keywords: Catherine Marshall
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CONTRIBUTORS
Catherine Marshall is a Sydney-based journalist and travel writer. She started her career as a broadcast journalist in her native South Africa and has written for magazines, newspapers and online publications in Australia, South Africa, the United States and Asia. She micro-blogs at www.zizzyballord.com and tweets as @zizzyballordand. Her writing can be seen at www.catherineamarshall.blogspot.com.
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AUSTRALIA
- Catherine Marshall
- 10 December 2020
4 Comments
There’s not a spare parking spot to be had in the NSW central west town of Orange. Patrons spill from cafes onto pavements and queues trail in orderly ribbons from the gelato shop’s doorway. There’s no room at any inn, and restaurants are bursting at their (COVID-compliant) seams; forget about scoring a table if you haven’t booked ahead of time. Travel is back, and regional Australia is the big winner.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Catherine Marshall
- 17 September 2020
10 Comments
The freesias are a delight, for they flower in random places on their knife-edge leaves in yellows and whites and mauves, their beauty absolving them from their dubious classification as weeds. They delight the eye, therefore they are forgiven. But why not the nightshade and the onion weed, with their delicate flowers? What makes a weed a weed, anyway?
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 23 July 2020
8 Comments
Six months grounded and I’d forgotten how to fly. I was due to take my first COVID-era flight, a brief flip from my home in Sydney to Ballina on the NSW mid-north coast for a meeting a few weeks ago. But I wasn’t ready.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 15 May 2020
7 Comments
This time last year I was smuggling contraband into one of the world’s most inaccessible places of exile. I’d stared down nervously as we descended onto the island’s lofty runway — a strip of ribbon ending abruptly high above the sea.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 20 April 2020
7 Comments
So rapidly have I adapted to this surreal existence in which we now find ourselves, the sound which was once an inseparable part of my morning routine — jets announcing the dawn as they droned overhead — has now become disturbingly anachronistic.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 19 March 2020
4 Comments
Overnight, my workplace has doubled in size. This once quiet space, filled with just the click-clacking of a keyboard and the occasional waft of classical music, now rumbles with the sound of my husband’s voice. He goes from one call to the next, discussing spreadsheets and renewals, holding conference calls and informal chats and performance reviews.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Catherine Marshall
- 20 February 2020
3 Comments
This communal outpouring during the bushfires has an opportunity to perpetuate itself indefinitely, even though the embers have been extinguished and those not directly affected by the fires have gotten on with their workaday lives. For even as the fires burned, Tourism Australia was mounting a campaign to encourage Australians to holiday locally instead of taking their patronage abroad, and to persuade international tourists to visit, too.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Catherine Marshall
- 22 January 2020
3 Comments
Turning off the main road, we burrowed now into a verdant tunnel; at the end of it stood one of Australia's flagship properties, Southern Ocean Lodge. Entering its vaulted, glass encased great room, I turned my head from the rolling waves on one side to the rolling bush on the other. Each was an ocean unto itself.
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ARTS AND CULTURE
- Catherine Marshall
- 17 December 2019
5 Comments
Stopping along a ridge, we beheld the Garhwal Himalaya range as it came into view: a tumble of mountains crowned on the horizon by an irregular, saw-toothed range ... In that brief moment between sunrise and daylight, when a once-secretive world would be illuminated, our wonder at the world was multiplied many times over.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Catherine Marshall
- 14 November 2019
10 Comments
As fires obliterated large swathes of Australia, I was largely oblivious to the news — though tenuously connected to events as I travelled through oven-hot, tinder-dry national parks in Southern Africa. It was only when I reached the airport in Johannesburg that the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to me.
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AUSTRALIA
- Catherine Marshall
- 17 October 2019
10 Comments
It's the final outpost, symbolically, demarcating Australia from its closest neighbour, PNG. The islands beyond it are a link to the cultures and geologies that lie to the north, giant stepping stones that guide Australia's Torres Straight Islanders home. For white Australians, they're the barrier marking the country's fiercely-held border.
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