Take a river cruise in Europe with APT. Take a river cruise in Europe with APT.

Take a luxury train journey from Sydney to Perth on board the Indian Pacific.

Fly business class to Singapore with Scoot. Photo: Supplied

Take a river cruise in Europe with APT.

Take a river cruise in Europe with APT.

You can have a grand old time in London for $5000. Photo: Shutterstock

You can have a grand old time in London for $5000. Photo: Shutterstock

You can have a grand old time in London for $5000. Photo: Shutterstock

You can have a grand old time in London for $5000. Photo: Shutterstock

Speaker Bronwyn Bishop’s $5000 helicopter trip between Melbourne and Geelong is a story that just won’t go away, despite a late apology.

And fellow Liberal Malcolm Turnbull didn’t help this week by showing us that if you need to get from Melbourne to Geelong, you can easily do it by train. In fact for $5000, the same amount as Ms Bishop spent, you can get 300 off-peak return train trips on the route.

But forget Geelong – with $5000 you can do a lot more than travel between Victoria’s two largest cities.

Here’s five ways Bishop and Turnbull could spend $5000, either together or singularly, and actually do some real travelling. Singapore fling for two

It’s Singapore’s 50th birthday so why not indulge in a couples retreat package (separate rooms of course) for Malcolm and Bronwyn. For $1200 they can fly ScootBiz from either Sydney or Melbourne (from November 1) on Scoot’s shiny new 787 aircraft. After checking preferences we’ve reserved them seats on the right-hand side of the plane. We’ve checked them into a luxurious Sofitel So Suite each for three nights ($3394 for two rooms) and organised dinner at Xperience restaurant ($240) and a few bottles of Miraval Rose ($220).

Total cost: $5054 for two Just for train geek Malcolm

The good news is we can get them a gold class cabin on the Indian Pacific train from Sydney to Perth within the price range in the off-season. The bad news is they will have to share that cabin. The journey takes four days and three nights. We are sure they’ll have lots to talk about. According to the Great Southern Rail website (greatsouthernrail上海夜网m.au) they’ll enjoy “private cabin accommodation together with all-inclusive dining, beverages and a range of fascinating off train excursions at key stops”. The gold class offering is all inclusive.

Total cost: $4558 for two which leaves them just enough money to fly home from Perth – if they can find a really cheap deal. Go solo at the top of the class

If business class doesn’t cut it for this hard-working duo, then why not grab a first class flight on Emirates between Sydney and Kuala Lumpur.

Emirates’s first class offers guests a private suite, champagne and an individual cinema experience. We suggest Ms Bishop watch True Lies with Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger (great helicopter scene) and Mr Turnbull might enjoy The Railway Man with our own Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth. Perhaps they might like the wild Iranian caviar as an appetiser during the movie before tucking into the glazed duck breast. Yum. (Read Traveller’s review of Emirates’ first class suites)

Total cost: $4992 per person. Still not far enough away?

Award-winning river cruise company APT can get them to the saucy city of Amsterdam. APT offers an eight-day all inclusive royal collection (sorry about the royal part Malcolm) river cruise sailing through the Netherlands, Germany, France and Switzerland. If you book to travel on the April 15, 2016, departure in a category E cabin and you’ll pay $4495 a person twin share.They could set sail aboard one of APT’s luxurious river cruise ships along the Rhine and Moselle rivers. The trip includes two styles of sightseeing: signature invitations, special once-in-a-lifetime moments crafted for APT’s guests, which for this journey include a tour and tasting at the Schlagkamp​ Winery and Wine Museum and the chance to gain an insight into local life as you visit a family for afternoon tea; and freedom of choice where guests can choose their activities in five destinations, for example in Cologne there is a choice of a visit to the Eau de Cologne Fragrance Museum; a tour of Bonn, or the chance to explore the Bonn Botanic Gardens. For further information call APT on 1300 196 420, visit aptouring上海夜网m.au or see your local travel agent. (See the 10 most luxurious river cruising suites)

Total cost: $4495 per person. Up, Up and Away

They might need to use their frequent flyer points to get to London, but once they arrive we will have them on cloud nine. For $3200 we can get them a 30-minute helicopter flight over London (The London Helicopter) with close-up views of The Shard, Canary Wharf, St Paul’s Cathedral, The Oval and Hyde Park where no doubt they will linger over the famous Speaker’s Corner. The Crowne Plaza London Battersea is right next door to the helipad and at $500 per night they can share a room for a couple of nights leaving them enough money for a visit to the London Transport Museum ($34 each) and to treat themselves to a five-course lunch on board the luxury Belmond British Pullman​ train which includes a bottle of Laurent-Perrier champagne on ($700). The train leaves Victoria Station at 11.15am. Don’t be late.

Total cost: $4964 plus frequent flyer flights to London.

How would you spend $5000 for a holiday? Post your comments below.

Ithaca in the Greek Islands. Photo: Dorling Kindersley

Procida Iisland in the Mediterranean sea.

Ithaca in the Greek Islands. Photo: Dorling Kindersley

Procida Iisland in the Mediterranean sea.

Ithaca in the Greek Islands. Photo: Dorling Kindersley

Times Square, New York is a busy tourist intersection of neon art and commerce.

Procida Iisland in the Mediterranean sea.

Procida Iisland in the Mediterranean sea.

Ithaca in the Greek Islands. Photo: Dorling Kindersley

It is no coincidence that dedicated travellers are also often great, voracious readers. Because what is reading but an inward journey, or a journey of the mind. Both reading and travelling represent a restlessness of spirit, a desire to  see the world from every possible angle.

Anybody who has every stayed in a modest hotel in Bali, or a cabana in Mexico, or a hostel in Budapest, will recognise the sight of a raffish bookshelf stuffed full of novels and guidebooks and travel memoirs, left behind by people unable to stop moving, even when they were ostensibly at rest.

A good book can take you footstep by footstep across the Sahara Desert, or down the length of Africa overland. It can let you roam across the Mongolian Steppe, or cross the United States on the now-defunct Route 66. It can give you, momentarily, a coffee farm in Kenya, or a chateau in Provence. It can allow you to role-play other lives entirely as an exercise in “What if?” A good book offers meaning, too; it sets the chaos of a foreign place into some sort of order that is not only comprehensible but inspiring.

Every traveller has their favourite reads. But some books are so powerful that they can change the way we think, and act as the catalyst to a physical journey. Here six of our writers reveal the books that influenced their own travels, those works that made them want to pack their bags and hit the road in search of something new and strange. HOMER’S ILIADLuke Slattery

There is one thing I share with Alexander the Great – given the abject failure of my plans for world domination – and that’s a fascination with Troy. Crossing from Greece to what is now Turkey at the head of 160 triremes (warships with three decks of rowers), the young Alexander stopped at the ruins of Troy, stripped off his armour, oiled his body, and ran around naked. My visit, some 2300 years later, was a rather more subdued affair.

I crossed the Dardanelles on a ferribot, to use the quaint Turkish name, in search of Homeric echoes. After a few melancholy days exploring the Gallipoli battlefields I headed south to Troy – fully clothed. The Iliad was the first classic I read. I must have been 10. The granddaddy of all war stories was a nightly tryst with an impassioned world of gods and heroes. Of course it was an abridged children’s version. But it gave me the story, and set me alight.

The word “sobering” best conveys the experience of standing at Troy’s wreckage, a guide droning about King Priam and his son eldest Hector, the legendary beauty Helen, and Achilles the enraged warrior. “Helen’s lover Paris,” he said, “from these very walls lets his arrows fly.”

It is a lovely site – notwithstanding the presence of a kitsch outsized Trojan horse rising gloomily nearby – with views over the rich Anatolian plains and the electric blue Aegean beyond. But the Trojan ruins are the size of a very big house or a very small palace – more like a pirate fort than anything. It is called Troy. But Homer’s Trojan war, a 10-year Greek siege of an Asian kingdom “rich in gold”, was not fought here. Homer was no war correspondent. He sang not of a war that was but of a dream in which he and his listeners could find themselves.

