Australia | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

Dec

Welcome to Australia’s best beach (which you’ve probably never heard of)

Cossies Beach, Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Photo: Rik Soderlund

It’s official: Australia’s best beach is …drum roll… probably nowhere you’ve ever been.

This week past saw a chat with beach expert Brad Farmer, who has
ventured across Australia, boardies on, notebook in hand, to find our
best beach. His new book lists the top 101 beaches in Australia.

The
island group is on the extreme fringe of our marine waters, and better
known for border patrols than beach patrols.

Farmer’s research isn’t driven by hotel companies, website stats or
private equity funds, he says. He worked with Tourism Australia, which
says the value of our beaches to the economy need to be appreciated, and
capitalised upon.

Also in the top 10 best beaches are strips on another distant
outpost, Christmas Island. Some people will roll their eyes that the
Gold Coast is underrepresented, or that Bondi should be top o’ list. But
I think it’s refreshing that we explore past the everyday.

As Brad told me,”Australia is one of the last countries you can
actually go and explore. Go a little further, open your eyes, explore.”

It’s a motto to live by.

Click here to read the full story, which appeared in Fairfax Media’s Traveller website.

Dec

Welcome to Australia’s best beach (which you’ve probably never heard of)

Cossies Beach, Cocos (Keling) Island. Photo: Rick Soderlund

It’s official: Australia’s best beach is …drum roll… probably nowhere you’ve ever been.

This week past saw a chat with beach expert Brad Farmer, who has ventured across Australia, boardies on, notebook in hand, to find our best beach. His new book lists the top 101 beaches in Australia.

He reckons he’s visited about 4000 of Australia’s 11,000-plus beaches, and the best beach is the newly named Cossies Beach on the tiny Cocos (Keeling) Islands, about 4.5 hours north-west of Perth. The island group is on the extreme fringe of our marine waters, and better known for border patrols than beach patrols.

Farmer’s research isn’t driven by hotel companies, website stats or private equity funds, he says. He worked with Tourism Australia, which says the value of our beaches to the economy need to be appreciated, and capitalised upon.

Also in the top 10 best beaches are strips on another distant outpost, Christmas Island. Some people will roll their eyes that the Gold Coast is underrepresented, or that Bondi should be top o’ list. But I think it’s refreshing that we explore past the everyday.

As Brad told me,”Australia is one of the last countries you can actually go and explore. Go a little further, open your eyes, explore.”

It’s a motto to live by.

Click here to read the full story, which appeared in Fairfax Media’s Traveller website.

Sep

Architecture tourism: The world’s inspiring new architecture

Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Courtesy TDIC, Architect Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Castles, towers, skyscrapers: all rich pickings for the travelling
architecture lover. Why not add a hill of garbage, a modern mosque or
the site of the world’s oldest drawings to your travels in 2017?

There’s some crazy, dreamy, ambitious and unexpected architecture
projects opening next year, from Denmark to Doha. Take a look at my round-up of a handful of the best, published in the Sydney Morning Herald/ The Age newspapers.

Sep

Architecture tourism: The world’s inspiring new architecture

Castles, towers, skyscrapers: all rich pickings for the travelling architecture lover. Why not add a hill of garbage, a modern mosque or the site of the world’s oldest drawings to your travels in 2017?

There’s some crazy, dreamy, ambitious and unexpected architecture projects opening in 2017, from Denmark to Doha. Take a look at my round-up of a handful of the best, published in the Sydney Morning Herald/ The Age newspapers.

The Abu Dhabi Louvre. Photo: Ateliers Jean Nouvel

Feb

Peppers Docklands review: Melbourne’s newest five-star hotel

A couple of weeks ago, I popped in to the newest five-star hotel in
Melbourne, Peppers Docklands. It’s right beside Etihad Stadium, at the
bottom of La Trobe St.

Loved the Melbourne tram printed
on the wall above the bed, the pool with a view and the crayfish
omelette. And if you find pancakes on the new menu, you can thank us for
the junior reviewer’s determined efforts 🙂

To read my review, published on Fairfax Media’s Traveller website, click here.

Jan

Roberts’ portraits the ‘selfies’ of their day

With her huge blue eyes, plump rose-kissed cheeks and a tumble of
golden curls spilling over her fashionable fox-fur trimmed coat, Lily
Stirling is the perfect face of a beautiful new nation.

Born in Melbourne’s Lonsdale Street, Lily was about six years
old when her father, a physician friend of prominent Australian artist
Tom Roberts, commissioned her portrait in 1890. Roberts wrote cheeky
ditties of painting children, “… I’ve painted kids in every pose,
A’kissing their mammie or smelling a rose …”

Many of Roberts’ finest portraits are showcased at the blockbuster Tom Roberts exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, on until March 28 in Canberra.

To read more about artist Tom Roberts’ portraits, click here.

