Lake Tekapo, Mount Cook My first visit to New Zealand was my last family holiday. I was 22, had spent the year before living in Canada and Scotland, and the earlier part of that year working in a bar in the port town of Fremantle in Western Australia. I’d always been what The Lemondheads dissed as the ‘Outdoors Type’, having grown in the suburb of Illawong in Sydney’s south, an Aboriginal  and Torres Strait Islander word meaning ‘a place between two rivers’. Streets there shared backyards with bushland, many sloping down into valleys where pebbled creeks swelled to join the rivers of their namesake. I thrived on exploring the bush. I was the first to climb trees with the boys, wade into the river and, to my mother’s despair, return dirtier and more scratched up each time I’d begged to be allowed to ‘go down to the creek’. But it was the grandeur of the Canadian wilderness that really tattooed the passport to my beating little heart. British Columbia became the pine-clad gate against which …