Australia is big... really big! This vast island continent could swallow up Europe whole, with room to spare. For some 50,000 years, a tiny Aboriginal population lived here in harmony with the untamed primal wilderness, undisturbed by the outside world until European colonisers arrived, spearheaded by Lieutenant James Cook in 1770. Since then Australia has flourished, and now makes her presence felt around the world, thanks in large part to the boundless enthusiasm and resourcefulness of her people, the outgoing, energetic descendants of convicts, gold miners, explorers, traders and adventurous settlers down the centuries.

You’ll travel in style on trains, boats and planes (and luxury coach) on your escorted Australian adventure, where diversity is the watchword at every turn, serving up sights, sounds and exotic experiences to delight all your senses. Our itinerary reads like a roll-call of world-renowned tourist icons, from sunset-reddened Ayers Rock to Sydney Harbour Bridge, ‘the Coathanger’, silhouetted against the evening sky; the wine-rich Barossa Valley; eucalyptus forests of the Blue Mountains; and the 1,400-mile-long underwater paradise teeming with life that is the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on the planet. Australia’s land-based fauna is extraordinary too; kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, kookaburras and emus are strangely familiar from a thousand wildlife documentaries, but never less than astonishing when you finally meet them in the flesh in their natural habitat.