. Where there should be driving winds and rain, instead there are flies and beating sun. Instead of overcoats pulled tighly against the harsh weathers there are rather bikinis and vests flashing fields of tanned flesh. The piped carols seem displaced among the frenzy of spending that infects all the muddling masses that dart hither and thithe...

Siloti is a charming man. He has a big moon face and a mouth full of metal fillings. His beard and hair are white and immaculately groomed. On his head is a hat with a yellow and tangerine piping, matching the yellow and tangerine feather that was stuck into the top of the hat at a jaunty angle. He is beaming. He is beamin so much I was briefly concerned that his head might fall off. Sitoli likes to be called uncle. He insists in fact, and shakes hands at every opportunity, almost li...

The Indian Pacific Railway (Saturday 6th - Sunday 7th) At last, I was leaving Sydney. Now I loved Sydney, there's always plenty to do and see, the restaurants are generally good, but I felt I was slowly drowning in Sydney, just as I eventually drowned in London. But now, the tourism switch was truly off, and I was about to wend my way westwards towards Adelaide. Via the Indian Pacific railway, a line that stretches from coast to coast from the well, the Indian to the Pacific. I...

It's that time of the year again. The pulse quickens and the heart starts to pound, in the Middle of Winter, the finest competition outside the Rugby World Cup gets under way. The Six Nations Tournament Brilliant, or it would be if I weren't stuck in dismal Auckland, New Zealand. I can't believe that I cannot see any of the games, or at least I haven't yet found a pub that carries the Rugby Channel. All the six nations are being shown on the Rugby channel here, but most people don...

Dear all, Australia Day Part II On this, Australia day 26th January 2004, Billy Young was honoured with the Medal of the Order of Australia. This story is not so much a fete of Billy Youngs remarkable life, this has been told elsewhere, notably by Lynette Silver, who has painstakingly compiled Billys history and those of his fallen companions. It is rather the consequence of a elderly chap I met at a little know secluded oases in the heart of Sydney, where away from the madness o...

Dear all, Australia Day. It is Australia day here, unsuprisingly, in the land of Oz. Strolling through Sydney, everywehere is crowded with flocking Australians, while bemused foreigners such as myself stare in wonder at all the flags and the overt patriotism. Trying to get lunch is a formidable obstacle, a madness in itself, but fortunately I have made friends with a Latvian owner of a Bavarian restaurant and am able to find a table, and more importantly to be fed, in a reasonabl...

From Efwa:Efwa, 'I loved the drama and poetry of this' It's a fantastic story isn't it? But remember it's Mollys story. I haven't seen the film, but I have seen where it was made in the outback. There's this little shanty town, the name escapes me for the moment, I'll dig it out of my notes when I get a chance, which is basically a bunkhouse next to a railway line. Population is four. There's a mad Englishman called Harry who wanders the outback every day searching for a ...

Dear all, Heading North from Port Augusta, the outback stretches endlessly before you. It is hot, dusty, dry and drippingly empty. The Stuart Highway winds slowly west and then north, skirting the magnificent Flinders ranges. It passes between vast, inland salt lakes, remnants of an ancient inland sea that evaporated millions of years ago leaving a rheumy white crust as the only memory of water. A warning sign on the shores of these desolate lakes, covered like ice, tells yo...

Dear all, The songlines are a fascinating concept. Among other things they are also a map of Australia from the aboriginal perspective. In theory an aborigine can sing himself right across the land, from one end to another. The song is like a mental map, a list of routes from one water hole to another, one piece of hunting ground to another. When an aborigine is born, he inherits part of the dreaming, and this is his responsibility for life, to maintain the land that he inherits ...

Dear all, As part of my current odyssey, my walkabout has taken me deep into the aboriginal territory of thinking. The aborigines are not one people but are many, and there are as many as two hundred different languages. They are an ancient people, having lived in Australia, some would say, for up to fifty thousand years, populating the land in a series of crashing waves. They have a beautiful creation story called the dreamtime. The following is from Bruce Chatwins Songlines*, a ...

Dear all, Finally back in Sydney again. I flew in tired but happy having spent a marvellous New Year back in Tasmania. God but I love that place. I took a taxi and was chatting to the driver and said this to him. He told me that he'd come here fifteen years earlier for two weeks construction work. He said he knew within five minutes that he would stay here for the rest of his life. And he had. I was relieved to find that my suitcase was still alive, I wasn't overly confident t...

The Welsh Taxi Driver. In Coober Pedy I met a Welsman who told me a little story. Many years ago he had been prospecting in Northwest Canada in a one horse town called Broken Stick for anything the earth would yield; ore, gold, oil anything that could be sold further south. There was one road in town a kilometer in length and dotted with higgledy-piggledy hotels, busy bars and bordellos. Men slept ten to a room where it was dangerous to light a cigarette because of the fartin...