Sydney, that uncultured city everyone down south is so rude about. But weather can be everything – the dark blue sunny skies, the warm days and the cool breezes made for a relaxed, languid and thoroughly enjoyable week away. It often felt like an Asian city, and it was so good to be back in a real city. Yet strangely, I think the highlight was the moment an echidna waddled over to sniff my shoe!

After eight days on the Overland track, any hostel would have been alright, even the cheapest one in Sydney that advertised itself as ‘good but not very good… if you want quality don’t stay here’. I probably should have been a little bit fussier… Creaky lino floors, slimy tiles, stained sheets, food caked into the cooker, overflowing rubbish bins in every corner. There was no toilet paper, no cold water (only hot), no cutlery. People slept in beds they shouldn’t have been sleeping in. The sitting room was occupied day and night by lonely men watching TV. Students and working holidayers were living there for months and had tired of a city in which they could not afford to do anything.

Some of the guests could see the humour in the situation, and I made a lot of friends this way. Even the cockroaches were funny. But when my bed broke and the mattress started sagging dangerously close to the person below, I was moved to a room of my own with even more cockroaches, overlooking a roof strewn with filthy old socks, and next door to a toilet and sink smeared with I-don’t-even-want-to-think-what-that-brown-stuff-was and a drain hole crawling with bugs and sodden rolls of toilet paper disintegrating on the floor. On my own, it didn’t seem so funny.

So in fleeing the cockroaches I wandered the streets and found myself in a completely fascinating lecture on Japanese tattoos.

Everything at the Art Gallery of New South Wales begins with the following phrase: ‘First of all I’d like to acknowledge the Cadigal people whose land we are on’. But I have no idea what this is saying, especially when what you then say has nothing to do with the Cadigal people. However you wade into indigenous affairs, you seem doomed to lose.

The Opera House (which really is beautiful, to my surprise, especially close up) held a festival celebrating first nations. Perhaps it was just because the weather had turned colder, or because it coincided with the hugely popular night noodle market, but the turnout wasn’t very good, despite the fact that indigenous culture seems to be increasingly fashionable. There was a cooking demonstration using native ingredients (just throw in a bit of mountain pepper and wattle seed) which really came to life when the food started flying around the harbour. There was some incredible dancing and singing, which I had assumed would largely be a tourist thing, like the didgeridoo busking elsewhere, but it didn’t really have that feel. The best, and by far the most popular, moment was when a black-skinned woman leapt up from the audience (roughly half black, half white) and joined in one of the dances. I wished I were aboriginal, ‘first to arrive and last to leave’, but no, I was stuck on the colonial side, and the only thing I could think of doing that would really help was to go home.

So I went back to my hostel, slowly opened the door and stuck my arm in to switch on the light. Little cockroaches scurried under the bed. I put on a Haydn mass, laced up my boots and started attacking them like an aboriginal dancer, crouching, stamping, hopping and twisting. I think they’ve all gone now.

In this small island state, forgotten at the bottom of the world, is ‘untouched’ wilderness (if we forget the inhabitants that lived there for 35,000 years) – mossy rainforests, rugged mountains, alpine meadows, buttongrass moors, perfumed eucalyptus forests, thundering waterfalls. In the 1930s, a 65km walking track was created through the middle of this, the Overland Track. It has become Tasmania’s biggest tourist attraction and is now too popular for its own good. You have to pay to do the walk half the year round, and the other half of the year is so crowded with hikers you’ll meet more people there than in the centre of Hobart. But when the sun goes down and everything is in darkness, or when someone sprains their ankle, or when it’s snowing and everything is wet and the only heat is what comes from your camping stove, there’s still a pang of remoteness, of isolation and vulnerability.

With side trips and not enough money for the ferry at the end (but that would be cheating anyway), my eight day walk covered 106km. There were a few scrambles up mountains, a lot of slipping over tree roots, sloshing through puddles of mud, and one famously horrendous climb with a chain to pull yourself up, but a surprisingly large amount was delightfully easy boardwalk (which prompted the best line of the trip, in a thick Irish accent – “I’m going to do a Pope!” – getting down to kiss the boardwalk).

