Chapter 1

If you were to ask your average American to locate the West Coast on a map, he'd rap a knuckle on California. If you were to ask your average Australian the same question, he'd slap his hand over the lower right hand corner of his country to indicate Victoria -- a state whose southern border flanks the sea, but whose landlocked western border is a whopping fifteen hundred miles away from Australia's actual west coast. Which, comparatively speaking, makes it the geographical equivalent of Iowa.

There's a simple explanation for this anomaly.

It's Australia. It's complicated.

We'd spent our first full day Down Under motoring along Victoria's Great Ocean Road, a one-hundred-sixty mile, two-lane, roller coaster of a highway with panoramic views of the Southern Ocean's golden beaches, pounding surf and wind-tortured bluffs. In the late afternoon we'd arrived at Port Campbell National Park so we could ooh and ahh over the chimney stacks of rock that rise from the sea like gigantic lumps of coal. Our travel brochure refers to these craggy monoliths as, "The Twelve Apostles," and they were nothing short of spectacular. With the fearsome Southern Ocean gnawing at their base and the sun gilding them with blinding light, they were the most dazzling natural wonder I'd seen in my fifteen month stint as a tour escort.

"What a gyp," Bernice Zwerg grated in her ex-smoker's voice. She crab-walked over to me as we gathered inside the protective shelter of the visitor center, waiting to reboard our tour bus.

"Why is it a gyp?" I wasn't surprised by Bernice's negative reaction to one