Day one: Jugiong to blackheath, Blue Mountains (398 kilometres)
Jugiong, in New South Wales, is tiny: the Murrumbidgee river may run through it but the only reason to stop is to slake a big thirst at the imposing Sir George Tavern (established in 1845 and the oldest pub in Australia to remain in the same family). Inside, the thick stone walls are covered with grainy nineteenth-century photographs featuring some of my relatives enjoying a pint, which makes me merely the latest in a long line of familial regulars. My mother even remembers when Jugiong's vast roadside poplars were saplings.
Mother lives on a property (the correct term for an Aussie farm - never, ever a ranch) just a couple of dirt-track miles from here, off Australia's busiest road, the Hume Highway. In Australia, however, busy-ness is relative and from her hilltop garden the view is of the rolling Monaro tablelands studded with gums, rocky outcrops and now, in November, the blue flower known as Patterson's Curse, a weed nicknamed for Banjo Patterson (the man best known, by Poms at least, for writing Waltzing Matilda) who imported it to brighten up his garden. To graziers' dismay, Banjo's Curse now runs amok over the Monaro.
On a clear day you can see, if not quite forever, then all the way to the Snowy Mountains. But though empty of people it is far from quiet. A flock of pink galahs recently colonised the biggest gum tree in mother's garden, and their noise competes with that of the horses, sheep and dogs, while, after dark, small nocturnal marsupials thud, scuttle and thump on the tin roof. In its own way the bush is noisier than London.
Driving away down the dirt track, I watch in the rear-view mirror as my mother leans on her gate, waving tearily. I'm pretty weepy myself but, by the time my partner and I have passed Yass and are heading up the Hume towards the Southern Highlands, I'm also looking forward to a few days on the road. We have a daunting amount of ground to cover before we'll see the sea.
Mossvale, Bowral and Mittagong are the main - but small - towns in the bosky Southern Highlands. Within weekending distance of Sydney, I always think of this area as NSW's Surrey or Sussex. Well-heeled, with verdant grazing perfect for stud cattle and dairy farming, there are lots of antique shops and chi-chi country outfitters where exotic imported Barbours hang next to the traditional R.M. Williams moleskins.
The Monaro is much wilder and less pretty than this but it is also, to my mind, more Australian. Still, Aussies adore the Southern Highlands because, if you squint, it looks a little like the old country. My mother went to school in Bowral (the boarding schools are back-to-back, just as they are in Surrey), little knowing that my father was then living a few hundred yards away, at 300 Bong Bong Street. Incidentally Sir Donald Bradman, who died just last Sunday after a 92-year innings, first played cricket here, so there is a Bradman museum too.
But given that tonight's destination, Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, is still another 180km away, we press on. I want to look for a house called Niudja, in nearby Gladstone Road, Leura - the address on dozens of letters sent to his brother, Charley, by my maternal great-grandfather, Cecil Berkeley Jenkins, from the trenches of northern France. Cecil was later killed in the Spring Offensive of March, 1918. Gladstone Road turns out to be beautiful, high on the ridge of the range and not far from the famous rocks known as the Three Sisters. Unfortunately, among all the grand Edwardian villas built as holiday homes, I fail to locate Niudja, though I like to think it's still there, somewhere, hiding under an assumed name.
I'd like to think, too, that it looks like Blackheath's Cleopatra Guest House, where we arrive just in time for cold beers on the verandah. Later, returning to the Three Sisters for a photo-opportunity sunset, I am struck by the unspoilt Jurassic landscape in which tourism lives cheek-by-jowl with ancient tranquillity. At the madly stylish Cleopatra, one can dine on courgette and gruyère soufflé, fine spring lamb and poire William sorbet, just a mile from the spot where botanists identified a new tree as recently as five years ago. It's the most civilised sort of wilderness.
Day two: Blackheath to Pokolbin, Hunter Valley (284km)
Talk about timing: the local papers are full of the fact that, as of today, the Blue Mountains have been designated Australia's fourtteenth World Heritage Site. What took them so long? You can almost hear the Japanese tourists scrambling to book tickets for what was, yesterday, the plain old Blue Mountains. I'm rather pleased we've beaten them to it.
Away from the mountains, on the Great Western Highway, we are soon snarled up by Sydney's sprawl, but skim north on Highway Nine and the emptiness beyond. The most thrilling thing about travelling in Australia, even to someone who has been coming here all her life, is the amount of wild, wanton space. The population of New South Wales (roughly the size of Texas) is just over six million, the same as London. Even in the busy bits there's an awful lot of nothing into which one can disappear.