Next stop on my Homeric odyssey was, fittingly, Ithaca. I set out on a warm spring night from the port of Patras on the Kefalonia. The moonlit Ionian Sea is a zinc tabletop and from the upper deck I gaze up at the night sky, dusted with the white pepper of countless constellations, thinking about the joys of slow travel and C.P. Cavafy’s​ famous lines:

Better if it lasts for years,

So you are old by the time you reach the island,

Wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

Not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

There is no particular Homeric site on Ithaca, save for the name itself with its powerful mythic resonance. But after a week on the island, a string of pretty pebbled coves lapped by crystalline waters – neat gin on the rocks – I begin to see why the shaggy hero Odysseus, having survived the tribulations of war, would want to return. I do. THREE MORE FAVOURITE TRAVEL BOOKS

Mani by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Paddy Leigh Fermor was, to my mind, the great travel writer of the last century, and Mani, first published in 1958, tells of his journeys through the stark, brooding, glittering Peloponnese​: a region saturated in history and myth and memory. The young Leigh Fermor stopped at the Maniot village of Kardamyli, in a region of rust-coloured hills silvered by olive groves erupting now and then into insular hilltop villages, and made a home. I once wrote to him there, and received a postcard in return. I treasure it.

Naples 44 by Norman Lewis

There is an accidental quality to Norman Lewis’ searing witness account of Naples in the months after the German occupation, as the author was a serving intelligence officer not a writer of renown. The renown would come later, with several books about Indochina. But Naples 44, its dry lightly ironic reportorial style a perfect match for the dark comedy of a grand yet fallen city, is his masterpiece.

Following the Equator – A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain

Perhaps Mark Twain’s true metier was travel writing; what is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, after all, if not a journey down the Mississippi. Following the Equator is a vibrant, often hilarious account of the author’s 1895 tour of the British Empire, and it contains a sharp yet affectionate account of colonial Australia. The book’s offbeat style is best captured in this sparkling incidental line from Twain’s experience of Varanasi: “A canvas-box is not much of a sight – when empty; but when there is a lady in it, it is an object of interest.” JOHN STEINBECK’S  THE GRAPES OF WRATHCatherine Marshall

It was so clear in my imagination I could have sworn I’d already made that journey myself: the ribbon of tar “crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work”, as John Steinbeck​ described Route 66 in his 1939 Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. I was 18 and had never been overseas, but Steinbeck brought that road to such vivid life I could practically see it inching its way across the flat expanses of Illinois and Missouri and Kansas, through the dust bowl of Oklahoma, into the eerily empty Texas panhandle, over the crumpled surfaces of New Mexico and Arizona, and into the final, warm embrace of southern California – a state whose abundance of sunlight and fruit orchards would, by the reading’s end, reveal itself to be tragically deceptive.

The despair of the tenant-farming Joad family, their exploitation at the hands of ruthless bankers and money-hungry landowners, caused my innocent young heart to clench. But I was thrilled by the promise of adventure as they set out in their laden truck, by the idea that a whole family could reinvent itself somewhere new, some place more forgiving. Steinbeck’s Route 66 was a migrant highway streaming with families fleeing the drought, defying the Great Depression, escaping the tyranny of debt.

Yet it was also a metaphor for the paths we all take, the many forks that appear in the road as we make our way through life. Despite the tragedies that befell the Joads as they journeyed along America’s main street, I was captivated by its potential for deliverance, by the infinite possibilities that always seem to lie at the end of a wide open road.

Many years later, during the GFC – when American bankers were being bailed out and working-class folk were losing their homes – I finally set off along Route 66, from its official starting point on Chicago’s Jackson Boulevard. My husband and three children were with me. My original copy of The Grapes of Wrath – the one I read as an 18-year-old – was tucked into the cubbyhole. I invoked those Joads every step of the way: in Oklahoma, where the newly-paroled Tom arrived at his parents’ house only to find it abandoned; along stretches of empty, desolate road where the evicted tenants camped; crossing the Mojave Desert where Granma, too heartbroken to go on, died.

It took us almost two weeks to pick our way along the buckled, exhausted original route. Eventually, we pulled up at its official endpoint beside Santa Monica pier. I’d traversed the road Steinbeck conjured for me all those years ago, and felt a sense of accomplishment denied the characters in his singular novel – those people whose souls the grapes of wrath had filled until they were heavy, the writer warned, heavy for the vintage.  THREE MORE FAVOURITE TRAVEL BOOKS 

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The best travel books aren’t travel books at all: they’re stories about people shaped by the places they live in and the countries they’ve come from. In The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan transports the reader from San Francisco to pre-revolutionary China and back again, tracing the impact of cultural identity on a group of first-generation Chinese-American women.

Burmese Days by George Orwell

To really understand a country, one needs to burrow far beneath its skin. This is what George Orwell does in his debut novel, Burmese Days, loosely based on events that occurred during his five-year stay in Burma while serving as a policeman under the British Raj. The book’s beauty lies in its ability to contextualise all these years later the complex, confounding country that is modern-day Myanmar.

Oh, the places you’ll go! by Dr Seuss

There’s no book that better captures the thrill of exploration and the messiness of life than Dr Seuss’ Oh, the places you’ll go! Ostensibly a children’s book, it’s really a blueprint for anyone wishing to live without fear, nurture a sense of adventure, and accept that something is bound to go awry along the way. AGATHA CHRISTIE’S DEATH ON THE NILE Brian Johnston 

When I was a teenager, I was inspired to travel not by travelogues but by novels such as Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt and Frederic Prokosch’s​ The Asiatics, which featured geographical movement and exotic locales. Two Agatha Christie murder mysteries in particular fired my imagination. Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express share the same conceits: murder, a closed group of scheming suspects, and a mode of transport that carries the characters and the reader ever onwards towards an improbable yet deeply satisfying denouement.

Although I’ve yet to ride the Orient Express, Istanbul (its final destination) was one of the first cities I ever visited solo. It took me longer to get to Egypt, but it had always been in my sights. Agatha Christie novels have never been highbrow, and are now terminally old-fashioned and strewn with embarrassing 1930s racial and social stereotypes.

Still, Death on the Nile is one of her best and a clever classic of the mystery genre. It has tension – no murder is committed until halfway through the book – and, as the passengers float along the river on a Nile cruise, jealousy, high emotion and gossip unfold. I was equally entranced by the 1978 movie version that starred Peter Ustinov as detective Hercule Poirot, alongside a host of stellar suspects: David Niven, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, Angela Landsbury and a brilliantly grotesque Bette Davis.

The book has little to say about its Egyptian location, focusing instead on the ensemble of shipboard characters, but Egypt is always in the background. No surprise, then, that when I finally got to Egypt a Nile journey was a must. I found an old-fashioned cruise ship and, though fortunately murder-free, the polished brass, tinkling teacups, backgammon games and retired Etonian types satisfied my search for that Agatha Christie moment.

I finished my cruise in Aswan, actually the starting point for the book. Early scenes take place at the Cataract Hotel (now the Sofitel Legend Old Cataract Aswan), an impressive red pile built for 19th-century British travellers. Agatha Christie, whose husband was an archaeologist, wrote much of the novel in the suite that now bears her name. It was beyond my budget, but I had afternoon tea on the terrace, which overlooks the Nile River.

