Great Australian Road Trips review: a beautiful SBS journey worth taking

Great Australian Road Trips on SBS features two duos – Claudia Karvan and Steph Tisdell in one car, Melissa Leong and Nazeem Hussain in the other – who each take three separate journeys across the series six episodes.

There’s no denying that outback roads trips have come a long way since the days of the Leyland Brothers. Television travel is as much about meeting people and exploring culture as it is visiting stunning locations; if your hosts seem unsettled or uncomfortable, no number of gorgeous shots of amazing scenery is going to make your series work.

Other travel series treat the travel as a bit of an afterthought. Seven’s 2024 outback road trip series The Big Trip was mostly based around seeing a grab-bag of personalities encountering things they weren’t really prepared for in between occasionally awkward conversations. The stars were the focus, the setting largely backdrop.

In Great Australian Road Trips, just because the focus is on the landscape outside the cars, that doesn’t mean the hosts are just along for the ride.

Great Australian Road Trips: the destinations

Episode one sees Leong and Hussain taking the 500km journey along the Red Centre Way from Alice Springs to Kings Canyon (as seen in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), with a few diversions along the way. Leong’s a big fan of the region; Hussain’s memories are less glowing, largely thanks to a youthful Scouting jamboree where his messing about denied him an explorer’s badge.

Watch the Great Australian Road Trips trailer.

Along the way they make various stops – after all, you can’t fill a travel documentary entirely with footage of a car driving past amazing mountains and landscapes. So the pair ride camels (Hussain is not a fan, but he does learn that they don’t lay eggs), which provides a handy excuse for a short history lesson, as well as an introduction to the concept of a camel beauty contest.

Other stops are a bit more serious. Stanley Chasm is stunning to look at, and it’s also a good place to learn about the various uses of the local plants and the guardians of local culture; later on there’s an indigenous choir performing in a natural amphitheatre, a school preserving local language (in a community where Australian Rules football ‘is life’), and it turns out that Kings Canyon was definitely worth the trip.

The following week is Karvan and Tidsell exploring Tidsell’s home turf of far north Queensland, where they cheat a little by taking a boat ride, along with meeting some ‘alternative types’ at Kuranda and pass through sugar cane country to the Daintree. The rest of the series alternates between the two duos as they hit the road along Tasmania’s west coast, drive from Adelaide to Kangaroo Island, take a trip between Darwin and Arnhem Land, before ending with another coastal drive, this time from Sydney to Jervis Bay.

Great Australian Road Trips: why it’s worth watching

It’s not exactly news that Australia has a lot of beautiful scenery, and this takes full advantage of it. SBS’s recent travel series have focused more on parts of the country that don’t usually get the spotlight (that is to say, they’ve gone places that aren’t the outback), and this does a good job of making the whole country look good – not just the red-dirt parts.

What makes this worth watching above and beyond the settings (which to be clear, are definitely eye-catching) and the always interesting communities they encounter is the chemistry between the hosts. We’re all used to celebrities being bundled together and forced to pretend they get along, with various degrees of success.

But the firm impression here is that with both duos we’re watching people who actually do like spending time – a fair amount of time, considering the length of some of these trips – in each other’s company.

Whether it’s Karvan and Tidsell talking about what they find funny (Karvan is a big fan of pratfalls) or Leong tearing up while telling Hussain about her relationship with some of the locals they met, the conversations here feel authentic in a way you might not expect in this kind of series.

Early on Karvan says ‘it’s as much about the journey as it is the destination’. While the destinations are often striking and memorable, it’s the conversations during those journeys that makes Great Australian Road Trips more than just six episodes of recognisable faces in pretty settings.

Great Australian Road Trips premieres on 31 July on SBS and SBS On Demand, with new episodes weekly on Thursdays at 7.30pm.

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