Early in 2005 I travelled up and down Australia’s east coast on assignment for Lonely Planet. This was for LP’s Australia book. I wrote the introduction to the NSW chapter, the NSW North and South Coast sections, and the Far North Coast Hinterland section. All up, my contributions totalled 35,000 words.

I’m only including excerpts from my introductory and special-subject material, rather than accommodation and restaurant reviews or transport information.

Selected material by Simon Sellars from Australia 13, Lonely Planet Publications, November 2005.

NEW SOUTH WALES (intro)
New South Wales is Australia’s most populous state and home to Sydney, with its attention-grabbing bridge and opera house and a cockiness that bites you on the bum. These are default images that visitors conjure up when they come to NSW, but the state is more than just a backdrop to Sin City.

New South Wales was the site of Australia’s first permanent European settlement, and as such, the New South Welsh often believe the rest of the country should come to them. That pose has spread from the swish capital to cities like Newcastle and Wollongong, once branded industrial backwaters, now reinventing themselves with tourism-fuelled gusto.

In between the urban sprawls, NSW is Australia’s most diverse state, filled with outback vistas, Alpine territory, verdant rainforests and golden surf. So why don’t you pack your tent and hiking boots and lose yourself in the Blue Mountains or any number of rugged National Parks? Or else get a ‘Brazilian’, pack your wax and board and hotfoot it to the loose-as-a-goose coast, one of the state’s most popular trails: the south coast is filled with dainty historical hamlets and fishing villages, while the north is home to unbroken beaches and resort towns. The far-north hinterlands are filled with a heady mix of lush rainforest and alternative lifestyles.

Naturally, with such a geographical playground to explore, NSW is ideal for mainlining adrenalin – take your pick from canyoning, skiing, surfing, whale-watching and even goanna-pulling (not what it seems).

This remarkable spread of attractions ensures that NSW is the gateway for most visitors to Australia, and with excellent road, rail and air networks, you can rest easy knowing you’ll be able to whisk from place to place with consummate ease.

SOUTH COAST: TOP FIVE CULTS OF PERSONALITY
The South Coast’s quiet charm has always attracted its fair share of unique individuals. This is a guide to some of the most interesting historical figures to have graced the region since Charles Jackson stretched a line across the Kiama blowhole, took a deep breath and hoped for the best…

Ben Boyd
Charismatic Boyd, a former London stockbroker, liked to gamble with other people’s money. He sunk a small fortune into two whaling settlements at Twofold Bay – Boydtown and East Boyd, only for his British backers to get cold feet and vote him out of the syndicate. Boyd left Sydney in disgrace and was last seen in the Solomon Islands in 1851, after going ashore to hunt duck; his deserted rowboat was later found next to a gun and a multitude of footprints. They say Boyd was killed by head-hunters, a salutary lesson that the spectacular, failed Aussie entrepreneurs of the 1980s singularly neglected to heed.

Old Tom, the Killer Whale
In the 1920s, in Twofold Bay, Old Tom led a pod of killer whales (including Stranger, Hooky and Humpy) that was known as the ‘Killers of Eden’. This mob was hell-bent on genocide. Finding stray baleen whales, they’d shepherd them into the bay, alerting whalers by thrashing the water with their tails. Once the baleen was harpooned, Tom would roll over its blowhole so it couldn’t breath; Stranger, Hooky and Humpy would swim below to prevent the victim from diving deeper. The pod’s reward was the tongue and lips, leaving the carcass for the whalers.

DH Lawrence
In 1922, the famous English novelist took a break from scandalising the Poms to spend the winter in Thirroul. With wife Frieda, Lawrence lived in a house named Wyewurk, where he wrote almost all his famous novel Kangaroo. Wyewurk still stands, looking much as Lawrence described it in the book: ‘A real lovely brick house, with a roof of bright red tiles.’ Kangaroo has become an unofficial guide to Thirroul, even though the town bears little resemblance to Lawrence’s world. Rampant development, as always, threatens to turn it into an identikit suburb of Wollongong.

Zane Grey
This prolific American writer was the first to use the Western as a serious literary genre, but to Aussies he’ll always be known for An American Angler in Australia, the book that put Bermagui on the global stage. In 1936, Grey, an obsessive fishermen, heard about the angling in Bermagui and decided to try his luck. The outsider was met with bemusement, but the locals changed their tune when he snagged a 460-kilogram tiger shark, then the largest fish ever to have caught with rod and reel. Later, Grey caught the South Coast’s first-ever yellowfin tuna in.

Arthur Boyd
This much-loved Australian artist was known for paintings that were deeply mired in personal experience: love, anger, religious attitudes. Later, he became immersed in the Australian landscape, buying the beautiful property Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River, before donating it for use as a gallery and artists’ retreat. Boyd said that ‘you can’t own a landscape’ and his decision to release Bundanon was borne from his desire for the public to be inspired by the place, rather than it benefiting just a chosen few.

