On the Beach in Luxury

Australian Traveller Australian Traveller
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As a travelling nation, there’s no question that we do like to be beside the seaside. And from triple-decker beach bungalows to booking out your very own island, there are plenty of ways to get sand between your toes in a luxurious fashion.

Around the world, and certainly across Australia, our idea of luxury in a beach setting differs wildly. For some it’s more of a bare-bones Wilson Island experience – a tiny coral cay southeast of Cairns – where lodgings are simple and the focus is on the surrounds, the snorkelling and diving, and the back-to-nature sense of solitude.

 

For others, luxury on the beach suggests – nay, demands – a five star, triple story, full-service private beach house with swimming pool, sweeping views, attentive butler and all the trimmings. So come with us now as we explore a little from each of these worlds, from peeking inside some of Australia’s premium, most sought after beachfront resorts and properties, to blowing the budget and renting your own island.

Beach houses, resorts & more

AT had a great time researching this one. Being able to pry even for a brief moment into the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and seeing where they rest their weary heads while on holiday, has been an education in itself.

 

Byron Bay, for example, that famous millionaires’ playground, is home to exclusive beachfront hotels like Rae’s on Watego’s, which can do you a deal that includes room, restaurant and spa treatment for $3080 a night (www.raes.com.au ). But wait, we’re just getting started . . .

 

How about a breathtaking private home that has only recently found its way onto the rental market? Villa Ewingsdale 5106 just minutes from Byron Bay, a five-bedroom palace of a place fit for royalty.

 

In high season, with a private chef, your own Porsche Cayenne and limousine airport transfers, you’re looking at $31,100 a week. Check out uniqueestates.com.au  for stunning luxury properties – including the six-bedroom Trinity Palace Villa 505 on a private beach 15 minutes north of Cairns that truly must be seen to be believed.

 

Still in the northeast of Australia, the now-famous new kid on the block, qualia on Hamilton Island, has reached its final stage with the installation of a helipad and completion of 33 luxury Leeward Pavilions, bringing the total to 60 for the resort. Each has west-facing views to take full advantage of the dramatic island sunsets and rent for $1450 per night, twin share, with the larger Beach House costing more than twice that amount (www.qualia.com.au ).

 

In the same neck of the woods, around 25 minutes drive from Proserpine and just northeast of Airlie Beach, lies an unbelievable private property called Woodwark Bay Retreat. This lush 4000-acre tropical retreat (surrounded by 50,000 more acres of national park) consists of two stylish main houses, a central communal lodge and a variety of smaller huts set amid the rainforest, with just a short stroll across close-cropped greens to the water’s edge and stunning views out to Double Cone Island. The entire property rents for an astonishing $67,000 a week in high season (www.woodwarkbay.com.au) .

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

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Heading south

Perhaps Sydney’s most expensive suburb when it comes to renting private beach houses, Palm Beach also leads the region in style – and exemplary choice. A few standouts include the “Caribbean Hideaway" (a refurbished four-bedroom 1920s sandstone home for $17,000 to $20,000 per week); the “Midori" (a modern, multi-levelled masterpiece in white and glass for around $18,000 per week); and the “Lanai" (with a stunning upper level comprising of 700m2 of living area, pool, cabana and more for around $30,000 per week in summer). 

 

Another Palm Beach home that shouldn’t be overlooked is Kalua, a national trust property that was one of the first homes to be built in the area. Seven bedrooms, wide verandahs, massive gardens, tennis court, swimming pool, a chipping green . . . all sprawled across two acres of street frontage right on Ocean Road – and it can be yours for $38,500 a week in summer (www.sydneyvillas.com ).

 

Heading across to South Australia, their latest luxury addition is the superlative Southern Ocean Lodge on Kangaroo Island, with one night in the Osprey Pavilion overlooking spectacular Hanson Bay costing around $1800 per person, twin share. (If you’d like that room all to yourself, you’re talking $2700). There are 21 suites in total at the environmentally conscious Southern Ocean Lodge, which could well represent the most luxurious experience on offer in the region (www.southernoceanlodge.com.au ).

Rent your own island

The idea of emerging from your luxury island bungalow early one morning, before breakfast, say around dawn, just as the discreet staff are stirring to life, then looking around you at the beaches and the palms, throwing your arms wide and saying, “all this is mine . . ." Well, there are few things in life that can compare.

 

There are a number of top-end options for making this dream a reality – from the aforementioned Wilson Island (maximum of 12 people for around $25,000 for five nights) through to Double Island off the coast of Palm Cove in northern Queensland (where 40 guests for a week will set you back a lazy $157,500). Bedarra Island is another attractive option just off the coast from Cairns, and features 16 villas – including the gorgeous Pavilion and The Point – and can be yours for just under $200,000 for five nights.

 

But AT’s favourite, and most ludicrously luxurious, would have to be securing for yourself the entirety of Lizard Island in the far north of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It remains one of Australia’s true luxury resort islands, and features two dozen private beaches studded with 40 villas to house 80 of your friends.

 

To claim the entire place as your own – which has been done before, rest assured, be it for a wedding or for the fly-in-fly-out visit of an A-List celebrity – costs as little as $454,000 for five nights during peak season (July to November).

 

And that figure includes everything, from transfers to meals to beverages to selected island activities like diving, sailing, nature walks and gourmet picnic hampers.

 

If you can’t quite muster the dollars to book the entire place out, a four-night Lizard Island all-inclusive package for two people in a top-end Pavilion is only $13,791. Check out www.lizardisland.com.au  for more info. 

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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.