I’m well over Agatha Christie now, but I have to thank the book for providing one of my top travel moments as I nibbled on cucumber sandwiches and enjoyed the splendid view over the Nile as it slides between giant boulders and the desert, then on past gaping tombs and tumbled temples, until swallowed up by the sunset. THREE MORE FAVOURITE TRAVEL BOOKS

In Turkey I am Beautiful by Brendan Shanahan

This is a travel book for those who think the genre is only about sunset cocktails and lavender fields. Aussie author Shanahan sees Turkey rather differently, as a country beset by religious, social and political issues and home to a melancholy people, not least his drug-addled friend Tevfik. It’s thoughtful, humorous and very personal.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

This 1975 story of a journey by train from London through Europe, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and back on the Trans-Siberian is as vivid as ever. Theroux is wonderfully adept at largely leaving the places he visits undescribed, while creating character, passing conversations and casual episodes from his journeys.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

I used to dismiss Bryson as lightweight, but have recently discovered his brilliance. This look at Britain, written when Bryson was about to return to America after 20 years, avoids all the classic tourist destinations but portrays the British character and life in modern Britain with wit, fondness and considerable insight. JOAN DIDION’S GOODBYE TO ALL THATLance Richardson

“When I first saw New York I was 20, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild  temporary terminal in a new dress,” writes Joan Didion in her classic essay Goodbye to All That, collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. When I first saw New York I, too, was 20, and it was spring, and I got off a 747 at the old American Airlines terminal in a new shirt bought especially for the trip. I carried Didion’s book in my bag like a Bible. I was hardly the first aspiring writer to bring it to “the mirage,” as Didion calls New York, though I know now that I hardly understood a word of what she wrote.

Didion’s essay is a love letter. Or at least it seemed that way when I read it on the plane, infatuated with her choice of details – the peach on a street corner, Christmas trees up Park Avenue – which seemed to presage “that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month”.

New York was a dream place, and here was the most exquisite portrait of it by the writer I wanted to be. It read like an affirmation of what my life would be like when I lived here myself, on the island where “nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach”. Of course, I was ignoring the ending of the essay during that first visit.

At age 20, I skimmed over the bit where Didion becomes disillusioned, explaining how she realised that “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair”. The first half of the essay was exhilarating truth; the second half beautifully written but impenetrable. How could the “golden rhythm” ever be “broken” in a city like New York? Impossible.

And yet it is amazing how a work of art can, over the course of your life, change its meaning entirely. That 20-year-old me, standing stunned in the glittering excess of Times Square, would have been delighted to peek into the future and see that he would indeed move to “Xanadu” (another Didionism), just eight years later. But maybe he would have been less delighted to see how the fantasy would break in the process; how Didion’s love letter would come to feel even more true for its ultimate resignation.

“It never occurred to me that I was living a real life there,” Didion writes. I first interpreted that line as pure encouragement. Now, having faced the city and endured its challenges firsthand, I see her line has a double meaning. Now Didion’s essay is even more precious: a codebreaker helping me to decipher the confusing place I  now call home, though maybe not for much longer.   THREE MORE FAVOURITE TRAVEL BOOKS

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen​

Taken at face value, this book appears to diarise a journey in the Himalayas, with Matthiessen on a science trip to study blue sheep. Really, though, it’s about grief and the search for meaning. Matthiessen’s kaleidoscopic book is a masterpiece of self-observation.

Sydney by Delia Falconer

Anybody trying to get a handle on the enigmatic strangeness of Sydney should read this book, a lyrical essay that seeks out the ghosts hiding amid  the surf and sunshine. The best portrait of the city since Jan Morris wrote her version, also entitled Sydney, before the 2000 Olympics.

On the Trail of Genghis Khan by Tim Cope

A young Australian packs up his life and spends three years crossing the Eurasian steppes on foot and horseback: What could be more compelling than that? But it is Cope’s ability as a writer, equal to his gift as a fearless explorer, that make this a modern classic. JAMES A. MICHENER’S THE DRIFTERSAlison Stewart

At 21, straight out of university in the mid-1970s, I set off alone to hitchhike around Spain and Portugal, with only a handful of pesetas, and a powerful need for clear air. Enrichment, delight in new cultures and people – these are all potent reasons to travel. Mine at that time was escape – from my birth country, South Africa and its hideous apartheid regime. At least I could escape.

And what inspired my journey? Among all the exquisite writing about alienation from fellow South Africans that engaged me through my university years, it was a less literary book that captured the zeitgeist, and me – James A. Michener’s The Drifters set in the revolutionary late ’60s.

I identified with Michener’s six disenchanted young runaways who fled the Vietnam War and the old world’s traditional values. They made their separate ways to Spain and specifically, wait for it, Torremolinos! It later became a much parodied package-holiday dive, but was briefly an exotic, weightless place.

Their hedonistic pursuit of drugs, pleasure and disengagement took them from Torremolinos to destinations like Pamplona, Ibiza, the Algarve, Mozambique and Morocco. But the place they sought was illusionary and gradually their utopian world dissolved into tragedy.

I didn’t care. I wanted what Michener offered. I could escape like his characters, shedding the beloved, despised country. So I booked a passage on a ship for Barcelona, taking only a few clothes and a journal. I wanted no baggage, literally. In the dying months of Franco’s Spain, alone or with fellow travellers, I hitchhiked, picking up scraps of work. Travelling for six months in the hottest summer for years, I made it to all Michener’s places and further.

I was robbed in Pamplona, slept rough in Ibiza and the Costa del Sol, camped with strangers at Algeciras​, Seville and the Algarve, fought off an abduction near Vilafranca del Penedes,fell ill in San Sebastian and was sometimes so hungry I frequented restaurant bins. I met many good people and some bad, took a few risks and terrified my family.

Liberating though it was, it became clear that I was also in search of a non-existent utopia. I wanted the different landscapes to change me. If only.

The Drifters’ time has passed, but for a brief moment, it opened a door to a world that promised something that wasn’t quite there. Travel it seemed didn’t make you better, or worse, just a little older and only marginally wiser. THREE MORE FAVOURITE TRAVEL BOOKS

The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow by A.J. Mackinnon

A wonderfully eccentric travel book by Australian author “Sandy” Mackinnon, who has the batty idea of leaving his teaching job at a Hogwarts-style Shropshire school and sailing away in a dinghy “just to see where I got to – Gloucester, near the mouth of the Severn, I thought”. Totally unprepared, he bumbles along various waterways, eventually crossing the English Channel and carrying on to the Black Sea. Remarkably, he stays alive to tell the tale.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Bryson, like Paul Theroux, can be curmudgeonly, but his engaging, self-referential style and mastery of dialogue is mesmerising. I think this book is Bryson’s best – his funny account of walking the Appalachian Trail hike skilfully explores the challenges of the journey and the grand intransigence of the landscape (and his travelling companions). Thanks to Bryson, I too want to walk in the woods – just without the bears.

Old Serpent Nile by Stanley Stewart

Stewart’s book is travel writing at its best – insightful, witty and elegant. Bernini’s sculpture in Rome, Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (fountain of the four rivers), inspired Stewart’s dangerous journey from the Nile Delta to the Mountains of the Moon in Eastern Equatorial Africa. When Bernini made his artwork, the Nile’s source was unknown.  READER’S DIGEST, THE WORLD’S LAST MYSTERIESBy Ute Junker

Growing up, I made many wonderful discoveries in my parents’ bookshelves, from Tolkien to Gunter Grass. The book that had the most lasting influence on me as a travel writer, however, was not a literary classic, but a quarto-sized tome from Reader’s Digest entitled The World’s Last Mysteries.

Over more than 300 pages, it explored the world’s vanished civilisations through the monuments they had left behind. From the standing stones of Stonehenge to the temples of the Khmer, I was drawn in first by the striking images, then by the detective stories that lay behind them.

Like any young child,  I was entranced by the majesty of the moai of Easter Island and grandeur of the Egyptian pyramids. As I grew older, I pored over the detailed text. The Egyptian chapter, for instance, included descriptions of how workers transported heavy loads on sledges, pouring water in front of it to help smooth the ground, and accounts of the many obstacles placed inside the pyramids to block the efforts of tomb robbers.

