itinerary, version one

• Fly into Sydney. Hang out in Sydney. 5 days

• Melbourne. (11 hours by train! stop in Canberra?) World Exhibition Building (UNESCO). 2 days.
  

• Melbourne - Adelaide Southern Railway train. Adelaide. Not sure what there is to do here yet. 2 days.
  

• Adelaide - Darwin Ghan railways journey (2 days journey). Get Great Southern Railways Pass which allows for unlimited travel on this line. Break at Alice Springs to go to Uluru (UNESCO). 5 days

• Darwin. 1 day. Kakadu National Park. Trekking. 3 days.

• Get to Cairns. Anything on the way? Fly? Northwestern coast. Great Barrier Reef, beach, tropical rain forests. 5 days.

• Cairns - Brisbane. Fly? Go slowly and enjoy the weird tropicalness of it all. Brisbane. Fraser Island (UNESCO). Gondwana Rainforests (UNESCO) which is a rain forest and has volcanic cones and such. 4 days.
  

• Back to Sydney. (14 hour train ride) 3 days. Fly out of Sydney.
  

So... I still need to do a lot of research. This itinerary, which is based on basically nothing save for the map at the beginning of the Lonely Planet, gives me five extra days to play with. I want to mix it up as much as possible between walking in cities, beaching it up, and doing wildlife. A few families-of-friends dinners wouldn't hurt either.