By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
Living right on the Yarra River in Melbourne – or close to it over the years – I’m very aware of its varied moods. Most of the time it’s flowing very slowly by the time it gets to me. I’m always surprised, a few km upriver, how it’s always flowing rapidly as it comes ...
Fortress Australia has been much in the news of late, here in Australia and elsewhere in the world. We’ve slammed the doors shut and nobody is allowed in or out, as the BBC reports. Well not quite. While Joe Bloggs – that hypothetical Mr Everyman – and his partner Jan...
The Australian government’s Covid Safe App has been one of the more amusing failures (we need some amusement) from the pandemic. Of course the government has been extremely reluctant to admit how much it cost and how well it has worked, but as of 30 April 2021 it appe...
Locked down in Melbourne I’ve been pedaling my bicycle around and thinking about places with – for me – a Melbourne history. I’ve lived in Melbourne for far too long, a lot of those years in Richmond, a ‘suburb’ which went from Struggletown – I’m reading that book at ...
Nobody has died – yet – but the hijack of Ryanair flight 4978 was certainly a shocker. Belarus is ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’ and Alexander Lukashenko, the brutal leader, looks precisely like what he is: a Soviet era thug. The best you can say is that he didn’t shoot...
◄ Daphne Mayo When I visited Adelaide earlier this year and saw the works of Clarice Beckett at her exhibit in the Art Gallery of South Australia I commented – like assorted other visitors – that it was remarkable she was so unrecognized during her life. Well that’...
My recent Australian travels featured the climb up Mt Kosciuszko, visits to three ‘big cities,’ Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, stops at smaller centres, the Hawkesbury River, Byron Bay & Tweed Heads, Longreach and Winton, the train trip from Brisbane to Longreach ...
From Longreach I jumped in a rent-a-car and continued west to Winton, way out west. From Winton if you continue further west you reach Boulia and then you’re out of Queensland and into the Northern Territory. ▲ As you approach Winton there are signs letting you kno...
▲ Signs around Winton claim that you’re in Australia’s dinosaur capital. ▲ Part of that claim can be credited to the Lark Quarry ‘dinosaur stampede’ site. A modern building protects the site and features a café and a small theatre for introductory talks before visi...
▲ Longreach Train Station – my arrival point in the outback town after the 26 hour train trip from Brisbane ◄ Across the road from the train station is this marker for the Tropic of Capricon, a reminder that Longreach straddles the line where the ‘Temperate Zone’ t...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013