Awesome family holidays for last-minute parents

Dilvin Yasa Dilvin Yasa
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Worried you’ve missed the boat on top summer deals for the Christmas holidays? Dilvin Yasa says there are plenty of great last-minute family holidays to be had – if you know where to look.

If you’re anything like me, summer holiday panic usually sets in somewhere around the end-of-year school concert and that stomach-dropping chat with another parent who tells you about that wonderful new Fijian resort they’ve booked for Christmas. Of course, if you are me, you also have the panic of knowing that if you don’t book something today, you’ll be spending the next few weeks sitting under your mother’s carport, eating sun-warmed snags as your children wrestle with the sun-warmed hose – a holiday you’ve been known to previously sell as a ‘STAYCATION!’

 

I won’t lie; this fear alone is enough to prompt me to book something quickly these days, but should you find yourself facing a similar situation (and you don’t fancy dropping in at my mum’s), you’ll be pleased to know there are plenty of amazing family holiday destinations you can access with little-to-no planning.

Capital gains: Canberra

When I was a child, you only ever went to Canberra as punishment, but since the hipsters, their coffee machines and a multitude of Michelin-starred restaurants have moved in, our nation’s capital has long since shaken off its ‘kill me now’ tag and groomed itself into one of the hottest cities around.

 

For a start, it’s probably more child-friendly than most, with a wealth of fun museums such as Questacon, National Museum of Australia and The National Dinosaur Museum, and it has a multitude of gargantuan outdoor spaces packed to the brim with activities such as kayaking at Burley Griffin, cycling Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, and riding the miniature steam train at Cockington Green Gardens. Add to that accommodation options that range from sleeping with a lion or brown bear just outside your window at Jamala Wildlife Lodge, to the bright and bold East Hotel, which offers families interconnecting Kids Studios with bunk beds, play tables and an Xbox 360.

 

The cherry on top? Since Canberra is still considered on the up and up, you’re likely to find some truly great last-minute deals through sites such as lastminute.com.au and booking.com

Need tips, more detail or itinerary ideas tailored to you? Ask AT.

AI Prompt

Road trippin’

Embrace those ‘character building’ driving holidays of your youth and treat your own family to a similar experience (this time with air-con, water and a spare tyre) by taking advantage of super-low domestic fares and hiring a car at your destination.

 

With minimal planning, you can fly to Launceston, Tasmania, pick up a hire car from the airport and embark on a stunning driving holiday around the northern part of the state where the produce is mouth-watering, the scenery jaw-dropping and the activities such as Penny Royal Adventures, Cataract Gorge Chairlift and basin, Hollybank Treetops Adventure, and Tasmazia & The Village Of Lower Crackpot in Sheffield, suitable for young and old.

 

Fancy somewhere warmer?  Take the well-trodden path between Sydney and Yamba (on the way to the Gold Coast), visiting all the ‘Big’ things before eventually settling at a campground at Yuraygir National Park. Offering cliff-top sites overlooking stunning beaches, the park is located close enough to both towns to visit regularly, but is far enough that you’re unlikely to be affected by summer crowds (and pricing).

 

For other holiday parks you can match with a driving holiday, check out Turu, Big4 Holiday Parks and Discovery Parks.

Kangaroo Island time

What’s a guaranteed way to have the (last-minute) holiday of your dreams without having it crushed by crowds or surge pricing? You head somewhere many don’t know too much about… somewhere like South Australia’s spectacular Kangaroo Island.

 

Located 13 kilometres off the coast, Kangaroo Island is a wilderness wonderland where the seals, sea lions and yes, kangaroos, appear to outnumber the human population of some 4,500 by quite a bit.  Simply hire a 4WD and earmark visiting the sea lions at Admirals Arch, enjoying a guided seal tour at Seal Bay Conservation Park, and feeding  pelicans at Kingscote as ‘must dos’. Then rest your head at one of the many campgrounds scattered around the island, hire one of the waterfront private residences also readily available through sites such as Stayz or Airbnb, give yourself over to the ultimate luxury by checking in at LifeTime Private Retreats.

