Unforgettable, magical Australia really rocks!

CAROL DRINKWATER is best known for playing Helen Heriot in the much-loved TV series All Creatures Great And Small.

But she has since become a best-selling author of 21 books.

Her latest, The Lost Girl (Michael Joseph £12.99) is out on Thursday. It’s a gripping tale about a mum’s hunt for her missing daughter.

Carol lives with husband Michel in a farmhouse in the French Riviera.

IThe sky is the limit: Uluru is a truly wonderful sight in the heart of the Outback.

’VE been fortunate in my life to travel to many places.

I’ve lived a week inside a Balinese volcano, travelled the Amazon alone, climbed mountains and dived many of the world’s seas.

I have also travelled to war zones for my Olive Route books and been welcomed by people surviving under the direst of circumstances.

But, if I have to choose just one trip I’d opt for my first visit to the Northern Territories in Australia.

I was accompanied by Michel, my future husband, who I had met whilst filming in Sydney.

On our first date, he took me to dinner at a waterside restaurant in Elizabeth Bay and proposed. I laughed, avoiding an immediate answer, but we began travelling together.

We flew to Alice Springs, hired a car and hit the open desert road to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.

In those days, there were few tourists. We were alone at the heart of that vast, red-baked land. And then our first sighting of Ayers Rock. Uluru is the name given to it by the indigenous Australians, the Anangu tribe, who revere it as a holy site.

You can climb to its summit, but the Aboriginals request visitors not to clamber over their sacred paths.

Today, I would respect that appeal. Back then, sweating and puffing, we climbed Uluru.

The view was a mind-blowing marriage of endlessly flat scrubland and cloudless, cobalt sky.

Back in the early 1980s we booked a room at the only available hotel. We drove ourselves to the rock and hiked.

It was hot, a dry heat that baked your skin and enveloped you.

From Uluru, we continued to the Olgas, a companion range of rich, red domes that were equally impressive.

We sweated the three-hour Valley of the Winds walk, and then we sat and stared around us.

Nothing prepares you for the majesty, the mystery of this place.

Its light changes, its landscape transformed at sunrise and sunset.

Once experienced, it is never forgotten.

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