Although I was walking alone, there were two other women also doing it on their own, and it was impossible not to be extremely sociable. I watched in envy as my new vegan friend cooked up dehydrated vegan feasts of tempeh, tomatoes, seaweed and split peas, and the Ned Kelly gang of bearded Adelaide hipsters drank their two litres of port, lovingly hauled for days, and spent the evenings giving each other massages. There were couples from Sydney comparing this walk to their last one in Machu Picchu and debating Gore-Tex and UV water purifiers. There were young men ticking mountains off their to-do list, ignoring any snow or cloud (“I just want to say I’ve done Ossa. I don’t care about the view”). Afternoons and evenings were spent lying in sleeping bags in old wooden huts, or sitting around in red headtorch light, playing cards, listening to stories of life in Egyptian gold mines, surviving the Nepalese earthquake, being a Hungarian refugee queuing up for food, and life in emergency departments in the Northern Territory (how can a man with no legs and no arms go missing from ICU? A woman comes to the hospital with an itchy head – it’s the maggots on the festering wound from where her husband beat her skull in last week), taking it in turns to recount shark encounters, recreating the sound of crocodile jaws snapping shut, longing for iceberg lettuce and gambling for chocolate and fresh carrots. The final evening was spent with a group of 11 obese Tasmanians who had decided that they cheated last year by taking the ferry at the end, so were coming back to finish the walk off properly. They were really bush, somehow, despite their rolls of fat.

The landscape is ancient, a memory of an Australia that no longer exists. Mountains that bear the scars of the ice age and plants from the old world of Gondwana that the rest of the world has forgotten. Huge trees that grow just a millimetre or two a year, encrusted with layers of lichen and covered in slimy moss. Warm, friendly hillocks of yellow buttongrass scattered among small pools of black water.

I could see the rhythm of the track going on forever – looking up at the stars each night, waking up and heading outside into the frosty morning, taking water from streams, feeling the weight of my pack sink into my back, slipping my feet into wet boots, bumping into a pademelon feeding her joey, eyeing up whether a currawong is going to try and break into my bag, just stopping to sit on a tree trunk I’m climbing over, falling into leech-infested waters in Frog Flats, fighting through bushes and branches. But each day was also a countdown to a shower and a real toilet, a night without snoring, real food.

The final day of 17km through rainforest felt like the longest walk of all, but as I trudged triumphantly into the Lake St Clair visitor centre, to celebrations of beer and chips, I was so sad it was all over. We Overlanders were bonded by a kind of pride and shared exhaustion. We drank Boags and champagne and sheltered inside a hut by a large log fire, watching the promised rain finally come down, discussing the rumours of who had been airlifted out and how you could walk for two days on a snapped ligament – the subject of this rumour soon arrived and actually showed us his impressively black swollen leg. The others started comparing their aches and pains. I sat silent, feeling awkwardly smug in having nothing to contribute.

If I could, I would have turned round and walked back the way I’d just come. Rainforest fatigue is far better than traffic jams.

The rainwater tanks offered us, quoting Auden, a new motto for the week: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” It was a strange blend of survivalist independence and highly managed tourism. It was wilderness without feeling harsh or too wild; cramped and sociable and smelly, but with a beautiful, simple, all-absorbing freedom in walking.

A weekend at Cradle Mountain was a long overdue escape from the hustle and bustle of Hobart. I really wanted to go in winter to see snow and clouds and mysterious rain, and I’m really glad I did. Nothing especially exciting happened but it was absolutely spectacular and beautiful. I walked around Dove Lake in the rain, through Ballroom Forest and the occasional bit of rainforest, and then across some bush. Most exciting were all the wombats, and the pademelon joey – so unbelievably cute. I also saw some traces of Tasmanian devils: they push their prey into the ground while eating it, so bits of the animal get crushed into the mud.

On Sunday morning I got up at 6am to see the moon and stars and a dusting of snow, and set off to catch the sunrise at a rainforest waterfall. I got about 10 seconds of sun before a snowstorm set in. Overnight the park had turned into a picturesque winter wonderland, with lichen-covered trees frosted thickly with snow.

Up towards the summit of Cradle Mountain it got snowier and snowier until everything was black and white. I was falling up to my thighs in snow, occasionally crawling on all fours – the serious people had snow shoes and crampons – before finally turning back and retreating to the emergency hut. The cloud blocked out everything below, cutting us off from the world like a dream. I was blinded by the snow and had started seeing stars, and the huge footprint holes glowed with a pale, alien turquoise light. Occasionally the cloud would lift enough to reveal the jagged peaks of Cradle Mountain, when everyone stopped and gazed in awe. And then it disappeared and we returned to the pure and magical land of black and white.

