MMXXV / Australia's 10 most welcoming towns, according to travellers

Booking.com Reveals the World’s Most Welcoming Cities for 2025

 Maleny and Montville Not Matraville  / Australia's 10 most welcoming towns, according to travellers

A major travel website has revealed the most welcoming cities in Australia, based on thousands of reviews.

The Booking.com 2025 Traveller Review Awards collate the posted opinions of customers to find out where in Australia people can find the best hospitality and travel experiences.

Booking.com is a travel website that allows users to book accommodations. The Traveller Review Awards recognize the most welcoming cities in Australia based on traveler reviews. 

• Montville, Queensland
• Maleny, Queensland
• Margaret River Town, Western Australia
• Mudgee, New South Wales
• Ocean Grove, Victoria
• Bicheno, Tasmania
• Port Lincoln, South Australia
• Halls Gap, Victoria
• Daylesford, Victoria
• Orange, New South Wales

Maleny was First in 2022  

Maleny (pronounced muh-LAY-knee) is a rural town and locality in the Sunshine Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. Maleny was a timber town until the early 1920s and then was a centre of dairy production and fruit growing. In the 2021 census, the locality of Maleny had a population of 3,959 people.

VM knows the best picnic spots at Mal eny

Maleny has once again secured top spot in the top 10  Most Welcoming Towns in Australia. 

Booking.com announced the recipients of its 10th annual Traveller Review Awards recently. 

Maleny won for the second year in a row while Montville was ranked number 9, proving Blackall Range charm still reigns supreme.

The awards draw on more than 232 million verified reviews from real travelers. 

Div 5 Cr Winston Johnston said it was no surprise Maleny and Montville were such welcoming towns. “Congratulations to our community and business owners who have worked tirelessly for many years to promote our area and to ensure that visitors enjoy a welcoming experience to the Blackall Range. This award is not easy to win and it is a credit to all concerned. It requires a lot of planning, training and strict attention to detail. Keep up this excellent work.”

Montville Chamber of Commerce President Shiralee Cooper said Montville’s accommodation venues have continued to provide outstanding service despite the continuing challenges of last minute cancellations and staffing because of the pandemic. 

“I am so proud to see how our local businesses have extended a warm welcome to guests in trying times,” she said. “The friendly face is an important part of the experience for visitors to our hinterland home.

“Our proximity to Brisbane, our epic green vistas and fresh air have enticed visitors to escape to the hills. Montville’s natural beauty, our vibrant arts and crafts scene, unique shops and cafe culture are all a part of the appealing mystique of Montville.

“One of our hosted accommodations, Narrows Escape Rainforest Retreat took out the top gong for Tripadvisor’s Travellers’ Choice Most Romantic Hotel in the entire world last year. While another multi-awarded accommodation, The Falls Montville won third place in the Small Hotels in the world as rated by Tripadvisor guests. 

“If you read the reviews on any of the booking platforms you will understand why Montville and the Sunshine Coast Hinterland are such resilient destinations. Our tourism offerings are exceptional, as are the people who make it their business to warmly welcome guests.

“If you are seeking a refreshing break, now is the time to book before the onset of the Easter holiday crowds.”

2022 Most Welcoming Towns in Australia 

1. MALENY, Queensland

2. Mount Tamborine, Queensland

3. Halls Gap, Victoria

4. Denmark, Western Australia

5. Margaret River Town, Western Australia

6. Healesville, Victoria

7. Warrnambool, Victoria

8. Hervey Bay, Queensland

9. MONTVILLE, Queensland

10. Albany, Western Australia

Discover more from The Sunshine Valley Gazette

Montville named Australia’s most welcoming city in 2025 Traveller’s Choice Awards

Booking.com announced the recipients of its 13th annual Traveller Review Awards on January 28, revealing South Australia as one of the ‘Top 10 Most Welcoming Regions on Earth’.

Based on over 360 million verified customer reviews, the awards honour travel partners who consistently deliver outstanding hospitality and service.

In 2025, a record-breaking 1.71 million partners were recognized, an 16% increase compared to the year prior.

