Big thanks to...

...my father; who was a teacher, and took advantage of virtually every school holiday to take us somewhere or other. He would spend weeks planning touring holidays of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, writing off for routes from the RAC and modest accommodations. Every summer we would go to Cornwall, never tiring of this westerly extremity – from the magic of Tintagel Castle to the wave-crashed Lizard peninsula. My father observed everything we passed along the way and explored our destinations to the full.

Wherever we went, he and I would walk before breakfast, whatever the weather. We would breathe deeply, look intently and return ravenous. Sometimes I would complain, but I always went. How glad I am now that I did.

It was from him that that I acquired the eager anticipation of driving off into sunshine on the first day of a trip; the joy of watching landscapes unfold; the allure of little-used lanes leading to remote places; an appreciation of big vistas and the desire to record them; a delight in walking though unfamiliar territory; and the ability to be invigorated by, and take solace in, the ocean.

He loved highlands and headlands, harbours and docks, monuments and battlements, bridges and causeways, estuaries and lakes, trees and weather. He bequeathed me his wanderlust, his itchy feet and his belief in the education of the journey. As a child, I believed there wasn't anything he didn't know about these things.

He would have been fascinated by my current adventures, asked me a zillion questions and never tired of admiring my hundreds of photographs.

April 9th was his birthday.

Natural wallpaper 2

Down New England way

You take the New England Highway to reach Queensland's Granite Belt: with a road name like that, I knew I would sooner or later have to travel further south along it, over the border into New South Wales. The opportunity arose once we'd booked tickets for a Santana concert in the Hunter Valley, Australia's oldest wine-producing region. What could have been just a weekend, with flights between Brisbane and Newcastle, soon germinated into a roadtrip full of wine, waterfalls and (Mt) Warning.

The New England Highway (15) runs 914km from Brisbane to Sydney and provides an alternative to the heavy traffic and roadwork snarl-ups of Highway 1 along the East Coast. The New England region doesn't have precise boundaries: its eastern edge is roughly 60km from the coast, and it largely consists of the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, a plateau about 800-1,000 metres above sea level with higher peaks dotted about. The Tablelands are part of the Great Dividing Range and extend from the Queensland border to the Moonbi Range north of Tamworth.

The region's altitude, climate, volcanic rocks and soils give it a distinctive look: granite outcrops, lush pasture (for sheep, cattle and horses) and rich cropland. There are many national parks – especially where rivers have cut down through the eastern edge of the Tablelands, forming gorges – and pleasant towns whose public buildings often reflect former wealth created by mining or logging.

We set off from Brisbane one fine, hot and sunny Thursday morning. We took the Ipswich Road and soon turned off on to the Cunningham Highway. It was a perfect day, which meant I wanted to retrace a few steps of our Mt Cordeaux walk (see Great Granite, October 2010) for the view from the Fassifern Valley Lookout, previously shrouded in a mist of driving rain. We were seriously delayed on the ascent to Cunninghams Gap by extensive roadwork to repair water damage from last summer's Great Rains, but we made my detour anyway. Little did I know then that this was the first of many big views on this trip. And we may have got our first view of Mt Warning, to the southeast, but we didn't realise it at the time.

Then we put our foot down, soon joining the New England Highway north of Warwick. It should have taken just over an hour to reach the New South Wales border from there, but in fact it was more like two and a half, because we made another detour at Girraween National Park, to check out how one of our favourite accommodations from last year, Girraween Environmental Lodge, had fared during the January floods. The answer was, not well. Although GEL is open for business, extensive repairs to tracks reduced to corrugated water channels are ongoing.

Twenty minutes on lay the state border town of Wallangarra, Queensland... or Jennings, New South Wales.

The granite outcrops of the Girraween area continued, littering golden grassland, itself an extension of the Darling Downs landscape of southern Queensland.

Then there was Tenterfield, which developed because of its position on the original Sydney to Brisbane route and its consequent role in the foundation of the federation of Australian colonies. Today Tenterfield is important for beef cattle, merino wool and timber from nearby state forests. These include the Forest Land State Forest, which seems more than a little tautological.

Next up was Glen Innes, a town with a massive Celtic heritage reflected in some of its many churches and the Australian Standing Stones (inspired by the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands off Scotland's northeastern tip), unique in the southern hemisphere and a tribute to the town's Scottish pioneers. The place has a distinctly Scottish Presbyterian feel to it. Its early prosperity was based on tin mining: there are still gem fields down the road, and cattle and sheep are big business. My friend spotted this: in a land where roads often have multiple names or numbers, the simplicity of this sign appealed.

