Everything from opera in the outback to the continuum of ancient cultural traditions in the Top End takes centre stage as in-depth ways to appreciate a destination.
1. Camping with Custodians, WA
Travelling with:Megan Arkinstall
Western Australia’s Camping with Custodians is a first for Australia. The program invites travellers to stay at one of the state’s Aboriginal-owned and operated campgrounds, such as Lombadina on the Dampier Peninsula, Imintji on the Gibb River Road and Peedamulla in the Pilbara, to meet the Traditional Custodians and learn about their culture and land. Fees paid support employment, training and generating income, creating a positive impact for both camper and community.
Stay on Lombadina on the Dampier Peninsula. (Image: Tourism Western Australia)
2. Garma Festival, NT
Travelling with:Megan Arkinstall
Garma is a four-day event hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation to share traditional Yolŋu knowledge systems and address and improve social equity for Aboriginal people. The annual festival in north-east Arnhem Land is the country’s largest Indigenous gathering, showcasing art, song, dance, film and storytelling. Garma attracts thousands of political and business leaders from across the globe who are invited to the remote Gulkula ceremonial site, about 40 kilometres from Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula. See also Cape York’s Laura Quinkan Dance Festival, slated next for June 2026, and the Katherine region’s Barunga Festival for more culturally significant First Nations gatherings.
Immerse yourself in Aboriginal culture with a broader community at Barunga Festival. (Image: Tourism NT/Alana Holmberg)
3. Festival of Outback Opera, Qld
Travelling with:Carla Grossetti
Opera Queensland has impressed its image into the red dirt of the outback. The Festival of Outback Opera , which runs annually during May, is about singing and scenery on a grand scale: gather under the stars at Australian Age of Dinosaurs in Winton for Dark Sky Serenade. Or linger in Longreach to see singers like Kate Miller-Heidke or soprano Sumi Jo lead Singing in the Night at Camden Park Station. Up the ante on the experience further with a stay at Rangelands Outback Camp.
The Festival of Outback Opera is held every May in Winton and Longreach. (Image: Glenn Hunt Photo)
4. Illumina, K’gari, Qld
Travelling with:Carla Grossetti
The sky is a liquid violet as luminous lilies bobbing on the silvery surface of Lake McKenzie/Boorangoora help to illustrate its magnificence. Illumina by Canadian-born artist Bruce Ramus uses lighting, lasers and audio-visual projections to incorporate and celebrate the natural environment on Queensland’s K’gari. The light and sound show, Return to Sky, invites guests of Kingfisher Bay Resort to immerse themselves in the island’s landscapes.
See K’gari in a new light. (Image: Tourism and Events Queensland)
5. Adelaide’s festivals, SA
Travelling with:Megan Arkinstall
March is arguably the most exciting month on Adelaide’s calendar, with three huge events – Adelaide Fringe, WOMADelaide and Adelaide Festival – creating an absolute buzz on the streets. Some locals call it ‘Mad March’, when some 6000-plus artists descend on the city, from comedians and musicians to street performers. No matter which day you visit, or which way you look, you’re sure to find music, arts and entertainment. Or set your sights on Illuminate Adelaide, a winter festival of art, light, music and tech.
WOMADelaide is one of six WOMAD festivals. (Image: Saige Prime)
6. Townsville’s art scene, Qld
Travelling with:Taylah Darnell
The temperature in Townsville isn’t the only thing that’s hot – the North Queensland capital of cool will have you wiping your brow thanks to its diverse culinary scene, incredible outdoor offerings and luxurious five-star waterfront hotel, Ardo. But the city’s relatively under-the-radar arts community and communal creative spaces are also raising the mercury. Whether it’s a rare exhibition at Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery , a showcase of local work at Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts or a hands-on pottery workshop at the North QLD Potters Association, Townsville’s creativity flows as freely as a sea breeze in summer.
7. Big Red Bash, Qld
Travelling with:Megan Arkinstall
The tiny outback town of Birdsville in south-west Queensland has become renowned for its historic pub and annual Birdsville Races. But each year, the numbers in the town also swell for the annual Big Red Bash , an all-ages music festival held in the Simpson Desert. The epic event is on pause for 2025 but is expected to come back bigger and better in 2026. Festival-goers camp under the starry sky and enjoy performances by Aussie music legends. If you can’t wait until 2026, fill your cup at NSW’s Broken Hill Mundi Mundi Bash in August, at which Missy Higgins, Hoodoo Gurus, Birds of Tokyo and The Cat Empire will perform.
Catch iconic Australian artists at the three-day extravaganza. (Image: Tourism and Events Queensland/Hayley Williamson Photography)
8. Bendigo Art Gallery, Vic
Travelling with:Carla Grossetti
A $54-million expansion of Bendigo Art Gallery is set to lure even more art lovers to the regional Victorian city, which has built its brand around arts, culture and events. Bendigo’s place in Australia’s art scene has also been bolstered by the exclusive exhibition Frida Kahlo: In her own image (until 13 July). Fans of the revolutionary Mexican artist are making a beeline for Bendigo to see the pop-up exhibition featuring some of the artist’s most treasured belongings.
The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.
There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd . In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.
Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.
‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.
Exchanging city chaos for country calm
The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)
I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.
I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.
The trails and treasures of the Grampians
Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)
Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.
Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles . I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.
Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)
There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail , Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.
Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.
“There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.
Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)
We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.
Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)
The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.
What else is on offer in The Grampians?
Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)
You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.
And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region ? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).
Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)
Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.
The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.
Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)
There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.
The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.
Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.
And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.
Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)
You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.
A traveller’s checklist
Staying there
Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity .
