BOOK: Sacred Places

The Sagamatha-Wollumbin Axis Mount Warning — Byron Bay Australia’s Twelfth Sacred Place Disclaimer: your author has recently returned, disillusioned, to the Sydney area after living in Australia’s 12thSacred Place for 14 years. The objectivity of negative comments to follow is therefore open to question. My wife and I lived on a beautiful, bountiful sub-tropical acre […]

The Great Barrier Reef Australia’s Eleventh Sacred Place “He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small, For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.” This verse, from the end of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is a timeless canon of the Animal Liberation […]

Land of the Lightning Man Kakadu — Australia’s Tenth Sacred Place From November to March each year, in Australia’s wet season tropics, a war rages between two spiritual beings and their hosts. These are Nyalyod, sometimes personified as an airborne fire python, and Namarrgon, The Lightning Man. The central theater of this metaphysical battle is […]

Gateway to the World The Kimberly-Broome Australia’s Ninth Sacred Place As I pen these words, East Timor has just had bestowed upon it by the United Nations full sovereign state independence. This is the climax of four centuries of foreign occupation: first by the Portuguese, for a short time, in World War II by the […]

Far-West Tropic of Sagittarius Australia’s Eighth Sacred Place When I was just four months old, on November 19, 1941, my soul was painfully impacted by one of the most tragic single events in Australia’s history. On the opposite side (I was in Sydney) of this wide, brown land, the Australian Navy’s flagship, HMAS Sydney, was […]

The New Gestsemane — The South-West Australia’s Seventh Sacred Place When Jonathon Swift, in 1726, chose his location of Lilliput for his immortal novel, Gulliver’s Travels, he probably knew that this south-west coast of Terra Incognita Australis was the furthest habitable point from any civilization on earth. And it still is. Western Australia’s capital, Perth, […]