This feature by Belinda Jackson was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Jan

Mussels and brisket: eating Melbourne this week

It’s been a good week for eating in Melbourne, and I checked out the new Marion wine bar, by chef-restaurateur Andrew McConnell in happening Gertrude St, Fitzroy. How’s that for a minimalist menu? My pick is the mussels, who are enjoying a renaissance in the food world, and nduja, a spicy Italian sausage that’s crumbled onto the dish.

On the opposite side of the city (and the other side of life), it was all about smoke-pit masters at the new San Antone Texan BBQ restaurant in Crown Melbourne. Vegetarians, please look away, the beef brisket wins the day.

This week’s Takeoff column in Sydney’s Sun-Herald also heads offshore to Singapore to check out the new Hotel Vagabond, by designer Jacques Garcia, who won my heart for his spectacular, three-year renovation of Marrakech’s grand dame, La Mamounia.

The Takeoff news column is published every Sunday in the Sun-Herald newspaper’s Traveller section.

Jan

Tom Roberts’ cigar box lids a touchstone of Australian impressionism

I recently wrote a couple of pieces on one of Australia’s leading artists, Tom Roberts, and was surprised to find the lengths that he travelled in Australia during his career, from the 1870s till his death in 1931. Not only did he criss-cross from his birthplace in England to his eventual homeland in Australia, but he also went bush, painting up in the Torres Strait, in outback NSW and in the far south of Tasmania.

One of the pioneers of Australia’s plein-air landscape paintings, he would set off on the weekends with fellow artists to the ends of Melbourne’s rail, to camp at Box Hill and Mentone for a few days’ painting. There are more shopping malls and beach boxes at these mid-city suburbs today, so we should be thankful he documented the times when European settlers were still eking out a home amongst the scrublands.

“Think of artist Tom Roberts and you’ll probably recall grand works: his muscular Shearing the Rams, painted in 1890, is more than six feet long (183 centimetres). The Big Picture, commemorating the opening of Parliament, is a “17-foot Frankenstein”.

However, Roberts’ small paintings, known as 9 by 5s, cemented
his position as one of the nation’s eminent artists and along the way
created a new school – Australian impressionism.”

Click here here to read the full story (and to see pictures!)

Tom Roberts is on at the National Gallery of Australia until March 28.
nga.gov.au/Roberts. Tickets are on sale through Ticketek

Dec

Christmas gift guide for people who love to travel

Buy a goat for Christmas…you know you want to,
worldvision.com/gifts

Thought about giving someone a goat for Christmas? It’s time for *drum roll* the Christmas gift guide for travellers.

No matter where your stocking is hung, in a snowy pine
forest or on the walls of a beach shack, here are Christmas gift ideas that will
travel – or will inspire you travel. Here are a couple of suggestions from the story, which was published in the Traveller section of Sydney’s Sun-Herald newspaper. Gifts range from $10 bags up to a slick weekend in Thailand.

Feel good, make others feel good buying a World Vision gift in their
name. Shop online (no postage or wrapping required) to give a child inrural Cambodia some school pencils or hey, buy a family a llama. You
know you want to. From $5 to $197, worldvision.com.au/gifts.

Add a touch of Scandi style to your Christmas babes with this 100 per
cent organic cotton baby travel blanket. One side is a smart neutral
grey (to go with whatever you’re wearing) the other is a monochromatic,
seasonal forest print, $75, jasperandeve.com.au.

From e-book readers to luxury weekends, if you’re an
armchair traveller or enjoy road trips, click on to my story in Sydney’s Sun-Herald newspaper for some crackers Christmas ideas for the traveller in your life.

Dec

Homecoming for Australia’s cultural treasures

Part of Kebisu’s headdress, collected in the Torres Strait
from Maino by Alfred Cort Haddon in 1888.
Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum

The day he pressed his father’s treasured ceremonial headdress into
the hands of an Englishman, Torres Strait Islander Maino must have known
life was changing for his people.

“Maino gave me the headdress his father King Kabagi [Kebisu]
used to wear when on the warpath and a boar’s tusk ornament!” wrote
English anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon in his journal in 1888. “We
were such good friends he … wanted them exhibited in a big museum in
England where plenty of people could see his father’s things.”

Skip forward several generations and Maino’s
great-grandson Ned David, a prominent Torres Strait traditional
owner, could not be more proud. “Maino was an absolute strategist,” Mr
David says. “He must have realised change was on the way, and [ensured]
the interests of his own people were looked after.”

The headdress has returned to Australia for the first
time, more than 120 years later. With its thick black
cassowary feathers, it’s one of the hero objects in Encounters,
an exhibition of key Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island artefacts at
Canberra’s National Museum of Australia, from November 27-March 28,
2016.

To read more of my story about this exciting exhibition at the National Museum of Australia, click here

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