It’s almost as far as you can go, and gargantuan when you get there. It’s a five-hour flight just to hop from one end to the other. Yet according to its tourist board, Australia is well worth the trip even if you’ve only got two weeks.

Can that be true? Surely it means making the classic down-under blunder of trying to pack too much into one visit? We decided to take up the challenge. With careful planning and pruning, we constructed a two-week tour, to be taken in our winter (the southern summer), which includes many of the best experiences Australia has to offer without feeling like an assault course. The Top End and Red Centre will have to wait until the next trip — both are infernally hot at this time of year, anyway — but we’ve squeezed in plenty to compensate. Beaches, inevitably; nature, naturally; culture, of course; wonderful wines; and that easy-living ambience that is uniquely Oz.

It looked great on paper — but how would it work in practice? We took our perfect itinerary for a test drive to find out.

GETTING THERE

First the bad news. Not only do you tie up 24 hours of your holiday in getting there, but you lose 11 hours to time zones in the process. If you go after work on Friday night, flying from Heathrow to Brisbane via Singapore, you get there at dawn on Sunday. Saturday never really happens.

HIT THE BEACH

There’s no better place in the world to convalesce from the mind-numbing, body-crunching ordeal of faraway flying than an Australian beach. But you should skip Brisbane’s Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise, which may well be paradise for the dudes with the boards, but is overdeveloped purgatory for the rest of us. Hang on for just two more hours — a straight drive along Pacific Highway 1 — and you’ll reach Byron Bay, a low-rise, laid-back and wonderful alternative. And if you want, you can still surf your socks off.

Check into the Watermark (see below), bang on Watego Beach, drop your bags and breeches on the floor, slip on the swimmies, and eight paces from the door you’ll be on a gorgeous beach. Twenty paces further and you’ll be in the water. You’ll feel born again.

The best policy on Sunday is to go steady, and stay awake as long as you can. When you feel peckish, order the best calamari ever, served in a cardboard box at a gastro-chippy called Fishmonger (1 Bay Lane, behind the Beach Hotel); £6 with chips.

Where to stay: the five rooms at Wategos Watermark (00 61-2 6685 8999, www.wategos watermark.com) have wall-to-wall windows overlooking the beach; doubles cost £198, including a huge breakfast.

Celebrities (including Mick Jagger and Richard Branson) prefer Rae’s (2 6685 5366, www.raes.com.au), a white villa with seven cool Moroccan/Indonesian-styled rooms and a pretty courtyard pool; doubles between £163 and £507.

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