The Traveller Review Awards has also unveiled the Top Ten Most Welcoming Cities in Australia, placing Montville and Maleny in the top spots

Some of the welcoming towns in Australia include: 

• Margaret River, Western Australia

  A vineyard town 
• 

  Mudgee, New South Wales

  A country retreat in a growing wine region 
• 

  Ocean Grove, Victoria

  A beachside town on the Bellarine Peninsula 
• 

  Port Lincoln, South Australia

  A seaside town known for its seafood and historic fishing industry 
• 

  Bicheno, Tasmania

  A small beach resort town on the east coast of Tasmania 
• Daylesford, Victoria

  A town known for its beautiful lake of the same name 
• 

  Halls Gap, Victoria

  A town in the Grampians surrounded by bushwalking tracks and mountain 

Bicheno named one of the most welcoming places in Australia by Booking.com

A cohesive community and ‘a world-class patisserie that’s bumped up everyone’s cholesterol level’ are some of the reasons why a Tassie town has been named one of the most welcoming places in Australia.

Simon McGuire

February 3, 2025 

PLACES WE GO. Bicheno, East Coast Tasmania. Bicheno From Whalers Lookout Picture: Supplied

Bicheno has been named one of the most welcoming places in Australia.

The East Coast town featured in a top 10 list compiled by Booking.com.

Glamorgan-Spring Bay Acting Mayor and Bicheno resident Mike Symons said he was not surprised the town received the accolade.

“It goes to show we’re obviously a friendly beachside town, and we enjoy people coming to visit us because that’s obviously the feedback they’re giving – so we must be doing something right.”

Mr Symons said the town’s landscape was part of its appeal.

“A point of difference is its natural beauty; the vista, the water, the rocks, and all those things go to making it a beautiful spot to be in.

“But we’ve also got some good attractions, and we’ve got a range of accommodation.

“We’ve got some very high-end accommodation, and then you’ve got your good old caravan parks that people just come and have a wonderful summer holiday at.”

Regarding the town’s attractions, Mr Symons said there were lots of things bringing people to Bicheno.

“You can go down the street and get any number of little, lovely coffee shops; we’ve got a world-class patisserie that’s bumped up everyone’s cholesterol level in Bicheno single-handedly.

“We’ve got some really good, world-class people in Bicheno doing great things.”

Perched atop the town's famous flame-coloured rocks, Cod Rock Point is perfect for an oceanfront stay at Bicheno, Tasmania

Mr Symons said a welcoming town has a cohesive community.

“The local people of Bicheno are really active in a community sense; there’s a surf club, we’ve got an RSL club, we’ve got a bowls club, a golf club – we’ve got lots of people active in the community.

“We have a great Lions Club; we have a fantastic food and wine festival at the start of summer, and then we have a fantastic rock concert at the end of summer.

“All of these events are run by local people, and that engenders pride into the community and makes everyone really proud of where they live.”

Conversely, Mr Symons said there were also factors that could make a town unwelcoming, such as “facilities not up to scratch.”

“That’s partly where the council comes in.

Lobster Shack Bicheno

“We’ve got a great council crew in Bicheno that keep all the facilities tidy.

“If you haven’t got that going on and the place is looking untidy, it doesn’t become welcoming.”

Mr Symons said the townsfolk’s attitude could also make a place unwelcoming.

“Sometimes there are some places where perhaps people maybe don’t want the visitors and don’t understand what they bring to the economy, and perhaps they bemoan the fact some visitors got their park outside the supermarket.

“I think Bicheno just accepts that, and we know it’s going to be busy at Christmas.

“And local people just plan for that and we’re all aware of that, and we just enjoy it while it’s there.”

Bicheno is around 185km northeast of Hobart and has a population of about 950.

simon.mcguire@news.com.

10 Tips for Prosperity and Pleasure in 2025 by Sabrina I. Pacifici on Jan 22, 2025 10 Tips for Prosperity and Pleasure in 2025

The Oldest Beer Receipt (Circa 2050 BC) Open Culture

Originating from the Greek word empatheia(em, in; pathos, feeling), empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It is a virtue that we try to instill in our young ones, and it is considered a good trait. 

The Lost Art of Empathy

10 Tips for Prosperity and Pleasure in 2025 – Jerry Lawson suggests 10 ways to work effectively, safely and incorporate innovation and AI into your practices.

On February 22, 2025, A Century of The New Yorker will open at The New York Public Library, showcasing the history of The New Yorker from its launch in 1925 to present day and bringing to life the people, stories, and ideas that have defined the iconic magazine. Founding documents, rare manuscripts, photographs, and timeless cover and cartoon art drawn from the Library’s rich holdings, along with artifacts from other renowned institutions, will feature in the dynamic exhibition, which will take visitors behind the scenes of the making of one of the United States’s most important magazines. 

