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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud with me, Lyndon Kempkaren. Each week we choose our

favourite pieces from the magazine and ask our writers to read them aloud.

Coming up on the podcast this week. Matthew Paris is just back from Australia and he shares his thoughts on the upcoming referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.

Dan Hitchens looks at church congregations and wonders why some are on the up, while others are in a spiral of decline.

And Liam McLaren describes the delights of audio and tells us why young children should be heard, but not necessarily seen.

First, it's Matthew Paris.

My partner and I have just returned from the most magical trip. As guests of Western Australia's tourist board, we've driven almost 1,500 miles on decent but mostly unpaved roads, right across the top left-hand corner of the Australian continent. This is the northwest, a landscape like nowhere else on

the planet. Three times the size of England, they call it the Kimberley. Starting from a town called

Broome, easy to fly there, we made it overland to Darwin in the Northern Territory. In almost leisurely fashion, we took about

ten days in an all-singing, all-dancing Toyota camper van, sometimes sleeping out under the stars,

more often staying in comfortable shallets at a string of cattle station-turned tourist camp places

dotted along our route.

Everywhere was clean and comfortable, everyone was welcoming, the stakes and the swimming

creeks were bliss, and I'd enthusiastically recommend this adventure, the Gibb River Road,

they call it, to couples or families, keen to get off the beaten track and into the bush,

but without any kind of danger, and always within reach of creature comforts.

Many Australians do it.

I'm writing at length for the times about the experience.

Suffice it to say that if Walt Disney had created a giant asteroid as a strange yet beautiful

...