South of Glen Innes the landscape changed. The leaves on many trees were turning – it gets cold here – and there were rather incongruous rows of yellowing poplars. Sheep almost disappeared from view against their pale pastures. We were staying the night in Armidale, 100km or so south of Glen Innes and roughly midway between Brisbane and Sydney. At an altitude of nearly 1,000 metres, it felt decidedly chilly after Brisbane's above-average temperatures of late. The New England moniker, incidentally, derives from this region's four distinct seasons.

Our accommodation was just outside town – Petersons Armidale (as opposed to Hunter Valley) Winery. The original homestead (1911) has been restored with an English country house in mind. The grounds were lovely, although rather disarmingly like home, with a London Plane tree and yellow crocuses (surely the wrong time of year?). Not so English were the pesky mosquitos that feasted on my legs as I enjoyed the gardens in the golden early-evening light.

A reasonably priced dinner gave us the opportunity to sample a not-half-bad Petersons Armidale Cab Sav (the winery is a cool-climate-wine award winner). Breakfast was very enjoyable, too, in the sun-blazed conservatory.

Armidale is a city – with two cathedrals and the University of New England – but feels like a county town. It is an administrative and retail centre but principally a centre for livestock (beef cattle and high-quality wool) and wine production. It is also one of five test sites blazing the way for the rollout of the government's controversial national broadband network. The town's wealth was originally based on gold-mining at Hillgrove, 40km east, in the 1850s, and many fine buildings remain from that era (below: the Imperial Hotel and Armidale Land & Property Management Authority).

Armidale has three local newspapers no less, perhaps vying for sensational headlines.

The landscape south of Armidale is not particularly pleasing. From Uralla to Walcha and beyond to Nowendoc is relentless cattle country – an endless bland plain with no settlement, no mobile phone coverage and an interminable, straight-as-a-die, ever-so-bumpy road. East of Walcha, however, is the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park. I like the name and the area is reputed to be very beautiful, but, alas, our itinerary precluded a visit on either our journey south to the Hunter or on the way back.

Twenty kilometres or so northeast of Tamworth, the Moonbi Range is the southerly limit of the Northern Tablelands, and the New England Highway descends dramatically and steeply, affording great views to southerly blue ridges (top and below). There was a lookout but not of the standard we Queenslanders have been led to expect: a granite and concrete graffitied perch accessed by a grim metal staircase.

Just before Tamworth, we were tempted off route by a tourist drive. Leaving the New England Highway at Nemingha, we headed off along the Tamworth-Nundle road following the Peel River and the Dungowan Valley. Very pleasing to the eye were fertile river-flat croplands and gently rolling pastures: many delights included goats for sale and the red-rock Chaffey Dam.

While my friend fossicked for rock samples, I was entertained by artwork by the children of Dungowan School and the dam's 'Morning-glory' spillway tower, the like of which I'd never seen before. Water is released from the reservoir via an 8m-wide, 10m-tall egg-shaped funnel.

Nundle is a delightful overgrown crossroads where we turned right. It has broad avenues, historic buildings, a nice relaxed feel to it, and we should have stopped for that coffee. From the 1850s to the 1880s there were several gold rushes in them thar hills, and prospectors included many Chinese pioneers. Fossickers are still very welcome here and about.

A bit further on, we turned into the Wallabadah-Nundle Road. We were pleased to see the following sign: my friend because it lessened the risk to our lovely car, which was about to endure many more kilometres of gravel road than the tourist drive information sign had indicated, and me because at last I could photograph a place-name with far too many 'o's (see My kind of place name, December 2010).

The road was wiggly and dashed on the map. We slowly up-and-downed hills and saw little life save birds in what felt like wonderfully isolated country. More blue-ridged mountains ahead. By now we were well and truly out of New England. We rejoined the New England Highway just short of Wallabadah and the Hunter was ahead of us over the horizon.

Border country

I've always had a thing about borders. I suppose it goes back to Cold War days and images of Eastern European guards wearing great coats, submachine guns and expressions of grim suspicion. As a child, I was terribly disappointed when driving from the North of England into Scotland that there was no barrier or hoo-hah to deter Sassenachs. I still try to collect an entry stamp on my passport as I arrive in a country that's new to me. But the EU is no fun anymore.