The exhibition will explore the literary cosmopolitanism The New Yorker forged throughout its one-hundred-year history, from the roaring twenties through the digital age, and highlight the role of both well-known creators such as E.B. White and Vladimir Nabokov as well as underrepresented and unsung contributors—from artists and copyeditors to typists and fact checkers. A Century of The New Yorker will be a centerpiece of The New Yorker’s centenary, a year-long celebration that will begin February 2025 and will include “Tales From The New Yorker,” a film series at Film Forum, and the digitization of the magazine’s hundred-year archive, among other programming and events.  The New York Public Library is the home of the New Yorker records, which it acquired in 1991.

 The archive includes over 2,500 boxes, or 1,058 linear feet, and is one of the Library’s largest and most-used archival collections. The exhibition will draw on the Library’s rich archives related to the magazine and its writers and editors. Additionally, The New Yorker provided rare documents and artifacts from its own holdings to supplement the Library’s. “In ways we see and don’t see, The New Yorker has shaped so many aspects of American culture, politics, and intellectual life over the past century,” said Julie Golia, Associate Director, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books and Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts, the co-curator of the exhibition.

 “A Century of The New Yorker invites the Library’s visitors into the pages of the magazine, revealing the fascinating history of the country’s most important magazine through our rich collections.” “Countless have been influenced by The New Yorker and delighted in its pages of groundbreaking journalism and irreverent cartoon art. 

As the home of the New Yorker records, The New York Public Library is the steward and preserver of the magazine’s one-hundred-year history,” said Anthony W. Marx, President of The New York Public Library. “I’m thrilled that visitors to the Library will be able to access the records through A Century of The New Yorker and see up-close how the renowned magazine has shaped intellectual life and cultural history in the United States.”

Art work

Bruce the Boss / FireAid, with Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga, is the latest in a long line of massive benefit concerts

Sting returns after illness to play FireAid with Sir Rod Stewart, Stevie Nicks and more – watch

From The Public Domain Review – Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

• Users may Search the Collection, Browse the Categories. Enter “Infinite View”
• (via colossal) “While The Public Domain Review primarily takes the form of an “arts journal”, it has also quietly served as a digital art gallery, albeit one fractured across essays and collections posts. The PDIA sets out to emphasise this visual nature of the PDR, freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation. Our aim is to offer a platform that will serve both as a practical resource and a place to simply wander — an ever-growing portal to discover more than 2000 years of visual culture. The “infinite view” is particularly fun…you can just pan & scroll and let the whole collection wash over your visual cortex.”

P

 

Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts but thoughts are fluid. Then we assign a word to a thought and we're stuck with that word for that thought, so be careful with words. I like to think that the same words that hurt can heal. It’s a matter of how you pick them.

George Carlin

Guilt, a story like ‘quicksand’: BBC’s black comic thriller

Black comic thriller Guilt is a story like quicksand — the more our protagonists struggle, the worse it gets.

‘Fictional guilt is as tenacious as Dante’s demons, as indelible as Duncan’s blood,” wrote novelist Annemarie Neary, citing books as diverse as Dante’s Inferno, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

'Guilt' Exits with a Delinquent Whimper 

Guilt Season 3: Scottish drama about two brothers blends comedy and crime

Shetland’s Mark Bonnar and Game of Thrones’ Jamie Sives return as brothers in Guilt, a wicked parable about the futility of trying to outrun your own past.

GRAEME BLUNDELL

January 24, 2025 

Jamie Sives and Mark Bonnar in a scene 

from the TV series Guilt. Supplied by BBC Australia.

“I did have a pipedream of doing a trilogy but that felt like something that was so distant in those early days when it was just about trying to get the show on the air and keeping it on the air,” Neil Forsyth says. “That’s the big challenge. It’s very hard to get a show on television and it’s even harder to keep it there.” Forsyth is the creator and writer of Guilt, Scotland’s most notable TV drama, the third season of which has just reached SBS.

It was the first drama commissioned by the newly formed BBC Scotland channel in 2019 – and has proved an international success, both with audiences and critics, despite the at times mystifying accents and plotting so labyrinthine it makes one’s head spin.

(In France, it was renamed Petit Muerte entre Freres [A Small Murder between Brothers], in Sweden they went for Var Lilla Hemlighet [Our Little Secret] and in Germany they called it Keiner ist schuld [Nobody Is Guilty].)