Although Egypt was my favourite, I devoured the other chapters as well. I learnt about the Nazca​ of Peru, who moved tonnes of stone to create gigantic images of birds and animals; the ancient stone city of Great Zimbabwe; and the ziggurats of the ancient Sumerians. More importantly, I learnt that the world was an enchanting place full of wonders that could be explored by anyone willing to make the journey.

It was this knowledge that turned me into a traveller. Top of the to-visit list was always going to be Egypt, where we went on a family holiday when I was still a teenager. Since then, I have worked my way through many of the destinations I encountered in the book, from the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu to the temples of Siem Reap and the cities of those other great pyramid-builders, the Mayans.

I pulled the book from the shelves again recently, and solved a mystery of my own. Visiting the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg, I had been struck by the delicate gold statues created by the Scythians, the ancient warriors better known for their bloodthirsty habits – and by a vague feeling I had seen them before. Flicking through the pages, I found a chapter devoted to the Scythians, with the same exquisite statues I had admired in St Petersburg. They had slipped from my mind, but I had caught up with them anyway.  THREE MORE FAVOURITE TRAVEL BOOKSCity of Djinns by William Dalrymple

The novels of Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry​ made me want to see India, but it was William Dalrymple’s that made me fall in love with a city I’d never visited. His vivid book includes a colourful cast of characters – Sufi mystics, eunuchs, pigeon fanciers – and explorations of Delhi’s past.

Venice by James Morris

This book is definitely dated – Jan Morris was still James when it was written – but that is precisely its charm. Venice in the 1950s was very different to the Venice of today, and James is the perfect tour guide, filled with fascinating stories and able to capture revealing snapshots in beautifully crafted paragraphs.

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

A laugh-out-loud book that will have you alternatively cringing with recognition and crying with laughter. Written in 1869, it proves that despite air travel, email and apps, travel hasn’t changed all that much.

Beautiful beaches with white sand and turquoise water in the national park on Komodo Island. Photo: Rafal Cichawa Komodo National Park. Photo: Joakim Leroy

Komodo National Park. Photo: Joakim Leroy

Komodo National Park. Photo: Joakim Leroy

Komodo National Park. Photo: Joakim Leroy

Komodo dragons on the beach in the Komodo National Park on Rinca Island. Photo: Danita Delimont

A manta ray near Komodo Island. Photo: Oxford Scientific / Photolibrary

Arriving on Flores, I have one of those perfect travel moments: when you know that this is exactly where you need to be right now; that this destination has called you to it.

I’ve just put my bags down at our Airbnb pad in the diving town of Labuan Bajo​ on the west coast of Flores, one of Indonesia’s Lesser Sunda​ Islands, when I show our host a photo of a flawless splice of an island that I’d snapped from the plane window on our flight in. He chuckles and shakes his head. “That’s Seraya Kecil. I’ve just started building a boutique hotel on it.” Not only that, he also knows the Greek family who’s opening a hotel next to his in just a few days.

What are the chances? A couple of phone calls later and it’s done. In two nights we’ll be sleeping on that slice of heaven that had  seemed like no more than a mirage from above, in a hotel that no one will have stayed in before.

But first we have some island hopping to do. We’ve booked an overnight boat trip through Indonesian operator Perama Tours, to take us to see Flores’ terrifying komodo dragons, and to explore this enchanted place that doesn’t appear on the average Australian holidaymaker’s mental world-map, despite being just an 80-minute flight from Bali.

After breakfast the next morning we set off, walking down to the port and onto our wooden boat. We’re greeted by our three crew members, only one of whom can speak (broken) English. As we set sail, my husband and I scramble up the ladder to the top deck where we laze about on a couple of single mattresses, mesmerised by the sun-speckled water and great rumpled cushions of land sliding by us.

Our first stop is Rinca Island, one of the three main islands of Komodo National Park, where the dragons have a haven from humans. It’s smaller than Komodo Island but we’d heard the landscape is prettier and it’s less crowded. Indeed, we see only four other travellers the whole time we’re there.

We pay our national park fees (about $50 for two) and meet guide Boni, who has been taking travellers around the island for six years. Barely 10 metres into the walk we spot five dragons lyingin the shade beneath the kitchen. Hearts pounding, we sidle cautiously behind the two-metre giants, the largest species of lizard in the world. Boni tells us the dragons have lived  on the Komodo Islands for millions of years, and that they have more than 50 strains of bacteria in their saliva: within 24 hours of being bitten, their prey usually dies of blood poisoning.

Boni tells us there’s a stable population of about 2000 dragons on this island. I don’t doubt it. For the rest of our 90-minute walk through the jungle paths we see only one more, a stunning female rushing away from us with her bowed legs and thick, muscular tail swishing through the dirt, yet I can feel  the dragons’ presence all around me – a rustle of leaves, the faintest swooshing sound. I imagine them peering out at us from the bushes, sniffing the air with their rounded snouts, judging the best time to attack. Or maybe I’m just being paranoid.

Either way, I can’t say I’m devastated to have to head back to the boat. Especially when there’s grilled fish, fried noodles and half moons of cold watermelon awaiting us on board. When we’re done feasting, we flop back onto the deck and bask in the afternoon sunshine as we roll gently over waves that eventually lull us to sleep.

By the time we wake it’s almost sunset, and thousands of flying foxes are rushing and chattering overhead. We’re off the coast of Kalong Island (or Fruit Bat Island), where, as the sky turns from yellow to orange, from pink to lavender, the bats leave their home in the mangrove forests  in search of fruit.

It’s terribly romantic. At least it is until the other seven boats arrive and two of them start pumping techno music out into the night. Luckily, we’re exhausted by the day’s adventures and escape the alfresco disco by heading to bed in our little bunk cabin at 8.30pm.

We’re up at sunrise the following morning and, after a breakfast of toast, tea and deep-fried bananas, we putter off to Pink Beach, which isn’t, disappointingly, nearly as pink as the pictures we’d seen on Google. Still, we have a terrific time snorkelling over the healthy red coral reef (which is what turns the sand pink) and exploring the beach.

Soon we’re back on the boat, puttering around in the salty breeze. Suddenly, one of the crew crouches, points urgently into the sea and mimics doing breaststroke, so we don our flippers and snorkels and splash in. That’s when we see a huge, ominously dark shape moving towards us. Three of them, actually. Wait, five! I clutch my husband’s swim shorts in terror for the few moments it takes me to realise we must have arrived at Manta Point, an endangered manta ray hot spot, where the huge, playful creatures flap about by the dozen. Once over my panic, I’m able to enjoy their otherworldly beauty as they glide around below us. It’s an awe-inspiring experience, especially given the lack of other tourists around.

After an long snorkel around Kanawa Island, where schools of tiny silver fish waft around us in iridescent clouds, psychedelically coloured Parrotfish nibble at blooms of coral and huge orange starfish sucker onto the ocean floor, it’s time to head to our mirage.

Our arrival on Seraya Island couldn’t get more idyllic. We walk down a jetty suspended above a coral reef then across a stretch of white sand to the seashell-encrusted check-in desk. We’re greeted by Rosi, the beautiful Greek girl whose family has built this resort. Rosi leads us past the pool and over to one of 15 upmarket wooden beach bungalows with palm-thatched roofs. Our whitewashed room smells like frangipanis but we stay in it only long enough to throw on our cozzies and float over to the beachfront saltwater pool, where within minutes a glass of chilled local rosé materialises (there is a more-than-decent Indonesian rosé they serve called Plaga Rosé).