Borders are not only geopolitical, of course, but those that aren't are much more likely to be overlooked. I can never understand why pilots don't inform their passengers as planes cross the equator. Even if most are sleeping through the experience, I am sure the pilot could post it silently on a screen for the benefit of those for whom the passage from one hemisphere into the other is significant. (As we flew to Australia on 31 December 2009, neither did the pilot mention the incoming New Year in the time zone we were overflying an hour or so after take-off.)

A day out of Brisbane on our roadtrip to the far north of Queensland last June, I was anticipating entry into the Torrid Zone (aka the Tropics). As we approached Rockhampton we passed the westward-leading Capricorn Highway to our left and the Capricorn Coast to our right. Amidst the giant plastic cows welcoming visitors to Rocky (Beef Capital of Australia), I searched for the sign to photograph for the record, the blog, my memories: 'Welcome to the Tropics'; or 'You are crossing the Tropic of Capricorn'. Nada.

Boundaries within Queensland can be both confusing (see Roadtrip Part 1: Heading up north, July 2010) and controversial. If you were ever to risk engaging a native Queenslander in the Daylight Saving Time debate, you would doubtless touch upon the idea that the southeastern corner of the state alone adopts DST along with New South Wales and Victoria.

Shock horror: we can't have the state capital in a different time zone from the rest of the state. But Mount Isa is a world away from SEQ, so what would it matter? Those of us who pop over the border into New South Wales in the summer and have to adjust our watches, or not, don't seem to suffer. Sometimes we forget and turn up an hour late. There is rarely a drama. Aah, I seem to have dived into the debate there without really noticing.

Where do you draw the line, however?

Source: daylightsavingseq.com.au

I am already imagining a light early-summer-evening for my beer overlooking Noosa Heads and Cooloola.

Of arguably far great importance to many Queenslanders, however, are quarantine zones and the boundaries thereof. Australia has a long history of invasions by unwanted species – from camels and cane toads to rats and rabbits – and there are stringent border controls in place to prevent the spread of pests and diseases. There are quarantine restrictions on the movement of plants, plant products, soil and machinery, for example, and the penalties are severe. I narrowly escaped a $200 fine for forgetting to bin a rogue Granny Smith lurking at the bottom of my in-flight bag on arrival at Sydney a few years ago. No excuses for jet-lagged idiots: you read the signs, didn't you? The beagle who headed straight for my bag as I approached immigration was cute as a button but her handler was unsmiling and intimidating.

My first experience of the fruit police was in Far North Queensland. I was happily heading south from Cairns to Magnetic Island when I was pulled over. There was a banana on the dashboard. I had to hand it over or eat it on the spot: I chose the latter as a matter of principle. The message was quite clear: don't mess with the fruit police in banana country.

© Brian J McMorrow

In the 1960s world banana production was decimated by a fungus called Panama disease. A resistant banana cultivar saved the day just in time, but the fungus has since mutated and once more there is the threat of a' banana apocalypse' (Banana: The Fruit that Changed the World, Dan Koeppel). Where there is monoculture cultivation – as in parts of Queensland – the risk of crops being wiped out by disease is a big one.

As you drive up and down the highways, you can't fail to see fire-ant warning signs, too. Fire ants are aggressive and voracious eaters. They are a threat to fauna and flora, livestock and humans. Multiple fire-ant stings is a fate worse than many mozzie bites. Anyone involved in the movement of soil, turf, hay and straw, potted plants, and mulch or green-waste fuel must comply with Queensland Government regulations. Again, the penalties are great.

I suppose I have strayed far from the notion of quixotic border crossings.

We recently returned from a roadtrip to New South Wales, back into Traffic-Light World (with its warmer nights and vastly superior road surfaces and viewpoint lookouts). I couldn't have wished for more beautiful border country as the Murwillumbah-Nerang road climbed the Springbrook plateau.

Very often when you're driving, the directional signs you've been following are suddenly no longer there when you need them: at other times, there is such a plethora of sign boards you can't possibly take in all the options in one brief glimpse away from the road. The state border on the crest of the hill was of the plethora type. I was pleased as Punch to see the state line (top), of course, but this – just beyond a cattle grid – puzzled me somewhat.

Are there fewer requirements for horses entering New South Wales than cattle? Is that why the horse is trotting off and the cow is waiting behind? And I couldn't help thinking the sign would have been more helpful at the bottom of the hill. It was a hell of a long way back down to the vet's.