Postcard from Australia’s World’s End: After a 20,000-mile ‘slow travel’ odyssey, Tatler unwinds on Kangaroo Island

Liam Freeman took the 95-year-old The Ghan train across the outback en route to Kangaroo Island

Sustainable travel doesn’t just mean offsetting carbon footprints; but re-setting how we holiday, from where we stay to how we move around. A 20,000-mile round-trip to Australia, then, feels unjustifiable unless I spend significant time there; so I block out two months and plan a route that doesn’t hinge heavily on internal flights. I travel through the Kakadu National Park and Daintree Rainforest with Indigenous guides Mandy Muir and Juan Walker respectively; and I take a legendary train – The Ghan – from the Northern Territory to South Australia, where my destination is Kangaroo Island, or ‘KI’.

Two things draw me to ‘Australia’s Galapagos’: its luxury eco-retreat, Southern Ocean Lodge, and the fauna. Sustainability is in the bones of the former, whose architecture harnesses the elements. (There’s flow-through ventilation; glazing-captured solar energy heats most of the water; and 5.8 million litres of that water is rainfall collected via a purpose-designed roof.)  Meanwhile, more than a third of KI is protected, making it a haven for koalas, fur seals, glossy black-cockatoos and – of course – kangaroos, all of which I behold.