We stay just like that – swimming, sipping, slowing down and soaking up the island’s natural beauty and simplicity – until it’s time to watch the sunset. Seraya Hotel is set between the sea and a giant wall of curving 40-metre cliffs, which we climb to get a 360-degree view of the ocean, the neighbouring islands and that huge orange ball as it drops into the sea. We practically swoon at the romantic vista.

Seraya Hotel offers half- and full-board packages and our Grecian-inspired dinner – a tomato-based spicy seafood soup followed by lemon and herb flash-fried mahi mahi with hand-cut chips and salad and a tasty Greek dessert called lokma, a kind of melt-in-your-mouth doughnut – does not disappoint. We eat in their seaside dining room, which is decorated using the island’s natural resources (think lanterns crafted from driftwood, a bar made from an old wooden boat, chunks of coral and hand-painted palm leaf decorations), accompanied by a soundtrack of tasteful chill-out music to complete the dreamy tropical idyll.

A postprandial skinny dip in the warm-as-a-bath ocean would have been marvellous, or perhaps a midnight stroll along the island, which is just 1.7 kilometres long and 200 metres wide. Alas, we simply cannot resist the call of our king-size bed, swaddled in mosquito net, and the sound of the waves rushing up against the sand just metres from our open doors lulls us to sleep.

The day is our last  in Flores and we spend it enjoying what this Indonesian paradise does best. The flamingo sunrise, the balmy climate, the remarkable snorkelling (Seraya Hotel provides the gear), those perfect crescents of sand. On our 30-minute journey back to the mainland on the hotel’s blue wooden boat, we trail our hands in the indigo waters and wonder why more Australians don’t know about this gorgeous island. Eventually we decide it must really be a mirage – somewhere the rest of the world sees only, if at all, out of the corner of its eye.

The writer flew courtesy of Garuda but paid for her tour and stay.TRIP NOTESMORE INFORMATION

See florestourism上海夜网m. GETTING THERE

Garuda flies daily to Flores from Denpasar or Jakarta, from $250. STAYING THERE

Seraya Island Hotel and Resort offers rooms from $150 a  person a  day, on a half board basis including boat transfers from Labuan Bajo. Tours to the Komodo Islands, Kanawa Island, Manta Point, Pink Beach and more can be arranged through the hotel, which also has its own dive centre. See serayahotel上海夜网m. FIVE FLAVOURS OF FLORESHOP IN THE HOT SPRINGS

Encircled by jungle and consisting of just two rows of traditional thatched-roof houses and a pair of shrines representing the local Ngada clan’s ancestors, Bena Village is where it’s at for a taste of life as untouched by the modern world. Hike from here to the magical Malanage Hot Springs. EXPLORE THE CAVES

Just 15 minutes’ drive from Labuan Bajo you’ll find Batu Cermin Cave, filled with stalactites, stalagmites, glittering crystals, tiny bats… and if you’re unlucky, bat-eating spiders and deadly snakes. Visit at the right time of day and light will stream through a gap in the rocks and cause the walls to glisten like mirrors. HIKE TO A CRATER LAKE

Hike up Mount Kelimutu​ at dawn to see the sun rise over its stunning tri-coloured crater lakes, the colours of which vary from green to blue to red depending on the mineral content of the water. WEAVE SOME MAGIC

Flores is famous for its traditional ikat weavings, with each area specialising in its own distinctive motifs, patterns and colours. Aficionados head to Ende on the southern coast of Flores, celebrated for its red and brown Lionese ikat weaving which is sold to collectors all over the world. TAKE A DIVE

Komodo National Park is one of the most diverse marine habitats on earth, with more than 1000 species of fish, 385 species of reef-building corals, 10 species of dolphins and much more attracting scuba fanatics from all over the world. Maumere Bay in East Flores is another fantastic, and much less crowded, diving area.

The Malacca River at night. Photo: Getty The Malacca River at night. Photo: Getty

The entrance to the Majestic Hotel, Malacca, Malaysia. Photo: supplied

A deluxe room at the Majestic Hotel.

Baba-Nyonya style building facade in Malacca. Photo: GARDEL Bertrand / hemis.fr

The distinctive 18th-century Dutch-designed Christ Church in Malacca. Photo: Tomatoskin

The Malacca River at night. Photo: Getty

The Malacca River at night. Photo: Getty

It’s probably not surprising that in a city, and for that matter a country, where eating is more or less the national sport, that one of the signature treatments on the spa menu at the hotel where I’m staying should involve a foodstuff.  And chosen for me is the traditional egg roll therapy. As I  lie face down on the massage table, there is the disconcerting, though unmistakable, sound of boiling in the background. I can’t be sure if I’m getting my eggs hard or runny and I have to trust that they won’t make their way to my breakfast table tomorrow.

Surely not. I’m staying at the Majestic Malacca, the classiest place in town. At the end of the massage I ask to see the eggs. The Malaysian masseuse holds a rather lewd-looking pouch containing two round objects that moments ago were being rolled over my now admittedly relaxed body. Feeling good from the massage, it also feels good to be back in Malacca.

Since I was last here  about three decades ago, this ancient Malaysian trading port has been on something of, dare I say, a roll itself. In 2008, it received a joint UNESCO World Heritage listing with Georgetown, located on the island, Penang, to the north of the country, in recognition of their unique architectural heritage. “The two towns constitute a unique architectural and cultural townscape,” UNESCO stated in its inscription, “without parallel anywhere in east and  south-east Asia”.

Both Georgetown and Malacca are so well preserved – more by accident than design – that they provide a palpable sense of what a place like Singapore would have resembled before progress led to the demolition of its distinctive shop-houses and other historic buildings. On my first visit to cosmopolitan Malacca, a place that’s still not all that easy to get to, I came on a perilous coach ride from Singapore with the foreign passengers (me included) having to plead with the driver to desist from overtaking on hairpin corners. Malaysians at that time were rated among the world’s worst drivers.

Nowadays it’s freeway all the way from Singapore – notably via a surprisingly formidable and sizeable frontier that denotes  the tetchy relations between the two south-east Asian nations. Today the driving is a lot more tolerable even though the coach captain on my bus from Singapore elects to drop me a few blocks from my hotel, forcing me to find my own way to it in the mad-dog, noon heat. Oh well, take a cab if you want door-to-door service.

Although Malaysia itself has changed irrevocably – the very model, with some serious political reservations, of a modern Islamic state – Malacca itself, thank goodness, has altered little – save, that is, for some worrisome, creeping high-rises near the edge of the World Heritage zone. There is even a superfluous monorail track that the local burghers have been unable to render operational since it was installed a few years ago.

The Majestic Malacca  was, until 2004, an abandoned shell. It’s the  nearest there is to a decent colonial-era-hotel in town and  the best place to stay in Malacca, although its design is a neat sleight of hand. The building housing the reception, lobby, bar and restaurant is a charming old mansion, once the lavish residence of  a rich Chinese businessman who eventually fell  on hard times.

It’s teamed with a relatively discreet and sympathetic, 10-storey high-rise built at the rear, with modern rooms  doing a fine impression of being from the era of the much older building. Across the road from the hotel is an extraordinary sight: a former fishing village,  including houses with tin red roofs, that was transferred  from the seaside by the British.

Both Malacca and Georgetown have had more colonisers then they’ve had hot rendangs. Once one of the most important trading ports of the Far East, as the British still like to call it, Malacca’s wealth and strategic location were prizes too tempting for a succession of imperialist nations. The city dates to the 15th century, having been founded by a Sumatran prince who chose to name the city after a local tree, with Malacca first falling to the Portuguese in the 16th century, then the Dutch in the 17th, the British in the 18th. I guess you also could count the short and brutal 20th-century rule of the Japanese during World War II.

On the outskirts of town  a small Portuguese community has survived with the language, or a dialect of it, still spoken by many descendants. But the city’s most  indelible influence comes from the Baba-Nyonyas, or Straits Chinese, descendants  of the first Chinese merchants who married local Malay women, creating a unique culture, known as Peranakan.

