Return to Oz: Goway’s Iconic Australian Connection

Goway has been selling trips to Downunder longer than any other travel company in North America...and we can prove it! 

In our archives, you’ll find a 1979 four-colour 50-page book called Australia, which was the main Canadian and American publication promoting travel to Australia at the time. Published by Qantas, it was the predecessor to an Australian Tourist Commission travel guide called The Wonder Downunder. Bound between the covers of Australia was a 48-page red and black insert that featured 69 travel ideas from 17 tour operators and wholesalers. One of the companies featured was Goway Travel, with three trip ideas. 

Today, Goway is the only survivor from that exclusive group. This makes us the oldest specialist seller of Australia and the other lands Downunder in North America. 

Between 1983 and 2019, we produced the most widely distributed South Pacific brochure in the United States and Canada. It was distinctive for its upside-down DOWNUNDER trademark logo.

In 1986, we opened our own office in Australia to better serve our clients exploring the continent. No other North American company has this advantage. Today, with a staff of over 100, our Goway Sydney operation also serves clients from all over the world. With its longevity and overall infrastructure, Goway has been able to cater to any special-interest traveller who wants to visit Downunder. 

In 2022, I was presented with the unique and prestigious Friends of Australia award from Tourism Australia for my outstanding contribution to promoting Australia. I still run Goway today, and my son Adam and daughter Bronwyn hold senior leadership positions within the company. 

Our Australia roots go even further. Our VP South Pacific is an Australian native: Anthony Saba has worked at Goway for over 20 years. Another veteran of more than 20 years is Meghan Boyd, Commercial Manager for South Pacific, who works with Anthony to craft our unparalleled product line. Our Senior Director of Sales & Partnerships, Renee Stanton-Defaria, is also Australian and heads up the sales operation in North America. And this only scratches the surface of the Australian roots at Goway. 

Throughout 2025, we celebrated our 55th Anniversary, a proud accomplishment in the travel field. Over the years, we’ve successfully developed a full range of travel ideas to over 115 countries on all seven continents that match the calibre of our trips Downunder. As we say, we cater to Globetrotters, the ideal repeat clients for travel professionals. 

You can find Goway’s full slate of tailor-made trips for Globetrotters at goway.com. 

In the Beginning

In the 1970s, Goway offered and sold trips by the Australian camping tour operator Centralian, run by Max Whitehead. Its main tour was a 28-day journey from Sydney up the Pacific Coast to Cairns and across the top end to Darwin, then down through the Red Centre (Alice Springs, Ayers Rock) to Coober Pedy, to Adelaide and finally to Melbourne and back to Sydney. We also sold a camping tour program in New Zealand called Freedom Holidays for travellers aged 18 to 30. 

Both companies eventually went broke but fortunately we had already found more reliable operators who really helped Goway become a serious wholesaler to Downunder. The first was New Zealand’s Horizon Holidays, which operated “Easy Rider” camping tours for under 30s, as well as Motor Homes and Coach-Hotel tours for the older market.  

For Australia, we got to work with Australia Adventure Tours by Bill King, a truly legendary Outback Australia camping tour operator and pioneer. Bill's company was acquired by one of the country’s two large internal airlines, Trans Australian Airlines (TAA).  They wanted to run AAT Kings to offer TAA’s Coach-Hotel tours called Australian Accommodated Tours (AAT) along with Bill's own Australia Adventure Tours.  

By becoming these companies’ general sales agent, little Goway now had a solid foundation and travel products to sell to North Americans.  

Over the next several years, other quality Downunder operations wanted us to represent and sell them. Rail Australia was another image maker for Goway. We also saw the opportunity to open our own inbound operation in Sydney to provide extra service to our North American clients travelling around Australia. As well, our Sydney office got sales from Australian travel agents on our own Canada-USA and Latin American Adventures.  That meant we could keep the Australian dollars we were collecting in Australia for our own Adventure trips to pay Horizon, AAT Kings, Rail Australia and others, saving foreign exchange charges.  With such a large portfolio of Australia-New Zealand product and our own office in Sydney, we did and still offer anything and everything Downunder to anyone in North America.  

Goway also became a significant seller for Qantas and Air New Zealand. Along the way, all of our contacts and expertise spawned the creation of Groups Only by Goway, which is able to provide special-interest Group Travel arrangements for any group of any size. We have been doing this since 1986.   

Some Personal Travel Experience in Australia

Growing up in Australia myself, I believe I caught the travel bug from my mother’s aunt, who gave me photo albums of her ocean liner cruises to New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef, plus South East Asia including Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Traveling overnight on the steam train to Sydney from my country home was exciting and inspirational. Each cabin had a beautiful black and white photo of a stunning site somewhere in New South Wales, which owned the railway and was the state I lived in. With my very first car, a Volkswagen Beetle, I travelled with my two best mates, Tim and Don, to Melbourne, then on the overnight ferry to Tasmania for two weeks. It was like travelling overseas (to “Taswegians,” we were “mainlanders”). This particular trip aroused my interest in travel and to also to beware of local warnings, including: “Don't leave your shoes out at night because Tasmanian Devils will destroy them.”  

Me being Australian was not enough to be a “travel expert” on my home country. I had to travel more and experience the “real” Australia. This I have done and written about elsewhere. But I will relate some of them focusing on two special trips.  

