New South Wales

New South Wales is the state most first-time visitors imagine when they think of Australia: Sydney Harbour, Bondi, the Blue Mountains, the surf coast running three hundred kilometres south toward Jervis Bay. It's also the state with the widest internal range — from the subtropical North Coast near Byron Bay down to cool-climate wine country in the Southern Highlands. Saltrove covers NSW as the country's most layered travel region: the deep-history parts (colonial Sydney, the Hunter Valley, Aboriginal rock art in the Greater Sydney basin) and the newer-wave parts (Byron's property-market-meets-beach-town tension, the Northern Rivers food scene, the weekend-rental economies that have redrawn the coast). If you have two weeks in Australia, half of them probably belong here. The state earns the attention.