Of course, the centrepiece of Malacca is its coveted World Heritage zone and one of the best ways to explore it is on a guided tour, with The Majestic offering a free historical walk. I take one the next morning with a small and eclectic group of fellow houseguests. We follow a riverside boardwalk – minding the missing timber slats here and there. Then our guide, Rahayu, a well versed Malaysian woman from Kuala Lumpur, pauses on a footbridge – one of the many that pass over the Malacca  River  that runs through the city and near the old Indonesian quarter.

It is here, she says,  that the Japanese occupiers during World War II conducted their summary beheadings.  The severed heads were tossed into the river. No wonder it’s still known among locals as the “Ghost Bridge”. Beyond the bridge, with my shirt starting to stick to my back like paparazzi to a Kardashian, we pass an atmospheric street where on either side ancient, darkly lit specialty shops, selling everything from knives to nails, are slowly dying out, one by one, being replaced by cafes and the like.

The  streets are full of colourful, photogenic Baba Nyonya shophouses, with their mandatory shuttered windows while on Jalan Tukang Emas – also known as “Harmony Street” – an Islamic mosque and Hindu and Buddhist temples are neighbours. But it is the magnificent crimson-coloured 18th-century Dutch church – Malacca’s own “Red Square”, that draws the most tourists. It was the oldest building I’d ever seen when I first visited all those years ago. The Dutch built the church to commemorate the centenary of their colonial rule of Malacca in 1653. Eventually the British, having conquered the Dutch, transformed it into an Anglican church but, in looks alone, it will forever remain Dutch.

By the time the tour ends it’s already lunchtime and with the heat intensifying, I take a trishaw back to the Majestic; the short journey complete with the obligatory attempt to entice me into a store to buy a watch. The driver is nearing 70 and still toiling in a job, it must be said, with some of stain of colonialism still attached to it. He is a reminder, too, that it’s not just the buildings that provide a record of Malacca’s past.

He tells me he has spent nearly 30 years plying the streets of Malacca on three wobbly wheels, laughingly referring to his trishaw, adorned in faded plastic flowers, as his “antique treasure”. His dark, weathered skin affirms  all those years spent outdoors. As I wander back into the Majestic, having tipped the driver handsomely after denying  him a commission at the watch shop, it occurs to me that if anyone deserves a restorative egg roll therapy in this town it has to be this kindly, hard-boiled gentleman. FIVE THINGS TO DO IN MALACCAMALACCA RIVER CRUISE 

It’s no Seine but a cruise on the Malacca River is  popular  for  visitors, especially by night when the city’s historic building are illuminated. See www.ppspm.gov.my JONKER WALK

Also known by its Malay name, Jalan Hang Jebat, vibrant Jonker Street is Malacca’s main tourist strip full of antique shops, restaurants and cafes. See tourism.gov.my THE STADTHUYS

Built in 1650 as the colonial Dutch governor’s residence, The Stadthuys is believed to be the oldest surviving Dutch building in south-east Asia. See www.perzim.gov.my BABA NYONYA HERITAGE MUSEUM

This private museum on Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock (Heeren Street) features artefacts unique to the Straits Chinese, or Baba Nyonya community. See www.babanyonyamuseum上海夜网m PORTUGUESE SQUARE

Also known as a “mini Lisbon”, the square is in the small Portuguese village where inhabitants can trace their ancestry  400 years to Portuguese colonial times. See tourism.gov.my TRIP NOTES MORE INFORMATION

tourism.gov.myGETTING THERE

Scoot flies daily from Sydney to Singapore.  From November  1, the Singapore-based low-fare airline will fly five times a week from Melbourne to Singapore. See flyscoot上海夜网m.

From Singapore, the best way to get to Malacca is  by coach.  Various operators  run  multiple daily services to Malacca costing between  $16 and  $50 and taking between three and four hours. See easybook上海夜网m/bus-singapore-melaka. The equivalent trip between Kuala Lumpur and Malacca costs between $3.60 and $21  and takes about 2½ hours.  STAYING THERE

Doubles at the Majestic Malacca Hotel start from $127,  188 Jalan Bunga Raya, Malacca, Malaysia. Phone +60 3-2783 1000, see www.majesticmalacca上海夜网m

The writer travelled as a guest of Tourism Malaysia and Scoot.

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop is expected to meet with her Indonesian counterpart in Kuala Lumpur next week. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi. Photo: Achmad Ibrahim

Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed by firing squad in Indonesia in April.

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop will meet her Indonesian counterpart Retno Marsudi next week in a sign that relations between the two countries are warming after the schism wrought by the execution of the Bali nine duo and boat turn-backs.

Indonesian officials told Fairfax Media the meeting will take place on the sidelines of the upcoming ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Kuala Lumpur.

It will be the first by any ministers from the two countries since Australia withdrew its ambassador to Jakarta, Paul Grigson, in protest at the death by firing squad of rehabilitated drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran on April 28.

Mr Grigson has since returned to his post.

While the Australian government was deeply disappointed its repeated pleas for clemency were rebuffed, Indonesia expressed outrage in the lead-up to the executions when Prime Minister Tony Abbott linked Australia’s $1 billion in tsunami aid to the bid for mercy.

Since then, there have been ongoing tensions over boat turn-backs, including allegations people smugglers were paid by Australian spies to return a vessel laden with asylum seekers to Indonesia.

An 80 per cent cut in live cattle import permits by Indonesia also upset Australia.

Former Indonesian foreign minister Marty Natalegawa expressed concern last month that there was a “sense of disconnect” in the bilateral relationship and that communications between the two nations – both publicly and privately – were at a low.

He cited the boat turn-backs policy, since adopted by Labor as its policy, as “inherently incompatible” with good relations.

Ms Bishop retorted that the relationship was at an “all-time” high and she was in regular contact with Ms Marsudi.

Indonesian officials, however, have conceded that relations have been at a nadir but say they are anxious for the squabbling to end.

“Australia is an important regional partner for us,” said one official.

Ms Bishop was unable to comment as she was travelling back to Australia from New York. But it is understood she plans to be in Kuala Lumpur next week.

Minister for Justice Michael Keenan is expected to visit Jakarta in about three weeks, the first by a minister this year.

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Kiara Bloxsome and her six-month-old son Carter, whose family have been patients of the Mount Druitt Aboriginal Medical Service for four generations. “The GPs understand where you come from, because they come from the same background,” Ms Bloxsome said. Photo: Nick Moir’Dear Ministers, you are precipitating a catastrophe’ Aboriginal Medical Service to close over unpaid tax debt

​The safety of more than 11,000 Aboriginal patients will be put at risk by the closure of a specialist medical service in Sydney’s west, a psychiatrist claims.

Negotiations between state and federal health authorities and staff at the Aboriginal Medical Service Western Sydney (AMSWS) have not yet come up with a way to safely transfer the patients of the service to new treating teams ahead of the service’s closure next month, said Neil Phillips, the AMSWS consulting psychiatrist.

The western Sydney service is in voluntary administration and is racked by debts, and the government has said it will not fund it beyond September 30 because health funding should be used to pay for health care, not to service debts.

Dr Phillips has written an open letter to federal Health Minister Sussan Ley, Minister for Indigenous Affairs Nigel Scullion and Assistant Minister for Health Fiona Nash accusing them of hypocrisy for convening a “round table” on Indigenous mental illness at the same time as closing specialist services for those conditions after years of underfunding for them.

“I’m concerned the decision [to close] is ideological,” Dr Phillips told Fairfax Media. “I have never been more worried for my patients in my entire career, and I have worked in very difficult and remote places. Yet here we are in the centre of Sydney and I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

He said many of the service’s patients had very bad experiences with mainstream health services and would not be willing to have their files moved to other clinics. In addition, the western Sydney area did not have enough Aboriginal medical staff employed to meet the demand that would occur when thousands of people suddenly found themselves needing a new healthcare provider on September 30.