I reached Tasmania a while ago. I’m living in one of the southernmost cities in the world, and it feels southern, full of Antarctic wind and snow: we’re in the roaring 40s here – the wind that created a naval superhighway and blew ships around the world. The wind is vicious, and it tends to snow rather than rain, but the sky is nearly always blue, and there always seems to be a rainbow somewhere if you look hard enough.

I’ve been reluctant to write about Hobart for fear of making premature and prejudiced judgements that I’ll have to live with for the next six months. But it’s high time I wrote something.

We’re living in Battery Point, the quaint village-like part of Hobart just by Salamanca waterfront. The house is white and sharp-lined, part of a brown and grey modern development. It’s got a whole wall of French windows which is wonderful when it’s sunny, but there’s only one fan heater which is supposed to heat the whole house; for the first few days we froze, until we cracked and bought some electric heaters. I bought a second-hand road bike (“a piece of junk” said the man in the bike shop) and have become addicted to my morning cycle ride along the River Derwent.

Everything looks a bit cold, but perhaps that’s because it’s winter and I’ve long forgotten what summer is like. The buildings are elegant though rather cool and severe. It’s hard to believe this is a capital city; there are no skyscrapers, no fancy hotels, no large official buildings, no wailing sirens. In fact, it has the air of a rather pleasant little hilly town. There are good museums and exhibitions and plays, but it’s all so small! One day while standing at some traffic lights (they do exist) a car sped through an amber light, and it occurred to me this was the most exciting thing I’d seen.

In the water stand two enormous ice-breakers: Aurora Australis and L’Astrolabe. Next to them in Salamanca Place, the trees glow with lights every evening. It feels like the depot at the end of the world, hidden and forgotten about. Maps sometimes forget to put Tasmania on the map of Australia, or even leave it off deliberately.

And what of the work, the reason I’m here? Consider the size of Hobart and the amount of politics in inverse proportion. And I can’t explain how strange it is to find myself studying Romanian art and history here. But where better to dedicate myself to the pursuit of truth and wisdom than a place of no distractions, of pure wind and blue skies, of prisons and wilderness?

During my time in Adelaide I managed to squeeze in a trip to the Flinders Ranges, the ancient mountain range in South Australia. I was stumped by a lack of car and driving license so was looking for towns that were relatively accessible. On Alan’s recommendation (and nowhere else, he insisted, really captured the heart of the Flinders) I decided to head up to Arkaroola, a wilderness sanctuary in the Northern Flinders. We quickly bought a tent and food supplies (enough for weeks of being lost in the outback) and in two days I was ready to go.

The bus took me up to Copley, where I found a campfire and the milky way. Copley (pop. 104) is probably a typical outback town, but since it’s almost the only town I’ve ever been to in the outback, I can’t be sure. It’s tiny but the streets are huge and wide; there’s a caravan park, a filling station and mechanic, a shop and a pub, all in a line, but each one so far from the next there is no sense of town at all. Everything is centred around the train line which used to take coal to Adelaide, but that train stopped running a few months ago and now the campers have started using the railway sleepers as firewood. On the platform was a group of boys and their dogs hanging around, just sitting there, not waiting for anything.

In the morning, as I was packing up my tent, a woman came and invited me over for a piece of sourdough bread she had baked in her caravan the night before. She and her husband were some of the “grey nomads” who escape the cold winter weather and head for sunshine. And then in the caravan park café I got talking to a photographer who had just returned from Arkaroola and he bought me coffee – everyone was just so generous and helpful!

Originally I had planned to hitch a lift from Copley to Arkaroola with the mailman, but in the morning I was told that a delivery man had come to collect $9000 worth of meat from the caravan park, so instead I squeezed into the refrigerated van with an enormous puppy who sat and licked my face. Roger, the driver, was a fan of Scottish islands and history and we talked more Brexit; he told me about the geology of the landscape and Arkaroola’s removal of the sheep and cattle to restore the landscape, and just as we turned to look at one particularly interesting mountain formation, we drove into a signpost.

We passed some aboriginal villages advertising aboriginal cultural tours, and took a detour to visit an abandoned homestead. Roger compared the invasion of Australia and introduction of sheep to the Highland Clearances, which gave me a new perspective on the barrenness of the landscape (and great-grandfather Bob’s 13 sheep stations). But while the landscape might have been very different several hundred years ago, it was still extraordinarily green from all the rain and full of life.

150km later we arrived at Arkaroola. The geology is amazing and enough to turn anyone into an amateur geologist. The earth looks soft and malleable as it is squashed and pushed upwards and oozes and spills over. Each layer of rocks is about 9000 years, and they say the landscape is 2 billion years old, whatever that means.

