Australia

Australia arrives fully formed in the imagination before you land: the Harbour, the Opera House, the Outback, things that can kill you. The mythology does the country no favours – flattening a continent into a highlight reel someone else edited.

What the highlight reel misses is that this is, beneath the settler story, the oldest living culture on earth. The Anangu have been reading Uluru's creation stories into sandstone for 60,000 years. Albany's coast was Kinjarling, Menang Noongar country, for 40,000 years before George Vancouver arrived and claimed it for Britain. In Croydon, Queensland, a corrugated iron house holds four generations of a Chinese-Aboriginal family who built a life in the remote heat. The deeper you look, the less the reel holds.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours put local voices in your ear: walk Melbourne's river laneways, trace Sydney from the Rocks to the Harbour Bridge, or drive the Red Centre into Anangu legend country. Independent, immersive, always at your pace.

Put in your earbuds. Australia's been here a while – and it reckons you should know.