Adelaide seems to be just about the liveliest city in Australia. They used to call her the "City of Churches." Now she seeks-and deserves-the title of the "Festival City." Since the 1970 construction of a magnificent arts complex on the banks of the Torrens River, she has hosted a biennial extravaganza that brings every kind of performer and artist from the rest of Australia and from other cultural centers of the world.

However, throughout non-Festival years, too, there is a feeling of activity in Adelaide of something going on that should not be missed. Adding to that impression is the Adelaide Casino, although it has lost the running of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix to Melbourne.

The capital is also one of the best-designed cities in the world. It was laid out midway between the coastline and the Mount Lofty Range by its 1838 founder and surveyor, Colonel William Light. The main portion of the city today is almost completely surrounded by extensive parklands.

The town appears to be divided into two parts: The southern square-mile grid of seventy-five blocks contains nearly all the business, government, and cultural centers. To the north, across the Torrens and the wide green belt, is a city of homes, gardens, and parks.

The entire state of South Australia likewise divides itself into two different regions. Adelaide sits in the southern third of the state-fertile coastland with a Mediterranean climate and hills and valleys that provide excellent soil for olives, almonds, and especially the European grapes that have made the region famous for wine production. The 1,600-mile-long Murray River also passes its final four hundred miles through southern South Australia before emptying into the Southern Ocean.

Adelaide, though green, is also dry. It averages only about twenty-five inches of rain a year. But the second region, the northern two-thirds of South Australia, receives only half as much rain, and seemingly twice as much heat. These are the beginnings of the great deserts for which Australia, as a whole is known worldwide.

First there are the Flinders Ranges, colorful and rugged mountains popular with "bushwalkers" and lovers of spring wildflowers. Beyond those, the country is flatter and less inviting, although spectacular in a different way. Here is Lake Eyre, which most years has no water at all-just 3,000 square miles of glaring white salt. Here, too, is the opal country, where man lives underground, not just to dig out the precious stones, but to protect himself from the oppressive heat In this section is the shadeless Nullarbor Plain, where the Indian Pacific train sets out on a stretch westward that includes three hundred miles of perfectly straight track.

South Australia, gateway to the Outback, has the distinction of simultaneously being the most lively and the most deadly state.

Nothing seems more of a shame than for a Northern hemisphere visitor to fly all the way to Australia and not go to Ayers Rock. To any but the most jaded or the most superficial traveler, it is not 'lust a big pebble." Ayers Rock, 210 air miles southwest of Alice Springs, of course, is the largest monolith in the world. It is two miles long, 1½ miles wide, and 1,143 feet high.

But beyond that, the rock-a type of feldspar-rich sandstone called arkose was the sacred Uluro to the Aborigines, and their paintings and the remains of ancient rites and ceremonies are in evidence in the rock's folds and caverns. If you're in good physical condition and wearing appropriate shoes, you can climb the rock in about forty-five minutes, something many Aussies feel they must be able to boast they have done.

The rock is interesting from dawn until dusk; it changes colors throughout the day, ending usually with a brilliant orange blast exactly at sunset. No photograph we've seen does it justice, and yes, it's worth a special trip from Sydney if you can swing it. You no longer have to change airlines in Alice Springs.) It's also worth braving all the annoying flies you'll find in hot weather months. (Take some kind of repellent. Better still, like Thomas R. Gilmore of Willowdale, Ontario, buy a piece of army surplus open-weave net in Mice for $2 and drape it over your head for instant relief)

The Northern Territory is what most of the world imagines when it thinks of Australia.

Here is the Red Center - the baked desert and stone that has served as the setting for nearly a century and a half of Outback adventures. It's studded by that massive red granite monolith that almost marks the geographic hub of the entire continent, Ayers Rock-what the ancient Aborigines called their sacred Uluru.

The staging area for visiting the Rock and the other sights in Australia's Dead Heart is the strange, often lonely town of Mice Springs, which was sparked by a telegraph relay station and grew up along the banks of a usually dry river. It was made world-famous by Nevil Shute's wartime novel A Town Like Alice.

"The Alice," with a population of 23,600, may be the informal capital of the Outback, but the official center of government for the Northern Territory (N.T.) is the coastal city of Darwin, bordering the Timor Sea in the tropical climate near the tip of Australia's "Top End." Some 72,800 people now live there, half the population of the entire territory. (Alice Springs and Darwin are known today as the two fastest-growing cities in Australia.)

Many of Darwin's residents are foreign-born or are descended from a variety of nationalities and races, including the black Aborigines. (More than half of Australia's Aborigines live in the N.T., as a matter of fact. Some of those with homes on reserves outside of Darwin have managed to maintain their dignity, but visitors are sometimes shocked to see results of the cultural lag that causes many Aborigines to live out sad lives drinking in the dry Todd River bed in Alice Springs.) About 300 Vietnamese live in Darwin today-a small percentage of the thousands of "boat people" who arrived in the harbor aboard derelict vessels since the end of the Vietnam War.

Darwin deserves a book of its own. This multiracial town has survived despite repeated ravages of war and weather over the past 110 years. Thousands of American military personnel were stationed in Darwin during World War Il - one reason the settlement suffered no less than sixty-four Japanese air raids. The town is also smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean cyclone (hurricane) belt, and it has been directly hit by three of these storms to date. The first was in 1897, another was in 1937, and the last was the devastating Cyclone Tracy, which stripped Darwin to the bone during a 5½-hour siege on Christmas Day 1974. A few of Tracy's scars are still visible.

