About Clear Horizons

Why the site exists

Clear Horizons started in 2021 because the information we needed to plan our own trips kept turning out to be the wrong kind. Plenty of Australian travel writing describes what a place looks like. Very little of it tells you that the road averages 45 km/h rather than 90, that the campground you are reading about is allocated by ballot in January, that the track closes for five months of the year, or that the last fuel before a 200 km stretch keeps its own hours.

So the guides here are built around the practical constraints instead of the scenery. Every route opens with the same block of facts: distance, realistic driving time, road surface, the months it works, and where the mobile coverage stops. Where a page carries an opinion — that six days is better than five on the Red Centre Way, that the western half of the Great Ocean Road is the better half — it is signed by whoever holds it, with the reasoning written out.

We are a small operation and we do not pretend otherwise. Three people write everything on this site. We do not have correspondents in every state, we do not attempt to cover every road in the country, and where we have not driven something ourselves we say so and rely on the relevant park or road authority rather than restating another publication.

How the information is gathered

Route descriptions come from driving the routes. Distances are taken from road distances along the described route rather than straight-line measures, and rounded, because a figure presented to the kilometre implies a precision that road distances do not have. Driving times are our own, adjusted to include the stops a reasonable person actually makes rather than the theoretical minimum.

Anything that changes — fees, opening dates, closures, permit requirements, booking systems — is described in structure rather than in numbers, and pointed at the authority that sets it. That is why you will not find a dollar figure for a park pass anywhere on this site. Fees are reviewed regularly by each state, and a stale price presented confidently is worse than telling you where to look. The same reasoning applies to operating hours and phone numbers for businesses, which we do not publish.

Seasonal information is treated as a hard constraint rather than a recommendation, because in northern Australia it is one. Where we say a road is closed in the wet season, we mean it is physically impassable and formally shut, not that it is uncomfortable. Our editorial policy sets out the review cycle for each type of page and how to tell us when something is wrong.

Who writes it

Naomi Vale is the editor and covers Tasmania, Victoria and the southern coasts. She has lived in Hobart since 2014 and has driven every route on this site south of the Murray, most of them repeatedly and in more than one season. She is the person who insists that a walking time in a guide should be the time it takes with a camera and a lunch stop, not the time it takes to march it.

Tom Ridley writes the Queensland and New South Wales guides and most of the practical material about towing and family travel. He grew up in Townsville, spent eight years doing the Bruce Highway run several times a year, and now travels with two children, which has changed his opinions about daily distances considerably. He is responsible for the distance tables throughout the site.

Priya Raman covers Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, which means she handles almost everything on this site involving unsealed roads, fuel planning and remote travel. She has driven the Gibb River Road four times and the Stuart Highway more often than she can usefully count, and she is the reason the packing guide is as insistent as it is about carrying a second spare.

None of us hold professional accreditation in tourism, and we do not claim any. We are not guides, we are not operators, and we do not give advice on anything beyond driving, camping and where to look for authoritative information. When a question belongs to a park service, a road authority or an emergency service, we say so and point you at them.

How the site is funded, and how it is not

Clear Horizons does not sell tours, take bookings, run affiliate links, publish sponsored content or accept payment for coverage. Nothing on this site earns a commission if you follow it, and there is no advertising inside the guides or the trip planner. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the editorial policy page before it appears anywhere else, and any commercial relationship will be labelled on the page it affects.

We also do not publish user reviews, star ratings or testimonials. Where you see an opinion on this site, it belongs to one of the three people above and carries their name. That is a deliberate choice: an unattributed rating tells you nothing about who held it or why, and a signed paragraph tells you both.

Contact and corrections

We would rather know when something is wrong. Road conditions change, campgrounds close, booking systems get rebuilt, and a guide that was accurate last season may not be this one. If you find an error, write to hello@clearhorizones.com and tell us which page and what you saw on the ground. Corrections of fact are made as soon as we can verify them, and the review date on the page is updated when we do.

Everything else — questions, suggestions for routes we have missed, or anything about how the site handles your information — goes to the same address. Our contact page has the full details and our usual response time.