Geography

The Flinders Ranges run for about 430 kilometres up the spine of South Australia, from Crystal Brook in the south to Mount Babbage in the north. The country is some of the older landscape on Earth — the rocks are Precambrian and Cambrian, with surface formations dating back 800 million years and folding events that created the modern topography over hundreds of millions of ye...

Save the Koala Day is the last Friday of September each year. The Australian Koala Foundation has been running it since 1998 to maintain public attention on a species that has, over the past three decades, gone from “abundant national symbol” to “endangered across most of its range.” The pace of the decline has accelerated since the 2019-20 bushfires, and the policy and habit...

Kuranda sits 25 kilometres inland from Cairns, in the Wet Tropics rainforest at about 330 metres above sea level, and is one of the more rewarding day trips on the Australian east coast. The village itself is a manageable size, the rainforest walks around it are first-rate, and the journey up — by either the historic Kuranda Scenic Railway or the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway —...

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system on Earth. It stretches 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast, supports approximately 1,500 fish species and 400 coral species, and is one of the few living structures visible from low Earth orbit. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the reef came within months of being opened to oil exploration. The intervention that...

About 380,000 Amish live in the United States and Canada. Most of them you’ll never see. The Old Order communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and a slowly growing list of other states keep deliberately apart from mainstream culture, and the deliberate apartness is part of what they’re doing. Meet the Amish followed several Amish young people travelling outside t...