Guilt is the story of two very different brothers, Max and Jake, played by in-demand Mark Bonnar (Shetland) of the lupine face and silver hair, and Jamie Sives (Game of Thrones) Forsyth, a former journalist and novelist, is best known, certainly in the UK, for his most famous creation Bob Servant, from the TV series Bob Servant Independent, played by Succession’s Brian Cox. But he also wrote the fine TV drama Eric, Ernie and Me, the story of Eddie Braben, the writer behind the enormous success of Morecambe and Wise.

And Forsyth created the BBC’s critically acclaimed factual drama The Gold, inspired by the true story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, and the decades-long chain of events that followed. He’s nothing if not eclectic.

Guilt, already the winner of a number of awards, is the story of two very different brothers, Max and Jake, played by in-demand Mark Bonnar (Shetland) of the lupine face and silver hair, and Jamie Sives (Game of Thrones), somewhat lugubrious by comparison, who as siblings have spent as little time together as they possibly can as their lives have evolved. Unhappily, at the start of the first season their involvement in a hit-and-run leads to them being caught up in a much bigger web of crime.

They immediately panic after the accident; Jake, the driver is uninsured and Max, who is a big shot lawyer, it turns out, takes charge.

Series 3 Trailer | Guilt

Watch on

It’s the start of some manic, madcap and sometimes violent adventures across 12 hours, a highly entertaining urban noir really, that will send Max to jail, follow him as he seeks revenge in the second season against Lothian gangsters with whom he becomes involved, and in the third sees the brothers seeking some kind of absolution.

“This time around it was interesting to watch the characters in their own ways all seek some level of redemption,” Forsyth says. “What that might look like to each of them was also interesting.” 

As Max and his brother desperately look for liberation from the ails that continue to consume them, this seemingly endless cycle of deception, danger and allegation, they encounter a lodestone for opportunists and mentally maimed misfits. However they try to escape they find themselves in yet another version of what Auden called The Great Wrong Place, lucky to escape with their lives.

The brothers are constantly at some kind of crisis point – usually Max’s doing. Maybe too many, given the speed at which the drama is played, and the way in which we as viewers are from the start seduced into imaginatively participating and concurring in a murder. And somewhat uncomfortably uncertain of what we feel about these hapless killers, and with whom we sympathise. As Forsyth says of Guilt’s success, its fundamental dramatic building blocks are very accessible. “Two very different brothers are thrown into an extreme situation and have to uncomfortably work together to get out of it,” he says. “That’s not a complicated dramatic premise in terms of its starting point. I think that helps to sell it.”

As does the often macabre humour. Many have compared Guilt to Noah Hawley’s TV version of the Coen brothers Fargo and there are similarities in the juxtaposition of visual poetry, shocking violence and fiendish plotting. (There’s also a brilliant soundtrack of mainly Scottish bands too. “It’s such a big part of the show, the tone and outlook of it, the feel of it. It’s an intrinsic part so we spend a lot of time on it. When it goes to the edit, we sometimes look at more than 100 tracks just to get the right one set against the action.”)

It’s clever, stylish and engrossing, Forsyth a writer who doesn’t like to mess around. His obvious delight in the darker side of Scottish humour, often called “miserabilist”, that dark vein that runs through the cultural landscape of that nation, ingrained in its collective psyche.

It’s “a repudiation of the twee, coothie, over-sentimentalised, shortbread tin depiction of Scotland,” says writer Jamie Watt. “And, despite the self-perpetuating negativeness of miserabilism, it can have a constructive role in analysing the hypocrisies, shortcomings and taboo subjects of modern Scotland.” And in Guilt, it’s the source of much of the mordant humour.

Forsyth is constantly pulling the rug out from under the brothers. And he does it to us too, just when we are starting to feel comfortable with the direction of his story. The “suddenness and shockiness”, as he calls it a feature of his writing. Max and Jake are always arriving at some kind of crisis point, finding themselves in yet another nefarious goings-on. “It’s really important,” Max says to his brother at one point when escape looks unlikely, “that one of us doesn’t see failure as a natural bedfellow.”

Combining comedy with crime is a difficult balancing act and not many writers bring it off. (Forsyth says his favourite TV show is “The Sopranos, for the storytelling, the characters, the weaving of humour into the drama and the crystal-clear authorial voice.)

Comedy murder mysteries don’t even have their own category in bookstores. Sure, there’s often mordant humour in crime novels and the wisecracks and one-liners that go back to Chandler, but if it’s to work, humour can’t just be a matter of a few jokes to sugar coat the nastiness but be part and parcel of the author’s sensibility.

