The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne. Visitors to Australia and New Zealand would do well to carve out some time for their independent bookstores. A few immediate standouts: Unity Books in […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. As a heat wave sweeps through large swaths of Australia, the authorities are on high alert for drownings as Australians flock to the beach to cool down. Australia is a country of swimmers and beachgoers, where many […]

The Australian state of New South Wales will allow some returning international travelers to quarantine at home starting at the end of the month, possibly signaling the beginning of the end for the country’s strict hotel quarantine system. The pilot program will allow 175 fully vaccinated people to isolate in their homes for seven days […]

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — When New Zealand, for the first time in months, reported a case of community spread of the coronavirus on Aug. 17, residents sprang into action. They stripped supermarket shelves of pasta and toilet paper, dug socked-away masks out of drawers and fled to vacation homes in the mountains or at the […]

With a stubborn Delta outbreak in Sydney, Australia, spreading in areas outside the city and in vulnerable Aboriginal communities, New South Wales officials announced a lockdown for the entire state on Saturday along with tightened restrictions for residents of Sydney. The statewide stay-at-home orders, in effect for at least a week, reflect growing concern about […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Amaali Lokuge, an emergency room doctor in Melbourne. Almost half of Australia is in lockdown again as New South Wales loses control of the Delta variant and the virus leaks across […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. As a Melbourne transplant from Sydney, I never used to care much about state-based identities beyond occasionally reveling in the chaos of the potato cake versus potato scallop debate. It’s only since the pandemic that I started […]

The prime minister has finally acknowledged that Australia will eventually have to learn to live with Covid. By Damien Cave The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has finally outlined a Covid exit plan, which will include the end of […]

MELBOURNE, Australia — Pink, hairless, deaf and blind, the roughly month-old joeys were but the size of a shelled peanut. Yet they were a momentous discovery for the conservationists who had set off across a dense eucalyptus forest in the dawn mist in hopes of finding them. About 3,000 years after Tasmanian devils were wiped […]

Children and staff members at the Mount Cotton State School, an elementary school near a rainforest in Queensland, Australia, have spotted wallabies, koalas and snakes over the years. But recently, builders who were adding new classrooms to the school made a discovery that stood out even among the famously diverse fauna of Australia, a continent […]