Davidson’s Arnhemland Safari

This was one of my best experiences anywhere in the world. Max Davidson, who has since passed away, eventually got me to visit his exclusive camp in the Northern Territory, which incorporates a sacred Aboriginal site nestled against the Arnhemland escarpment. It also offers idyllic billabongs (waterholes), wildlife wilderness experiences, and Aboriginal caves and catacombs that have been occupied for over 50,000 years.   

Max was a genuine crocodile hunter when it was legal and there are photo albums to prove it. He claimed he had received “special rights” for his camp from the local Aboriginal elders. I was travelling with Ian, my longtime traveling mate, and Greg Aitkens, who was the general manager for Goway Sydney. Exploring the area by four-wheel drive vehicle and “tinny” boats, we saw lots of wildlife, including crocodiles, and a tapestry of art that dates from the “time of creation,” including a painted six-metre-long Rainbow Serpent that dominates a rock shelter. We walked through a burial ground with exposed bones. We also went barramundi fishing and cooked them on the embankment at lunch. Then we also did what no guests do: Greg and I went wild pig hunting.  

Stomping in a mosquito-infested swamp at dawn with two of Max’s local contacts, we all carried rifles, and one of Max’s escorts also carried a revolver in case we encountered a crocodile. As a teenager, I once vowed to never kill another animal after I shot a kangaroo (which had tears in its eyes) but wild pigs are different. They are not indigenous and are an invasive species that degrade water sources and swamps. I did shoot a pig, which was left for the crocodiles...and I resumed my vow to not kill wild native creatures.

Australia's Most Challenging Road Trip

Fast forward to 2024, when I was part of a small, five-person group that tried to drive the 1,850-kilometre Canning Stock Route (CSR). This adventure was one of my most amazing travel experiences in the world—one that only a few people have done.

The CSR is named after the expedition leader Alfred W. Canning, who in 1906 surveyed a stock route for cattle between Halls Creek in Western Australia’s Kimberley in the North to Wiluna in the Southeast of the state. Unfortunately, we could not complete the whole journey after two weeks and 1,000 kilometres. As we were travelling north, our route was completely transformed into a huge impassable swamp.

That whole CSR route would need waterholes (wells) approximately a day from each other for moving a herd of cattle. It took 30 men, 70 camels, four wagons, 100 tonnes of food, equipment and 267 goats for milk and meat to build 50 wells, taking 23 months. These guys also had challenges with Aboriginals that were not pretty.  

So the CSR is not a road. I have written elsewhere about the day-to-day encounters, but I will reiterate the warnings of Western Australia's 4 Wheel Driver Magazine: “Prepare for the worst, e.g. broken springs and shock absorbers...The track itself is rutted and heavily corrugated in long sections and there are numerous sand dune crossings and rocky and washed out sections.”  

This “trip of a lifetime” was organized by my good mate Don Rosenfeldt and two of his sons, Dean and Tyler. Tyler, a professional mechanic, had spent over six months preparing our (one- and two-year-old) Toyota Hilux vehicles for the trip, and we carried all the “spares” we could possibly need. While we had to handle the discomfort of driving the most challenging Road Trip in Australia, I have to confess we had the most comfortable camping trip I had ever been on, even though we were thousands of kilometres from civilization in an unforgiving environment. With four fridges on hand, we had cold beer every evening plus amazing meals (Dane, Don’s other son, is an amateur cook) and espresso coffee every morning. The vehicles were air-conditioned and equipped with two-way radio. We had electric blankets, and hot showers from the vehicle roof pipe tanks in a separate tent. We also had a chain saw for cutting fire wood, a drone that helped us circumnavigate water and other hazards, and a telescope to view the Southern Hemisphere night skies from the West Australia desert. The Southern Hemisphere night sky, particularly in the Australian Desert, is way more spectacular than the Northern Hemisphere. We had food, drinking water, and booze left over. The planning, preparation and organization of our CSR trip obviously reflected the professional culture of Don’s AEA Luxury tours, which handle a lot of Goway’s Sydney daytrip clients, back in Sydney and NSW.  

On the track around the campfire, we often reflected on how the members of the Canning Expeditions in 1906 and 1908 would have been so jealous of how comfortable we travelled.  

Other Travel Experiences

I once travelled up the west coast of Australia by Greyhound bus with my travelling mate Ian to visit Shark Bay and the famous dolphins at Monkey Mia and snorkeled Ningaloo Reef, which is wading distance from the shore. The highlight was swimming with the huge whale shark—an amazing experience. In Western Australia, I also have visited several mining areas plus Broome and its incredible Cable Beach. As well, I visited the unique Bungle Bungles and stayed at the luxurious outback El Questro homestead.  

Back in the East, I visited the tropical rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef several times. The best experience I had was when we joined marine biologists observing the annual coral spawning event on the Great Barrier Reef and doing a night dive.  

I am privileged to have travelled all over Australia, but I am even more privileged to have built a business that has made me an “unofficial ambassador of Australia” and allowed to promote this travel destination. So I feel like the Australian singer and songwriter Peter Allen, who wrote and sang I Still Call Australia Home. (You can hear it on YouTube.)