“We are talking about 11,000 people needing to be referred somewhere else,” he said. “Over the years it has become very clear that if mainstream services don’t have Aboriginal workers involved, Aboriginal people just don’t go.”

Dr Phillips said the closure could lead to serious psychosis or even death for some of his patients, traumatising them and their families and costing governments more in the long term.

He said it took a long time to build rapport with patients in the service, and many of them would not come in for treatment or take their medication if they were not with a service they trusted.

“Even if you can guarantee nobody will get hurt, which you can’t … if someone ends up in hospital there wouldn’t be much change from ten to fifteen thousand dollars for the government.

“It’s agonising for the families to have someone with uncontrolled psychosis, there’s the issue of domestic violence when someone is experiencing paranoia, and there is the issue of kids observing someone with psychosis in the house – it’s scary.”

A spokeswoman for the federal Department of Health said it was working closely with the NSW Ministry of Health and others to ensure the effective transition of patients, and the government’s “primary concern” was to ensure the patients had access to high-quality, culturally appropriate services.

But she said the service was in “significant debt” and government policy was to use health funding to pay for care, not pay off debt.

“AMSWS has accepted a three-month funding extension up until 30 September to assist with the transfer of clients and services,” she said.

“The government is unable to continue subsidising the service beyond this three months because of the financial difficulties being experienced by the service.

“The Australian government acknowledges that this could be disruptive for patients, many of whom benefit by the community-controlled model of care presently offered by AMSWS, but as this service is now no longer viable, every effort will be made to transition patients to other service providers as quickly as possible.”

A major fire has ripped through a disused factory in Eastern Creek only metres from the M4.

Up to 120 firefighters from the NSW Fire Service and 80 firefighters from the Rural fire service are battling the blaze. Peter Brock Drive – Eastern Creek pic.twitter上海夜网m/vxVsXRXbwT— Chris (@CBMediaSydney) July 30, 2015

Smoke is billowing from the building on Peter Brock Drive in Sydney’s west, which is believed to have collapsed during a hail storm in April.

Up to 90 people have been evacuated from nearby factories.

Rescuers do not believe anyone is inside the collapsed building, and there have been no reports of injuries. View from 7 News helicopter of the Eastern Creek building on fire. 100 fire fighters are in attendance. #7Newspic.twitter上海夜网m/eRZrjnfGHu— 7 News Sydney (@7NewsSydney) July 30, 2015This is scary. Eastern creek. @smhpic.twitter上海夜网m/Q4djmo02av— Jennifer Duke (@JennieDuke) July 30, 2015EASTERN CREEK | #FRNSW at a bld’ing #fire on Peter Brock Dr. Multiple 000 calls. Collapsed bld’ing well alight. Fire ops underway.— Fire & Rescue NSW (@FRNSW) July 30, 2015Huge fire raging in #EasternCreek as seen from Vaucluse. Stay safe everyone! #9Newspic.twitter上海夜网m/8t31iFxzUz— Lisa (@spicyicecream) July 30, 2015

Access to water was difficult for the firefighters and multiple crews were called in to assist.

Aerial footage from news helicopters shows the collapsed roof of the Mobis Parts Australia factory building is engulfed in flames.

The smoke is billowing away from the M4, but traffic is very heavy along the motorway, especially westbound near Reservoir Road due to the fire.

Motorists have been told to expect significant delays during peak hour. EASTERN CREEK | UPDATE: 100+ f/fighters at a factory #fire on Peter Brock Dr. 90 ppl evac’d. Fire contained. Fire ops continuing.— Fire & Rescue NSW (@FRNSW) July 30, 2015EASTERN CREEK: Traffic’s very heavy on the #M4, especially w/b, due to smoke in the area from a fire on #PeterBrockDr near #ReservoirRd.— Live Traffic Sydney (@LiveTrafficSyd) July 30, 2015

NSW Fire and Rescue have asked drivers on the M4 to take care and wind up their windows.

“It’s probably tempting to do a bit of rubber-necking, but we don’t want anyone to be in an accident,” a spokeswoman for NSW Fire and Rescue said.   @7newssydney large factory fire behind twin servos on m4 westbound pic.twitter上海夜网m/r6VRJbB9Kr— Joan Caballero (@joancaballero9) July 30, 2015

A patch of grass which had caught alight, threatening nearby bushland, is now under control, a spokeswoman for NSW Fire and Rescue said.

Swans fans soak up the atmosphere at the Alexandria Hotel in Sydney. Photo: Fiona MorrisFollow more Sydney news on Facebook

The Alexandria Hotel has been given a lifeline after the City of Sydney moved to stop a developer’s plan to replace the pub with apartments following community opposition.

The city received an unusually strong public response to a redevelopment plan, which had been open for comment for the last month.

The hotel had been marked for demolition.

“There’s been a very strong community campaign,” lord mayor Clover Moore said. “Around 470 submissions and comments about the development application were received by the City of Sydney.”

The City of Sydney has slapped a heritage order on the site preventing any construction for six months while it decides whether the building’s historical value should be preserved.

A “save the Alex” campaign spread on social media last month after the pub’s new owner, the publicity shy Centennial Property Group, lodged plans to build an $8 million, four-storey residential tower with 28 apartments on the site.

However, CPG has moved quickly to have its plans approved in court, where it will face a showdown with the council.

The developer has invoked a law that allows development proposals to be heard by the NSW Land and Environment Court instead of a council if they are not finalised after 40 days.

The move could be seen as a way for the developer to have the matter decided in a forum free from emotive public hearings.

CPG did not return a call from Fairfax Media on Thursday.

The question of whether the pub has heritage value is contested.

A hotel has stood on the corner of Henderson Road and Garden Street in Alexandria since the late 1870s.

The existing building was built about the late 1920s and was operated by Tooth and Co.

Documents lodged in support of the development application acknowledge the building has historical value but argue its style of architecture is relatively common and that its heritage value has been diminished by surrounding redevelopment.

However, the building is the last sign of Alexandria’s prewar industrial heritage. All the adjacent buildings were demolished in the 1940s to make way for the eastern suburbs rail line.

For the past 15 years, the pub has been leased by Darren “Harry” McAsey, a former Sydney Swans player who has forgone pokies and turned the pub into a de facto headquarters for Sydney’s Aussie Rules fans.

Mr McAsey, who continues to run the pub, declined to comment.

The pub has become a favoured spot for Swans fans to watch the team’s away games.

If the building is granted heritage protection – by the city or the court – it may still not operate as a pub. Depending on the nature of the protection granted, developers could build on the site, but might need to preserve the building.

The matter will be heard in the Land and Environment Court in coming weeks.

She runs the Australian arm of global tech titan Microsoft, managing about 800 people and the needs of 14,000 software vendors – but Pip Marlow said a man was surprised she had time to make it to a recent breakfast meeting.

And it wasn’t because she was a busy chief executive.

“He said ‘thanks so much for coming, it must have been hard for you as a woman to make a 7.30am meeting’,” Ms Marlow said. “I don’t think there was any ill intent but I’m a big believer there is an unconscious bias.”

Her comments came a day after former prime minister Julia Gillard said the unconscious bias against women needs to be fought and the pay gap between the sexes was only the “start of a cycle of financial equity that becomes harder and harder to rectify”.

An ANZ study this week found women earn $700,000 on average less than men over their lifetime and one in five who are yet to retire have virtually no retirement savings.

Speaking at a Melbourne Press Club luncheon on Thursday, Ms Marlow said crushing unconscious bias would help achieve gender equality. “We have got to look for bias and tackle it everywhere it exists,” she said.