Part of Roger’s job at Arkaroola is to act as a kind of ranger, and he invited me night spotting that evening. When it got dark he drove round in an open buggy and we set off down a track. It was only once he’d turned off the headlights and switched on the torch that I saw the great rifle on the mattressed bonnet. A voice in my head piped up (it’s only now, when the power cuts out completely, that this voice appears – the first time this trip): what are you doing in the dark getting into a car with a strange man and a gun?

Most people who come to visit never think of going out at night but it’s one of the best times to see wildlife, and they don’t seem to mind the light. We saw lots of kangaroos (or euros, common wallroo) and huge numbers of yellow footed rock wallabies, which were once endangered but are now so common at Arkaroola they’re considering introducing a predator. Suddenly Roger tensed and became very still: a rabbit, spawn of the English devil (along with cats). He picked up the rifle, took aim, and the rabbit ran away. We drove after it through the trees and bushes, but never saw it again.

I don’t think the folk at Arkaroola are used to people who don’t have their own car, and they don’t get many English people either. I was extremely lucky: not only did I get staff meals to warm me up, but I was even offered a free scenic flight. It was just awful luck it was to wrong place at the wrong time. And they said I should go back and work there!

Besides bushwalking, the main attraction of Arkaroola is the “world famous” ridgetop tour along an old mining track. They specially designed 4 wheel drives for this which can fit ten people in the back; we all had to hang on as we drove up and down the mountains along red mud tracks, which got so steep at points that they had been turned into staircases. Our driver had brilliant stories and nuggets of geology, but it was very difficult to concentrate on something so academic when we were hurtling around precipices and my fellow passengers were screaming.

At the top was an absolutely fabulous view across the mountains, and we were given lamingtons and milo (I imagine this evokes nostalgia for Australians) as the sun set and everything glowed red.

At night time the temperature really fell. The first morning at Arkaroola I got out of my tent to find it steaming like a haystack. The second morning I reached out to unzip the door and felt a solid wall, hardened by a layer of ice. But I was saved by my merino, yet again.

I’d been promised a lift back to Copley with someone. It turned out to be a convoy of six 4wds heading around central Australia and across the Simpson desert. They were pretty serious about it: they’d been planning the journey for 12 months and had got their cars specially fitted out with extra storage and adjusted suspension for the corrugated roads. Each car had one long aerial for radio communication (so they could let the cars behind know if there was a bumpy creek coming up or an emu in the road) and another long aerial which turned into a 3m long sand flag. It rather puts an end to my dreams of crossing the outback, just as I was getting a taste for it.

Another flight. I moved myself into suburban Adelaide for a couple of weeks, watching the lorikeets feed outside the windows and waiting for a koala to cross the garden. Alan and Jan live a life of what I might call suburban hedonism, where ‘moderation’ is forbidden and philistinism revered. I was delighted to see they are continuing my grandmother’s chocolate drawer.

I didn’t see very much of the city centre; it’s the dead season in the “Festival State”, so yet another place I’ll have to come back to. But I did visit some of the museums and galleries, including the Museum of Economic Botany, a very old fashioned dark room full of cabinets displaying ancient specimens of plants with explanations of how they are used by aborigininals and trade. I also spent a long time looking at Pacific cultures, and was transfixed by a very strange video of a man hunting sharks, in which the spirits of his ancestors live, with magic, a harpoon and his bare hands.

Afterwards, walking along North Terrace I was stopped by a man from a bush conservation charity: “Is that a Yorkshire accent? Where are you from?” “London.” “Oh, I thought so.”

As I passed the Grand Lodge of South Australia I saw a sign announcing free guided tours every Thursday afternoon at 2 pm. It just so happened to be 2 pm on Thursday, so I went in and met the 84 year-old Freemason guide; it was just the two of us in the end. We began in the basement looking at the parquet floor in rooms smelling of orange squash and soft biscuits and then worked our way up into the main rooms. He showed me the hierarchy of dusty aprons and lit up the red star on the floor and the letter ‘G’ hanging from the ceiling (“it stands for geometry, not God”), and then let me sit in the Master’s chair and bang the hammer! When he joined in his twenties there were 26,000 Freemasons in South Australia; now there are 2,400. They must be really desperate for new members.