THE GREAT PIE WARS: BEST PIES ON THE COAST
The Australian fetish for meat pies is legendary: Australians eat 260 million of them a year, around 13 per citizen. In the ’70s, a song from a well-known TV commercial featured a continuous refrain: ‘Football, Meat Pies, Kangaroos and Holden Cars’ – everything that defined Australia at the time. Actually, it wasn’t so long ago, before the current era of ultra-professionalism, that elite Australian sportsmen would turn up to training smoking a ciggy, drinking a beer and eating a pie (trailing their pet roo by a leash, no doubt). To sum up, pie crust in your moustache was a badge of pride – even if you were female.

Along the North Coast, you’re more likely to find kangaroo in your pie – this is Pie Country, make no mistake, and there’s a lot of showmanship around that tried to convince us of that. During research for this book, it seemed that every one-horse town we visited claimed to make ‘Australia’s Best Pies’, but often they were just the same old deal: insubstantial crust, watery filling, mystery meat.

If you’re salivating already, make sure you visit the following three pie emporiums; all have won medals in the prestigious Great Aussie Pie Competition (www.greataussiepiecomp.homestead.com/Page1.html). Every pie they churn out is, truly, an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a crust: wondrous to behold and indisputably unquantifiable. It’s not all about the flashy fillings, though: those creamy, flaky crusts are similarly breathtaking.

Red Ned’s Pies (ph: 4984 1355; www.redneds.com.au; Shop 3/17-19 Stockton St, Nelson Bay; pies $4-5) Fifty different kinds, baked fresh daily, everything from your standard savoury mince to the lobster-prawn-and-barramundi pie (with coconut-cream sauce, leeks and celery, and topped with caviar, no less). Don’t forget the Indian buttered-chicken pies, either, or the kangaroo teriyaki, the Thai satay vegetarian…Kingpin Pie King Barry Kelly learnt his trade in top-shelf international hotels and his philosophy is simple: he gets a kick out of watching people stare at his specials board, goggle-eyed (anyone for BBQ-bourbon-and-beef pie?).

The Pie Man (ph: Tea Gardens 4997 1733, Raymond Terrace 4987 1912; www.thepieman.com.au; Tea Gardens Shop 3/17-19 Stockton St, Raymond Terrace 26 Sturgeon St; open 24hrs) Motto: ‘I only have pies for you’. The variety isn’t as bewildering as Red Ned’s, but the quality is right up there. The Pie Man sticks to favourites including prime beef, Beef Burgundy and Thai chicken pies, peppered with a few innovative variations like the incredible Oyster Kilpatrick. The Pie Man himself, Randall Smith, grew up in Adelaide, home of the notorious pie floater – a meat pie floating in pea soup. Anyone who has tasted one of these horrorshows will know why he’s now obsessive about creating the perfect pie.

Fredo Pies (ph: 6566 8226; www.fredopies.com.au; 75 Macleay St, Frederickton; pies $4-5; h7am-7pm) The Marilyn Monroe statues out the front will grab your attention, but the amazing pies will keep you here for evermore. ‘Mrs Pie’, Nola Turnbull, claims to have 160 recipes in her possession, with a rotating 50 made fresh daily. The emphasis is country-style, as witnessed by the superlative, never-to-be matched lamb-mint-and-honey pie; and the rabbit mulligatawny; the emu; the ostrich… For vegos, the Farmhouse Potage is on a par, as is the asparagus-cheese-and-pasta pie and the vegetable mornay.

THE GLOWING CROSS OF LISMORE
In 1978 Lismore attracted global attention when a headstone in the local cemetery was discovered to be glowing luminescent, 24 hours a day. Word spread and soon the site was attracting hundreds of visitors a night, from far and wide, all looking for enlightenment (and not all of them high on the local weed). Some talked to the cross and even rubbed it for luck; others just sat and contemplated. The local papers devoted many column inches to the phenomenon, citing all manner of explanations, including the supernatural. Finally, the burning issue of Lismore being overrun by hippies and freaks had been pushed off the front pages by something even weirder.

The headstone belonged to the grave of William Steenson, who died in Mullumbimby in 1907 when he tried to stop an out-of-control train carriage. It turned out that the Steenson family had known about the spectral quality of Williams’s cross, and had colluded for 60 years with locals to keep the mystery a secret for fear of vandalism, until an out-of-towner happened upon it.

The light was known locally as the ‘ghost on the hill’, but what really made it shimmer? Some say the granite must have had some kind of phosphorescent quality; tests were undertaken, with all manner of methods to control the angle of light on the grave, but nothing could be determined for sure. Sensationalism obfuscated serious investigation into the matter and it remained an oddity, deepening in 1986 when the cross suddenly vanished. It has never been recovered.

Two years later a replica was constructed from the same material, but inevitably there has never even been the hint of a glimmer from it.