The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. The confluence of outlandish costumes, soulful folk ballads and an ode to the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe can only mean that Eurovision, the world’s largest, gaudiest and, perhaps, most eccentric song competition is gracing our […]

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 based in Melbourne. It was a story that made for splashy, even sensational, headlines in the Australian press this week: The notion that Warner Bros., the American […]

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 based in Melbourne. This week, I went looking for darkness. For the past several days, I have been reporting for The Times in Western Australia with the […]

A hunting contest in rural New Zealand where children were to compete to kill the greatest number of feral cats for a cash prize has been canceled after a backlash from animal rights organizations. New Zealand, an island nation, has aggressively tried to control invasive species from overwhelming its native wildlife. But culling feral cats […]

Every evening, tens of thousands of gray-headed flying foxes fan across the sky above Melbourne, Australia. By day, these large bats cluster in the trees they help to pollinate, dangling from branches as they snooze or chatter to one another. By night, they flit about the state of Victoria seeking food: leaves, flowers and fruit. […]

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Soccer has very little presence in the Marshall Islands. The atoll nation, with a population of 60,000, has no domestic fixture, dedicated playing fields or organized local teams, let alone a national team — making it a […]

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 […]