New South Wales
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On 13th May 1787, Captain Arthur Phillip left England with eleven ships filled principally with soldiers and convicts. He landed successfully at Botany Bay on 18th
January 1788, but found the position too exposed and moved to Port Jackson, a few kilometres further north, and established a new settlement there on 26th January 1788. |
The new settlement was to become Sydney and the new colony New South Wales, Sydney being named after Lord Sydney, the British Secretary of State for Home Affairs, who had authorised the colonisation scheme. There were 1,373 new settlers, of whom 732 were convicts.
Now New South Wales is the most populous of the Australian states with 6.5 million people, almost exactly one-third of the total population of Australia. Many visitors see only the coastal areas, but inland lies a different type of outback terrain well worth investigating. Your impression of the state, and indeed of Australia, will be totally different depending on whether you have simply followed the tourist groove up the coast or whether you have explored the splendour of the interior.
New South Wales Transport
Transport in New South Wales is operated under the generic name of Countrylink. The only services not under the control of Countrylink are the city and medium distance
rail services around Sydney, which are operated by CityRail; the city and large town local bus services, the long-distance interstate bus services operated by McCafferty’s, Greyhound, Premier, Firefly and Murray’s; and just a few intra-state privately operated bus services.
Countrylink operates trains to Brisbane, Murwillumbah, Armidale, Moree, Dubbo, Broken Hill, Canberra, Griffith and Melbourne, and a network of bus connexions from those trains to places all over the state. If you purchase either a national or a state rail pass, you can use all of these services. With the national pass, you can use the CityRail metropolitan and medium-distance services as well. Here again is one of the basic misconceptions of visitors who think that if they purchase a rail pass they are restricted to using trains. That is not the case.
When you come to use these buses, you will find that they are not usually marked with the name of Countrylink. Countrylink lets contracts to local bus companies to operate them on its behalf. Nevertheless, they can be used by rail pass holders. Countrylink offers passes for use for a fixed period, and also various journey passes with unlimited stops. These are well worth considering, since travel by train is more comfortable than travel by long-distance bus and the coverage of the state is far more comprehensive. The Backtracker Rail Pass is valid on all Countrylink services (including those which run beyond the state borders to Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne and other places). It also has four vouchers for single journeys on CityRail services, but is available only to overseas residents.
Only the passes to or from Cairns are available to Australian residents. The others are limited to overseas residents. All passes are valid for six months and can be used in either direction on Countrylink and Queensland Railways services, but without anyback-racking.
The long-distance bus companies offer passes too, but not specifically for New South Wales. There are, however, passes which run up the east coast from Sydney to Cairns. If you look around the travel agents in King’s Cross in Sydney, you can often find such passes offered at discounted rates, and also discounted bus tickets to Brisbane and Melbourne.
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