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Sober, Single and Saucy
I woke up on the 1st of January this year in a double bed spooning two of my friends in their dad’s apartment in a small town just out of Sydney. I’d spent New Year’s Eve doing the coffee table dance competition with my top four Myspace friends after the COVID restriction hammer was dropped…
How to Scam Wal-Mart For Free Camping Gear
This is a tale of how five young boys took on the corporate giants, putting the no-questions-asked refund policy of Wal-Mart to the ultimate test. Could the purchased items survive a three-day festival in the middle of the desert and be returned for a full reimbursement? There was only one way to find out. Preparing…
A Piranha in Laos
I will never forget the screams of those floating Germans. There I was, belly up on a scorching tube, drifting down the guts of the Mekong River, when a tiny fish decided to take the toe of a Deutschland-hailing backpacker. And by take, I mean bite the fuck off. As I attempted, in vain, to…
The Grand Escape
"Farkkk. Well, there go our winter holiday plans.” As Gladys announced the NSW-Victorian border closure, I felt my heart sink. It wasn’t unexpected, just another shitty trick in the shocking magic show that has been 2020. I closed my eyes. The spark of hope that had been a planned roadtrip during an otherwise dreary year…
The Day I Fell in Love With a Flat Earther
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. We were drinking champagne from the bottle, wearing only bathrobes in the suite of a 19th-century estate turned hotel two hours south of London. As the alcohol and dopamine coursed through my system, I managed to dig up a fact I’d heard in a science podcast months earlier:…
Adios, Motherfucker
What’s the most quintessential injury an Aussie can get in Bali? A scooter accident. Okay, what’s the second most? Animal Bite. What’s the third—actually, forget it. Picture this, it’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon and you’ve just down a beverage called Adios Motherfucker. Sorry, Adios Motherfu*cker. Can’t forget the oddly placed asterisk; it’s honestly charming.…
I Lost My Passport and Gained Perspective in Malta
The policeman sitting behind the desk in the St Julien police station looks too young to have graduated high school. His senior co-workers, clustered in a semi-circle behind him to oversee his report-writing, seem to think the same: good-humouredly teasing him about his pretty eyes and winking to me as they explain that he’s single.…

Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity.

We’re run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.