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Gunlom is the waterfall everyone knows, an 85 metre drop with a natural pool at the top looking out over Kakadu. It closed in 2019 and stayed closed for almost six years. On 1 July it opened again, and the reason it took that long is the best part of the story.
An early start from the ferry, a family of brush turkeys, cockatoos free falling out of the canopy, and a swim I could not resist. Five special places, one short ferry ride from home.
Five hours south of Lima, a lagoon ringed by palms and sand dunes is a regional conservation area with a new five year plan, a citizens' committee and a monthly top up from a well, while a woman nearby has planted tens of thousands of the desert's own trees.
Out past the Warrumbungles, a museum built from one district's rocks holds Jurassic fish, the leaves of a tree that grew before the Wollemi pine, and the most colourful crystals the volcanoes ever made.
A weekend under the sky moves your body clock most of the way back to sunrise, and a review of 108 brain studies shows the stress circuits settling within minutes. Here is a place an hour and a half from Sydney to try it.
Australia's largest Japanese garden sits in a country town in the central west of New South Wales, and this weekend it is celebrating its cherry blossom.
Cronulla throws its spring party this weekend, a hundred market stalls and fifty food trucks from Friday night to Sunday, and on Sunday afternoon the painters set up their easels by the water, with the money raised going to Relay For Life.
Wilsons Promontory's most loved overnight walk is back, on a boardwalk rebuilt by crews who camped in the bush for months and lifted the whole thing thirty centimetres for the sea to come.
Under the cliffs at North Maroubra, a pool built by hand in the 1930s shares its water with anemones, crabs, blennies, sea hares and the odd octopus. Go at low tide and meet the neighbours.
Woowookarung Regional Park turned ten this winter with a new eight kilometre loop, a new bridge, and a Welcome to Country from the daughter of the Elder who welcomed its first walkers a decade ago.
Timor-Leste's Nino Konis Santana National Park has just become the country's first UNESCO biosphere reserve. It has rainforest, a sacred island, cave paintings and Coral Triangle reefs, and almost nobody outside Timor has heard of it.
Between Warriewood and Narrabeen there is a beach most people drive past, and a headland above it carrying a grassland that almost nowhere else still has.