“I think I write stories that are dramatically driven – I never come up with a story point just to create a funny situation – comedy should play no part in the outlining,” Forsyth says. “Character, drama and story drive the outline. But when I’m writing a script then humour is always available as a way that a character might react to pressure or conflict. I think six-part dramas where no one says anything funny actually feel unrealistic and superficial because that doesn’t really reflect real life.”

The third season starts off with an episode called The Clothes on our Backs, and continues the brothers’ attempt to outrun the circumstances that began their ordeal, covering up that hit-and-run that started it all. At their lowest point with, as the title suggests, only the clothes they are wearing, they still must somehow come to terms with the fearsome Lynches, the vicious gangsters whose lives have become entwined with theirs.

Angie Curtis (Ruth Bradley), Jake’s American girlfriend, steals the money that Max has basically stolen from his brother, and they are deported from America. On arrival in Scotland, they are soon in the hands of the Lynches, who are growing the purest organically cultivated marijuana in Scotland. When it is legalised, they’ll be the first out the traps to get licensed.

The brothers are promised a quick death but of course manage to escape but must face up to the inevitable showdown with the fierce Maggie Lynch, played with terrible insouciance by Phyllis Logan. “I’m just a poor widow looking for a bit of wee light in the darkness,” she says at one point, her eyes like a cobra considering its next kill. Look out, too, for a wonderful performance from Scottish acting stalwart David Hayman as the boy’s father, who abandoned them years earlier to work on the oil rigs but with whom they seek refuge in his remote lochside shack.

This final season is a wonderful thrill, the perfect conclusion to Forsyth’s wicked parable about the futility in trying to outrun your own past. “I think the big thing with me, in terms of knowing that the story has come to an end, is that there’s nothing more about these characters that I need to know,” he says. “I think that’s a sign for the writer that it’s time to move on.”

Guilt is streaming on SBS On Demand.

from Kafka: A World of Truth Giorgio

 "Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me."

- Sigmund Freud

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

- Martin Luther King

“Nabokov describes writing as a kind of game between — not the characters and the page, but the readers and the author. I love that idea and think of it as a very participatory, playful thing, not as talking down to the reader.”

Imposter Syndrome

The truth about fiction 

from Kafka: A World of Truth

Giorgio Fontana

Kafka again. Why? A hundred years after his death, he has not lost one iota of his fascination, and that in itself is a problem. Few writers have enjoyed the fate of becoming an adjective; fewer still have names and adjectives that spill over from the literary field to immediately create, in whatever context, a “specific emotional atmosphere”: Kafka, it is said, describes the condition of contemporary man; he foresaw the inevitable rise of totalitarian regimes; he reveals the true nature of increasingly bureaucratised and dehumanised societies. 

According to the description in Wikipedia, his work “typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.”

 ‘Groundbreaking’: scientists develop patch that can repair damaged hearts

Choosing Seeds From 14,000 Varieties? It Just Got Easier.

The New York Times – gift article – “The Exchange, on Seed Savers’ website, pairs the people who save heirlooms with those who want them, all for the price of postage. With a diversity of crops and an impressive depth of choices within each, this year’s Exchange adds up to more than 14,000 unique plant varieties on offer — each of them open-pollinated, which unlike hybrids will produce offspring identical to the parent plant.Heirloom bean packets are among 20,000-plus types of seeds preserved inside the seed bank at Seed Savers Exchange. 

With the advent of hybrids and genetically modified crops, and a changing climate, as much as 75 percent of the world’s edible plant varieties have been lost. This is no ordinary seed catalog, and actually it’s not a catalog at all, but a seed swap of treasures begun 50 years ago, conducted back then by mail under the name True Seed Exchange and in recent years taking place online. That effort became the nucleus of Seed Savers Exchange, the well-known nonprofit seed conservation organization based in Decorah, Iowa, which was founded to preserve the culturally diverse and endangered genetic history of our garden and food crops. 

Today Seed Savers safeguards more than 20,000 heirloom varieties in the country’s largest nongovernmental seed bank, plus collections that include more than 300 historic apples, 500-plus potatoes, and some 200 garlic varieties. The organization publishes a popular seed catalog, too, featuring 600 varieties for 2025; the proceeds support its preservation work. 

But what’s catching my attention in Seed Savers’ anniversary year is a different navigational link atop its homepage, just to the left of the ones about the catalog — the link that simply says, “The Exchange.” It’s the way back to Seed Savers’ point of origin, and to make digging through the trove easier, it just got embodied in a newly redesigned website…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]