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The Great Barrier Reef alternative: Bundaberg

Going to the Great Barrier Reef for a last-minute summer holiday may not sound like a particularly good deal – until you realise the trick to successfully staking your claim on a palm-fringed beach is to dismiss the big ‘names’ and instead look at neighbouring towns, which not only tend to be cheaper, but are at less risk of being booked out by the time you make the call.

 

Lady Musgrave already booked out? Look to staying at Bundaberg, AKA the launch pad to the Southern Great Barrier Reef. With the town as your base, you can take the kids to visit Mon Repos Beach – home to the largest turtle rookery in the South Pacific, enjoy the beauty of Lady Elliot Island where you can swim straight off the beach over the reef, and you can visit the charming towns of Childers and Gin Gin where you can eat your body weight in gorgeous fresh produce. And then, of course, there’s the rum, but that’s another story…

Tips for booking last-minute

Help yourself score a better deal over the school holidays by liking your favourite/preferred hotels on social media or signing up to their newsletters. Doing so will put you ahead of the queue for any last-minute flash sales (likewise for airfares).

 

Consider also house swapping through Aussie House Swap or by hiring a private rental at the destination of your choice. Not only will this work out to be cheaper, but you’ll also (usually) have a full kitchen and laundry ready to go (reality stops for no one).

 

Download apps such as Skyscanner, which will not only notify you of price drops from airlines and online travel agents, but let you search through lists of suitable destinations for your desired travel period arranged by price, cheapest to most expensive.

Dilvin Yasa
Dilvin Yasa is a freelance journalist, author and TV presenter whose travels have taken her from the iceberg graveyards of Antarctica to the roaring rapids of Uganda. Always on the lookout for that next unforgettable meal, wildlife moment or 80s-themed nightclub, she is inexplicably drawn to polar destinations despite detesting the cold.
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This scenic Victorian region is the perfect antidote to city life

    Craig Tansley Craig Tansley
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    Video credit: Visit Victoria/Tourism Australia

    The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.

    There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd. In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.

    Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.

    ‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.

    Exchanging city chaos for country calm

    kangaroos near Halls Gap, Grampians National Park
    The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)

    I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.

    I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.

    The trails and treasures of the Grampians

    sunrise at Grampians National Park /Gariwerd
    Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)

    Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.

    Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles. I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.

    walking through a cave, Hollow Mountain
    Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)

    There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail, Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.

    Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.

    “There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.

    wildflowers in Grampians National Park
    Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)

    We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.

    Grampians National Park at sunset
    Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)

    The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.

    What else is on offer in The Grampians?

    a boat travelling along the Wimmera River inDimboola
    Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)

    You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.

    And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).

    dining at Pomonal Estate
    Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)

    Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.

    The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.

    Salingers of Great Western
    Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)

    There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.

    The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.

    Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.

    And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.

    Kookaburras on a tree
    Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)

    You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.

    A traveller’s checklist

    Staying there

    Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity.

    Playing there

    abseiling down Hollow Mountain
    Hollow Mountain is a popular abseiling site.

    Go abseiling under the stars or join a guided hike with Absolute Outdoors. Visit Wama, Australia’s first environmental art centre. Check out Dimboola’s eccentric Imaginarium.

    Eating there

    steak, naan bread and beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap serves a great steak on naan bread.

    Eat world-class cuisine at Pomonal Estate. Dine and stay at much-revered icon Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld. The ‘steak on naan’ at Halls Gap brewhouse Paper Scissors Rock, can’t be beat.

    Dunkeld Arboretum in Grampians National Park
    The serene Dunkeld Arboretum.

    For Halls Gap’s best breakfasts head to Livefast Cafe. Sip local wines at Great Western’s historic wineries, Best’s Wines, Seppelt Wines and Norton Estate Wines.

    two glasses of beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Sink a cold one at Paper Scissors Rock.