Darwin and Alice Springs are connected by the thousand-mile Stuart highway, locally called simply "The Track." This road, originally paved largely by the U.S. Army during World War II, passes through such history-steeped settlements as Adelaide River, Katherine, Mataranka, and Tennant Creek. It serves as the arterial route from which other tracks lead to poverty-stricken Aboriginal reserves; to huge, battling cattle stations; to teeming wildlife sanctuaries; to current iron mines; and to future uranium mines. What are called "road trains"-huge tractor-trailer rigs hauling as many as three outsize trailers-make driving "The Track" in the family car quite an experience. Until now, the road surface hasn't been that great either, but there has been considerable improvement in the Darwin-Tennant Creek stretch and work is continuing.

The Northern Territory is hill of anomalies, but one that concerns visitors directly is that it has only two seasons. In Alice Springs this is interpreted as summer (very hot days and warm nights) and winter (hot days and cool nights). In Darwin they talk about "The Wet," a monsoon summer season, when it rains nearly nonstop from about November through March, and "The Dry," the cloudless warm days and balmy, pleasant nights occurring from about April to October-the ideal season to experience some of the most varied bird and animal life you'll see in Australia.

Queensland might hit you in three stages.

At first, the state seems to be like Hawaiin coastlines of yellow sand, solid blue waters, bright green islands, then fertile plains of sugar, pineapple, rustling palms, and hills of flowering trees and plants-all backgrounded by the mountains of the Great Dividing Range.

But just beyond that first impression, the state begins to feel more like Florida. Its capital, Brisbane, bears the remnants of a traditional "wowserism" that is not unlike the "cracker" influence still at work in America's southern resort state.

Still later, Brisbane and Queensland take on their own personalities, as complex and as interesting as that of any other location in Australia.

Queensland's conservative tradition is an outgrowth of a long agrarian history. In the past, the great labor-intensive industries were operated by those who shanghaied and shipped in thousands of "kanakas"-Pacific islanders-to provide the brawn needed to harvest the sugar, pineapple, and banana plantations. There was little but scorn for the Aborigines who understandably enough did not see the percentage in this kind of backbreaking work.

The racist attitudes of the past have still not entirely disappeared in Queensland. This, together with its otherwise hospitahie personality, makes it a paradox comparable to the anomalies still found in the Aluerican South.

Physically, Queensland varies from the treeless, fly-ridden mining country and desert Outback around Mount Isa and elsewhere in the west through jungle-like Aboriginal reserves and other little-explored and hardly civilized territory to the north, especially in the York Peninsula. One feature of its sun-bathed northeast coast is world famous-the I ,2⁵⁰-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, once hazardous to navigation and today a repository of some of the most varied and beautiful marine life on earth. This massive ridge of regenerating coral polyps is now considered to he the world's largest living thing.

To the southern Australian, Queensland is a winter playground, the tropical home of the Sunshine Coast, a string of beaches and resorts from Brisbane north to Noosa, and most especially the Gold Coast, a long, narrow equivalent to Miami Beach or Waikiki, extending along the southern shore for the last twenty miles before reaching the border of New South Wales.

Outside of the wildest areas, the Queensland countryside is still very agricultural; in addition to the giant sugar plantations, there are vast acres of vegetables and fruits plus huge cattle stations raising some of Australia's best beef. An occasional impediment to this activity are numbers of wild animals who compete for the forage of the plains. Most of these are shot on sight-creatures like kangaroos, dingoes, and "brumbies" (wild horses that cannot he captured).

The city seems small, almost quaint, with its mixture of Georgian, very few Victorian, and some modern buildings all wrapped together in a comfortable "hometown" feeling, apparent even on a short stay. It has a definite appreciation for its roots, too, for Hobart was founded in 1804, making it Australia's second oldest settlement after Sydney.

Like Sydney, Hobart owes its beginnings to a penitentiary. The infamous Port Arthur was constructed nearby, and between 1830 arid 1877 the name was as feared in England and the rest of Australia as Devil's Island was in Europe. Today the prison city lies in mellow, romantic ruins sixty miles by road from the capital.

Hobart's population now numbers about 181,000 out of the island's total of 453,000. Shaped rather like a shield, the state is a sparsely settled, even partly unexplored area of 26,215 square miles. That's about the size of West Virginia or Scotland. Were it not so dwarfed physically, culturally, and economically by the continent above it, it would qualify as a big, important island indeed.

Like many scenic lands, Tasmania has a violent history-marked not only by conflicts with convicts but also by struggles between the settlers and the indigenous population, a nation of Aborigines of completely different racial stock than the natives of the mainland.

Somehow the early English colonialists managed to slay virtually every one of them. A few older survivors were rounded up, but the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal died about one hundred years ago.

It's been a similar story with nature. The Tasmanian tiger hasn't been seen since 1933, although there is some hope that a few may be creeping around the rough country on the west coast. Nevertheless, wildlife conservation is still a controversial issue in Tasmania.

Among Australians, "Tassie" is still thought of as the "Apple Isle"; some of the world's most delicious apples are grown there. Unfortunately, they've been largely priced out of the export market in recent years. Actually, many kinds of fruit abound, and during some seasons of the year, travelers enjoy picking wild raspberries and rose hip berries from the side of the road. There is considerable industry, now led by mining activities. Much of this has been attracted by the very cheap electricity provided by an ingenious hydroelectric system. Tasmania produces most of Australia's exports of zinc, tin, and lead. Its forests provide more than half of Australia's newsprint.