It's early summer but the Aussie weather is as unpredictable as the stuff we've left behind, and newsflashes report the worst floods in living memory - bogglingly, in the north-west of NSW, an area the size of England is underwater. Bathed in sunshine, we arrive at our hotel, the Convent, at Pepper Tree, Pokolbin, and immediately drive off again to the nearby Wandin Valley Estate winery, dismissing laconic warnings from the hotel manager that 'there's a bit of a storm on the way'. Come off it, we're Poms! We can handle rain!
But within five minutes something meteorologically biblical occurs. I have never seen rain like this. Or lightning. Or skies so louring. Or, indeed, so green . Green skies, we are told later, usually warn of A Big One, weatherwise. Aquaplaning, unable to see through the windscreen and gibbering with fear, we finally arrive at the Wandin Estate where their ornamental lake has grown into a small inland sea and, short of parting the waves, there is no access. Back in the suitably-named sanctuary of the Convent (and it was a convent once, though several hundred miles from here and moved brick-by-brick) there is no electricity, either. Exhausted, we get an early night. There is an added incentive, however: a dawn balloon trip over the Hunter, weather permitting.
Day three: Pokolbin to Armidale (375km)
This is my partner's first visit to Australia and though, in Jugiong, he came eyeball-to-eyeball with a 6ft snake (poisonous but, as my uncle had drily observed, 'we're only a 45- minute drive from the hospital, so no worries!'), he has yet to see a 'roo. When he does, it is a whole herds-worth busy dodging our balloon as it skates up and over the gum treetops, so it couldn't really be better. The 'roos stare at us, bounce off, then pause occasionally to box each other. It is magical.
Back at Balloon Aloft's HQ, we drink champagne and babble, adrenalised, about last night's storm. Our British pilot, John Clifford, tells us there was three inches of rain in 40 minutes and the pub in nearby Branxton was hit by lightning three times in 20 seconds before the roof blew off. Miraculously (they don't call this the Lucky Country for nothing), nobody was hurt, though there were a lot of spilt pints. This is Oz all right, albeit more like the one with the Wizard.
After breakfast we pass the roofless pub, now the talk of New South Wales. I'm not the only the journalist in Branxton, but apparently the news TV crews have already been and gone, so we hit the New England Highway (not very English at all) and head for Armidale, via Tamworth, Australia's country music capital (with a guitar-shaped tourist information centre!). It's a hell of a drive but at least it doesn't rain - and The Eagles' Greatest Hits sounds perfect on the stereo.
Day four: Armidale to Byron Bay (388km)
After a night in Armidale we are back on the high tablelands formerly known as New Caledonia. There are gorges and waterfalls but not much in the way of misty moors and heather, though Glen Innes's street signs are in English and Gaelic. Just outside the town we spot a sign for the Standing Stones, based on the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkneys and, the locals proudly claim, probably the first to be erected in 3,000 years. To my amusement, each loo roll in the gift shop lavatories is secured by an enormous padlock. They take their Celtic heritage very seriously round these parts.
At the junction of the New England and Bruxner Highways, Tenterfield is famous in Australia as the birthplace of the musician Peter Allen (once married to Liza Minnelli) who immortalised it in a song written about his grandfather, 'Tenterfield Saddler', which tends to make Aussies a bit misty-eyed. You can buy Allen's CD (and fine leather goods) in what was the original shop. 'Oh dear!' said my partner as we listened to it in the car. 'You're missing the point,' I said, 'it's an important piece of indigenous culture.'
More fun was to be had at the Tenterfield Cobbler's, where the impressively-bearded owner, Steve Smith, gave an impromptu recitation of a highly indigenous-sounding (not to mention scatalogical) self-penned poem about dunnies. Very funny, very Australian and wholly unexpected, Steve - an impressively authentic Aussie 'character' - only slightly spoiled the occasion by admitting he was really a Pommie, born and bred.
After 1,500km of wild bush, lushly semi-tropical Byron Bay, the country's most most easterly point, came as pure culture shock. Byron's hip surf kids, mellow holidaymakers and dippy-hippy dropouts are all a long way, in every sense, from my mother's front gate. Here the galahs and scrubby gum trees are replaced by frondy palms and kookaburras which giggle at us from their perch on the gateposts at Taylors, a treasure of a guesthouse. But in Byron, my father (a recently-arrived resident) was waiting to greet us, so although I'd never been here before, it was a bit like coming home - again.
• Kathryn Flett flew to Sydney as a guest of Air New Zealand.
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