Ms Marlow participated in a discussion with Rea Group chief executive Tracey Fellows and Pandora Australia chief executive Jane Huxley.

Ms Huxley said “we need to draw a line in the sand and say we are not going to perpetuate the issue” of gender equality, so “future generations are not having this same conversation”.

She said solving the problem didn’t mean giving women more cash.

“It doesn’t have to be a financial decision that stops us from closing the gap. There’s education, there’s mentoring, there’s coaching, opportunities, benefits, balance – all of these things can be traded to close the equity gap.” Ms Huxley said.

She said Australia faced a bigger problem than maternity leave, which is often attributed at fuelling gender imbalance.

“The carer’s-leave issue will dwarf any issue around maternity leave from about 2018 onwards. We will need to completely rethink a full-time employment workforce versus a contingent workforce,” she said.

She said an ageing population meant decades-old work practices needed to change.

“We are going to bring back or rethink the sabbatical … how we put on contract workers, because this issue is going to make maternity leave and all of the subsequent impacts that we are discussing now … look like a walk in the park.”

Ms Huxley said a sabbatical could be used to have a baby – maternity or paternity leave – care for an older relative or further study, such as completing an Masters of Business Administration degree.

“We need to think about what extended periods of leave look like from work, and simply slot maternity leave into a list of things that we need to think about as the population ages.”

Ms Fellows said mothers were expected to be the “default” to care for sick children or fix family difficulties.

“If women want to have more senior positions there has to be a sharing of roles and responsibilities,” she said.

Most inner-city suburbs have them. Often in a row, but sometimes free-standing.  They are that 19th-century architectural gem, the single-fronted terrace.

In brick or timber, with verandahs trimmed in decorative cast iron, terrace houses are as much a part of Melbourne as hot Christmas dinners and the Boxing Day Test.

From Carlton to Brunswick, Fitzroy, Richmond, Hawthorn, Malvern, Armadale and South Yarra, terraces are being transformed into glamorous, low-maintenance homes that pack a mighty punch behind their narrow frontages.

Soaring architect-designed extensions, interiors by Melbourne’s top designers,  marble and stone finishes, oak parquetry, and en suites are all part of the new terrace package.

Despite modest facades, many have staggering interiors with cutting-edge design and spaces that have to be seen to be believed.

In Brunswick, an unrenovated single-fronted terrace costs upwards of $700,000.  In Fitzroy, a rebuilt single-fronter will set you back at least $1.3 million, says Arch Staver, director of Nelson Alexander.

Single-fronted terraces with a well-executed renovation in Malvern or Armadale are incredibly popular, according to Marshall White director Justin Long.

“They are seen as a good, low-maintenance, ready-to-go proposition retaining a lot of the charm of the inner city,” he says. “People are looking for a seamless blend of contemporary and older style with quality design and fixtures.”

Melbourne terraces, typically with a five-metre frontage, have stood the test of time because they are efficient for high-density living, according to architect Kel Greenway, the principal of GHP Architects.  He says terraces can be recycled to fit in with modern ideas of sustainability.

Greenway first renovated a terrace in Hawthorn in the 1970s and estimates he has done more than 40 since.

“The challenge is getting light into the interiors and being very clever with the way you deal with the proportions of space in what is a long-narrow building,”  he says.

Light courts, extensive glazing and opening up the space to create a sense of spatial flow all require the architect to draw on a bag of tricks.

“It’s really about being an illusionist by the way you create sight lines and integrate the indoors and outdoors,” he says.

Brett Gilbert, of Gilbert Design Group, specialises in restoring heritage houses, including terraces.

“Most clients want a house that looks very simple from the front but amazing once you get inside,” he says. “The best way is to keep the front two rooms, chop the rest off and rebuild.”

Construction of terrace houses began when Melbourne was awash with money after gold was discovered in Victoria in 1851 and the city’s population trebled in three years. As gold fortunes grew architects designed great buildings, many of them elegant terraces.

The designs became grander and more ornate, with moulded ornaments, parapets and multi-coloured brickwork. In the early 20th century the middle class abandoned terraces as they sought out the leafy quiet of the new Edwardian suburbs.

Terraces got a new lease of life in the 1950s and ’60s when immigrants from southern Europe saw them as cheap first homes in Australia, often painting them blue or green, or even pink, but in the grander suburbs, often white.

Today terraces are quintessential inner-city living – the charming, compact option to high-rise.

Styling your terrace

With 18 years’ experience as a home stylist, Maree  Mursell​ shares her secrets on turning  a terrace house into a single-fronted gem. Aim to make the narrow terrace look spacious and light.Keep interior paintwork colour the same throughout. Popular colours include Antique White USA and Hog Bristle used at no more than a quarter or half strength. Forget heritage colours.Get the  wow factor and colour with scatter cushions on beds and sofas and with artwork.Invest in a good quality sofa because you don’t want to buy something every two years. Go for “conservative contemporary” when buying furniture because it won’t date.Mirrors in hallways and bedrooms reflect light and enhance the space.Use rugs on floorboards in hallways and living areas. Neutral-toned carpets make  bedrooms look bigger.Opt for plantation shutters or simple plain blinds at the windows. 

Case study

Interior architect Mairead Murphy imbues the smallest spaces with buckets of personality.

Her creative work to add functionality, style and light to a single-fronted home in Fitzroy North was a study in accentuating the positives.

Murphy calls it “playing on strengths”, which older, single-fronted homes do have, but not always in obvious abundance.

The solution can be found in simply looking up, Murphy said.

Period homes, including single-fronted addresses, often have soaring ceilings, which offers storage space – such as extending wardrobes to full ceiling height – and an airy feel, if used well.

At her easel in her Northcote-based Maike Design Studio, Murphy put pencil to paper and rejigged the Fitzroy North floor plan, which she has named in her portfolio as “C House”.

“The house had an old extension from the 1980s on the back, so one of the main challenges was how to work with that space,” she says. “A lot of detail from the original home was missing. It was crazy what people used to do.”

When tackling the makeover of any single-fronted home, Murphy says she reconfigures the layout to better suit modern families, who tend to share zones rather than splinter off into separated formal rooms.

One of the most common requests for transforming and improving single-fronted or smaller homes is adding creating an en suite for a main bedroom and enlarging the existing central bathroom.

To achieve that in C House, among other clever touches, Murphy installed a claw bath that sits up off the floor, so it didn’t feel heavy and dominant. Better still, it was an elegant nod to the home’s era.

31 Densham Road, Armadale $2.8 million+ Agent Justin Long, Marshall White 0418 537 973 Auction August 22 at 12.30pm

Mary Bishop describes herself as a “Greek girl from Brunswick who thought Toorak was another country”, so buying a rundown terrace in Armadale was a form of inner-city migration.

Mary and husband Simon enlisted Brett Gilbert, of Gilbert Design Group, to rebuild their single-fronted terrace into a stunning home with all the bells and whistles.

Gilbert gutted the place, leaving only the front two rooms.

Interior designer, the late Stuart Rattle, brought his customary flair to the interiors, which include large swaths of marble, imported fittings and fixtures. Behind the facade of this typical single-fronted terrace are now three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a study, an open-plan living-dining hub with concertina doors to the back garden and swimming pool – and interiors fit for a design magazine.

“It’s like a tardis,” Mary says. “You open the front door and it just keeps on going.”

Gilbert says his speciality is rebuilding heritage houses to attract minimum attention from the street but to be mind-blowing inside.

Four-metre-high ceilings in the back allowed him to incorporate big windows and the nine-metre-wide block, rather than the typical five metres, allowed a side courtyard and storage space.

“We found an antique pair of gates, put antique glass behind it and when you walk through the hall it reflects the light,” he says.

Mary loves everything about the house. “It’s warm, it’s fresh, it’s great for entertaining. We use every room.”

Now it’s time to do it all over again, she says.

  Domain