Journeys: Australia 2009
In August 2009, I took the trip of a lifetime. We’d actually visited Australia and New Zealand many years ago and it was great, but this time it was a working trip, and speaking at the Australian and New Zealand Romance writers conferences gave me a chance to interact with local writers, and added a whole new layer of richness to the trip.
The two writers’ organizations bring overseas speakers to their conference every year—ideally, an author, and agent, and an editor. Often the groups cooperate and share expenses if they agree on who to invite.
Several of my friends had done these speaking gigs in the past, and I was madly envious. So—I lobbied for the chance to do it. <g> Anne Gracie, our Australian Word Wench, was immediate past president of Romance Writers of Australia, so I told her if they wanted me, I was willing. Very, very willing.
I figured if I was invited it would be great, and if not—I’d be spared a very, very long trip and a lot of jetlag. <G> But the two groups liked the variety of books that I’ve written, and I’ve been around long enough that a fair number of people recognized my name, so I got lucky. They invited me, and I said yes, yes, yes!
With much juggling and online research, I was able to parley a humongous number of AmEx points into business class tickets for the Mayhem Consultant and me for most of the trip. This made the trip enormously more comfortable: not only good food, lots of space, a seat that became a level (if narrow) bed, but Qantas supplied sleeping pajamas with a flying kangaroo on the chest. <G>
The downside of going frequent flier was that the schedule wasn’t the most efficient possible: Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Auckland, NZ, and finally Brisbane. The worst of it was going to be an 8 hour layover at Auckland airport. That is a very long time to sit around an airport even if you can use the business class lounge.
So—we busted out of the security zone at Auckland airport and found the information desk, where a nice woman knew exactly how to charter us a van and driver for four hours. The driver was very pleasant and we had a private tour of Auckland and environs on a perfect sunny spring day. We even saw a small blue penguin swimming in Auckland harbor! So what could have been a dreadful layover became a fun tour of a beautiful city.
At the end of the day we flew to Brisbane, checked into an airport hotel, and slept with coma-like thoroughness.
Australia has been shaped by its vast expanse of ancient land, and the fierceness of much of the sun-struck interior. It’s the most urbanized country in the world, I’m told, with most of the population concentrated in coastal cities.
Auckland Park
So it’s not surprising we stayed near the sea. The next morning we flew up to Cairns, the touring center for North Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef. I gather that in summer, the area is miserably hot and muggy, but in winter, it’s lovely—think Phoenix in February.
We hopped onto a ferry that took us 45 minutes out to Green Island on the barrier reef. Green Island is a day trip destination for people coming to sample the delights of the reef, but it also has the Green Island resort, a fine, quiet hotel with each cottage set in the midst of lush rain forest greenery. (http://www.greenislandresort.com.au/
) 
The day trippers included huge numbers of Asians since the area is popular with Japanese and Korean tourists, for whom the trip is a reasonable length. All the signs were in multiple languages.
Green Island Coral
We stayed threenights, seeing the reef in a glass bottom boat and visiting the little zoo that specialized in scary saltwater crocodiles. Some of them just sat around, still as stone, with their mouths open in case something walked in. And when they leaped straight in the air to get a piece of chicken on a rod……….!!!!! Mean dudes.
Crocs on Rocks
We also went parasailing, gliding high into the sky and looking down on Green Island and the boats and the shadows of the reef. Pure tourist stuff, and great fun. As we were being strapped into the parasailing seat, I wondered if I would turn out to have a latent fear of heights that would kick in when we were several hundred feet above the water. Luckily, I didn’t. <G>
We spent a couple of nights on the mainland in the Daintree, oldest rainforest in the world. Silky Oaks Lodge http://www.silkyoakslodge.com.au/ was gorgeous. Here’s a picture of our bungalow. I want to go back!
We could have spent weeks just in North Queensland and that’s only one small part of Australia, But it was time to head to Brisbane, a beautiful city on the eastern edge of the country and site of the 2009 RWAustralia conference.
BRISBANE PARK
Aussies are sometimes called Ozzies, and believe me, those romance writing Ozzies know how to have a good time! The opening reception was an Arabian Nights fantasy, and that was just the start of the fun.
Both conferences were much like American RWA conferences, with similar kinds of workshops. But since both Australia and New Zealand have much smaller populations than the US (about 22 million and 4 million respectively) the conferences are smaller.
While there are many talented and successful romance authors Down Under, most of them writing for Harlequin Mills & Boon, the pool is relatively small, so th
ey enjoy bringing in foreigners with funny accents who may have different slants on writing and publishing. In return, both groups are wonderfully welcoming and supportive, and just plain fun.
This being the old British Empire, I found that tea breaks are built into conferences—when Anne Gracie and I gave a full day workshop on storytelling in Brisbane, the seven hour session included three meals. <g> Morning and afternoon tea had snacks—sweet in the morning, possibly savory as well in the afternoon. Lunch, interestingly, didn’t include dessert, but just wait a couple of hours for afternoon tea. <g> Once there was even a traditional cream tea with scones and real Devonshire clotted cream.
The last night of the conference, attendees who weren’t flying home till the next morning went off to dinner, and a group of us ended up at a lovely Turkish restaurant where we say outside on benches covered with Turkish weaving and shared mountains of delicious Mideastern food.
One of the waitresses was a gorgeous young lady who looked like she might be Malaysian—till she opened her mouth. <G> Turned out she was a student from New Jersey in Australia for a semester and working part time. Her exotic good looks were a blend of Puerto Rican and Chinese, and a fine advertisement for globalism. It was a great ending to a great conference.
Because this is getting long and might be hard to load on some computers, this trip is continued under the New Zealand header.