I wanted to know what they actually do in their meetings. “Well, there’s the usual business of meetings, you know, the minutes of the last meeting, accounts, and then there’s a lot of ceremony”. So they don’t really do anything, as far as I can tell. When I asked about the loving cup, he started talking about his recent trip to London and how he had hobnobbed with the grandchildren of the Russian Tsars. We went back downstairs and he handed me a leaflet on joining the Order of the Eastern Star; the leaflet had photos of middle aged women in long white skirts talking to other middle aged women in long white skirts. It was all rather sad.

We went on weekend drives beyond Adelaide, along long straight roads lined with gum trees. Every time we stopped so I could jump out to take a photo, I was hit by the smell of eucalyptus. At points there were whole sections of woodland where the trunks were charred black from bushfires.”Koala!” Jan suddenly shouted as we hurtled along. And there it was, hugging a tree, sharp claws and fluffy fur, staring down at us.

We drove through glorious rolling hills covered in vineyards and wineries producing some of the best wine in the world. We tasted tawny port, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Riesling, pretending to detect overtones of orange blossom and lines of acidity between the notes of Christmas pudding and prune. As we passed through the Barossa and Clare valleys, Alan and Jan told me stories of their time hot air ballooning, pointing out landing spots, complaining about the stresses of weather and wind changes, and giggling about the proposals Alan has prodded men through. Going south to the Murray River and beyond, we made a half-hearted attempt to go whale watching, but our failure was irrelevant in the evening sunlight glowing on the rocks and the turquoise water.

The Australian election was rather less exciting than the Brexit drama, but at least it moved at a pace you could keep up with. I queued up to vote and met the leader of the Green Party in South Australia (I think). A famous man I’m told. The current in-party is the Nick Xenephon Team, formed around an independent MP; it seems pretty decent and sensible, but every time I see a poster with his face on, it just seems like a bizarre anti-gambling personality cult.

Alan and Jan have been so generous. It is the debt of one generation to the next. On my last morning, as the wind lashed about, we ate toasted crumpets with caviar and chocolate milk, and went for a walk on the beach. An idyllic farewell to the mainland.

I’m not sure why I chose to end my overland travels in Hong Kong, but now I had to fly to Melbourne. The flight was painless and dull, reinforcing my desire to stop flying altogether. Perhaps this means I’m stuck here for a while.

I descended into the thick wintery mist hanging over Melbourne and was greeted by my uncle Alan and his vanishing car. It felt like arriving home at the end of an adventure, like a silent smelly savage returned to civilization, even though I know there’s a whole new hemisphere to explore. I met my gorgeous 17-month-old first cousin once removed (now a professional model) and I was initiated into the world of car racing.

Winter was promised, but I could only snigger and feel superior – no one’s even wearing a coat. There was a little bit of rain, to be fair, but nowhere near enough to justify the cafe signboards advertising central heating and mulled wine.

Melbourne is cool. It’s got a real hipster vibe and an obsession with protein. Industrial warehouses and rather elegant Victorian houses have become coffee shops serving turmeric lattes and tim tam toffee doughnuts, while old pubs with dark green tiles serve craft beers (“as cold as your ex-girlfriend’s heart” – there, that proves the weather – and served in schooners not pints). Monochrome people walk around in long coats, hats and skinny jeans, sipping green smoothies. Vintage clothes shops line streets whose walls are plastered with peeling posters and graffiti.

The names are lovely (Fitzroy, Collingwoood, Sassafras, Ferntree Gully) and have been recycled from other places, which makes them easy to remember, but navigation is a nightmare because they’ve messed up the positioning. Whoever heard of Brighton being just south of Malvern, or Kew being east of the Southbank, or Box Hill north of Notting Hill! At least Croydon seems to be in the right place.

Outside the city, in the wonderfully named Dandenongs, is a rainforest. We drove out, past moulting gum trees dripping with bark, to a little spot for afternoon tea with tablecloths and lorikeets. How nice it is to rediscover quaintness.

The museums and galleries are stylish and superb. I’ve also discovered that most of Hollywood seems to be Australian. There’s a fabulous moving image museum putting this in context, going from the early, rather racy, Hollywood movies to the weirdest Youtube videos and internet memes, and ending in shadow puppetry. So there was loads to do, even for the non-yummy mummy.

People seemed enormously friendly and genuinely interested in you, from the coffee shop waitresses to the museum security guards. Or at least they all beamed and started chatting to me about Brexit and whatnot (they were upset Britain ever joined the EU in the first place). I’ve decided to try and adopt the sunny Aussie disposition, so even though I didn’t see any penguins at St Kildas, it doesn’t matter – I’ll be back!