BRISBANE  By far the largest city in Queensland, BRISBANE is not quite what you'd expect from a state capital with almost one-and-a-half million residents. Although there is urban sprawl, and high-rise buildings, slow-moving traffic, crowded streets and the other trappings of a business and trade centre, there's little of the pushiness that usually accompanies them. To urbanites used to a more aggressive approach, the atmosphere is slow, even backward (a reputation the city would be pleased to lose), but to others the languid pace is a welcome change and reflects relaxed rather than regressive attitudes.

In 1823, responding to political pressure to shift the "worst type of felons" away from Sydney and the southeast - the further the better - the New South Wales government sent the Surveyor General John Oxley north to find a suitable site for a new prison colony. Sailing into Moreton Bay , he encountered three shipwrecked convicts who had been living with Aborigines for several months; they introduced Oxley to a previously unknown river. He explored it briefly, named it "Brisbane" after the governor, and the next year established a convict settlement at Redcliffe on the coast. This was immediately abandoned in favour of better anchorage further upstream, and by the end of 1824 today's city centre had become the site of Brisbane Town.  Ashmore  Broadbeach  Gold Coast  Surfers Paradise

Twenty years on, a land shortage down south persuaded the government to move out the convicts and free up the Moreton Bay area to settlers. Immigrants on government-assisted passages poured in and Brisbane began to shape up as a busy port - an unattractive, awkward settlement of rutted streets and wooden shacks. By far the largest regional settlement of the times, Brisbane was the obvious choice as capital of the new state of Queensland on its formation in 1859, though the city's first substantial buildings were constructed only in the late 1860s, after fire had destroyed the original centre and state bankruptcy was averted by Queensland's first gold strikes at Gympie. Even so, development was slow and uneven: new townships were founded around the centre at Fortitude Valley, Kangaroo Point and Breakfast Creek, gradually merging into a city.

After World War II, when General Douglas MacArthur used Brisbane as his headquarters to co-ordinate attacks on Japanese forces based throughout the Pacific, Brisbane stagnated, earning a reputation as a dull, underdeveloped backwater - not least thanks to the Bjelke-Petersen regime. As if to remove all trace of his rule, Brisbane underwent a thorough facelift before hosting the 1988 World Expo , when eighteen million visitors came to experience "Leisure in the Age of Technology". Not least for locals, who treated it as something of a coming-out party, the Expo provided a real boost after years of tedium and through the 1990s, under the public-spirited mayor Jim Soorely , the city became an increasingly busy and pleasant place to spend some time.

Seen from the river or the top of Mount Coot-tha, Brisbane is attractive enough, with the typical features of any Australian city of a comparable age and size: a historic precinct, museums and botanic gardens. There's a confused blur of old and new, crammed in side by side rather than split into distinct districts, while new suburbs are blithely added to the shapeless edges as the need arises. The residents, too, have a spontaneous manner, partly because many are new to the area. In the early 1990s, economic malaise in Australia's southern states resulted in a steady northward migration of people seeking work - or at least finding Queensland a better place to be unemployed - and Brisbane was the obvious first stop. It's still a fairly easy place to find casual, short-term employment, and there's a healthy, unpredictable social scene , tempting many travellers to spend longer here than they had planned. As for exploring further afield, you'll find empty beaches and surf on North Stradbroke Island and Moreton Island - both easy to reach from the city - as well as subtropical woods in Brisbane Forest Park , a twenty-minute drive from the centre.

CAIRNS was pegged out over the site of a sea-slug fishing camp when gold was found to the north in 1876, though it was the Atherton Tablelands' tin and timber resources that established the town and kept it ahead of its nearby rival, Port Douglas. The harbour is the focus of the north's fish and prawn concerns, and tourism began modestly when marlin fishing became popular after World War II. But with the "discovery" of the reef in the 1970s and the appeal of the local climate, tourism snowballed, and high-profile development has now replaced what everyone originally came to Cairns to enjoy: a beautiful, unspoiled, lazy tropical atmosphere .

For many visitors primed by hype, the city falls far short of expectations. However, if you can accept the tourist industry's shocking glibness and the fact that you're unlikely to escape the crowds, you'll find a great deal on offer and easy access to the surrounding area - the Atherton Tablelands, Cape York and, naturally, the Great Barrier Reef and islands. Used as a base to explore these regions, Cairns can be fun, as long as you accept its limitations

Australia  is massive, and very sparsely peopled: in size it rivals the USA, yet its population is just over eighteen million - little more than that of the Netherlands. This is an ancient land, and often looks it: in places, it's the most eroded, denuded and driest of continents, with much of central and western Australia - the bulk of the country - overwhelmingly arid and flat. In contrast, its cities - most of which were founded as recently as the mid-nineteenth century - express a youthful energy.

The most memorable scenery is in the Outback, the vast desert in the interior of the country west of the Great Dividing Range. Here, vivid blue skies, cinnamon-red earth, deserted gorges and other striking geological features as well as bizarre wildlife comprise a unique ecology - one that has played host to the oldest surviving human culture for at least fifty thousand years.

The harshness of the interior has forced modern Australia to become a coastal country. Most of the population lives within 20km of the ocean, occupying a suburban, southeastern arc extending from southern Queensland to Adelaide. These urban Australians celebrate the typical New World values of material self-improvement through hard work and hard play, with an easy-going vitality that visitors, especially Europeans, often find refreshingly hedonistic. A sunny climate also contributes to this exuberance, with an outdoor life in which a thriving beach culture and the congenial backyard "barbie" are central.

While visitors might eventually find this Home and Away lifestyle rather prosaic, there are opportunities - particularly in the Northern Territory - to gain some experience of Australia's indigenous peoples and their culture, through visiting ancient art sites, taking tours and, less easily, making personal contact. Many Aboriginal people - especially in central Australia - have managed to maintain their traditional way of life (albeit with some modern accoutrements), speaking their own languages and living according to their law (the tjukurpa). Conversely, most Aboriginal people you'll come across in country towns and cities are victims of what is scathingly referred to as "welfare colonialism" - a disempowering system in which, supported by dole cheques and other subsidies, they often fall prey to a destructive cycle of poverty, ill-health and alcoholism. There's still a long way to go before black and white people in Australia can exist on genuinely equal terms.