Here is natural beauty to fascinate and invigorate, writes Michael Gebicki.
LORD HOWE ISLAND
NEW SOUTH WALES
The word "paradise" cops a hiding these days. A few swooning coconut palms, a lurid sunset and "paradise" limps into view. Tired, overworked and underachieving, "paradise" has lost its punch, and so it is that I am left with no single word for Lord Howe Island. 
Yet from the moment your plane sweeps low over the island's cliffs, skims across the surf break on the edge of the lagoon and drops you in the shadow of two leaping green volcanic peaks you'll be in no doubt. Paradise it is.
Anchored 550 kilometres due east of Port Macquarie, Lord Howe Island is barely 11 kilometres from end to end and two across at its widest, yet rarely is so much crammed into such a tiny pimple of dry land. Its shallow lagoon hosts the world's most southerly coral gardens. The interior is shadowed by dense forests of the miraculous banyan tree, the summit of Mount Gower is richly invested with rainforest and most of the island's lower storey is blanketed by a rustling canopy of kentia palms. In the surrounding waters colliding warm and cool currents spawn giant clams, sea turtles, clownfish, lionfish, tuna, butterfly fish and the doubleheader wrasse.
The island is also a biological ark, a perch for exotic species of seabirds in migratory journeys that might take them to Siberia.
Lord Howe is the only place where providence petrels breed and one of the greatest concentrations of the fabulous red-tailed tropic bird can be found along the island's northern cliffs. So much natural bounty is mightily invigorating.
Everyone swims, snorkels, hikes, fishes, bicycles and takes up birdwatching. Lord Howe Island is also a potent personality-altering substance. Wherever you go on the island you'll come across visitors sighing or whistling to themselves, or stopping to admire some particularly heartening piece of real estate.
This is the way the world should be. Paradise, with brass knobs on.
See lordhoweisland.info.
Getaway: Capella Lodge - page 45