Category: Miscellany from a traveller’s life

It would have been rude to omit a visit to the capital city of the fine country we had been exploring these last five weeks, and conveniently our excursion to see Mt.Kośziucko had positioned us nicely to ensure such an offence was not committed. In choosing which route to take each morning, Google maps would often give us a couple of options. Whenever I saw an alternative route including a road with an interesting name such as “Snowy Mountain Highway”, that not only went in the right general direction but also veered off onto a “road less travelled” through yet another National Park, I would be tempted to take it even if Google advised it would take somewhat longer than the more obvious route following a major road.

So soon after we left the resort town of Jindabyne behind us, we turned northwards on the B72 in the direction of Adaminaby keeping a keen eye open for a minor road taking us into Namadgi NP in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Once found, this narrow road immediately made known its true character as it divested itself of tarmac, eliciting some slightly negative feelings from my co-pilot who, rather unusually, suggested that we might see the same scenery from a “proper road”. Driving on dirt roads was exactly the reason we had chosen to rent a half decent 4WD SUV, and my confidence in that decision was well rewarded as we drove into some superb up-country bush passing by the very occasional isolated farm.

One house in particular caught our attention with its rusting corrugated iron roofs, the lines of washing strung between trees and the nearby hydro pole, kids’ bicycles lying on the ground outside the fence and a child bouncing on a dilapidated trampoline. A young teenager walking his horse through a gate gave us a long stare as if questioning our presence, and with no sign of other habitations in any direction the place felt very remote.

We stopped nearby for our picnic lunch next to some large rocks and to take in the beautiful views of the surrounding countryside as we also watched the antics of a flock of rose-breasted Galah cockatoos, as they struggled to perch on the hydro wires. And we saw our first wild wombat, though sadly as yet another example of road kill.

The dirt road continued onwards and upwards, passing a gate of lost shoes, mementoes of travellers past, and as we entered the park itself, a sign advising us about poisoned baits put down for wild dogs; then somewhat ironically in view of the last hour’s driving,  a second sign warned us to drive slowly as ahead of us we had another 19km of narrow winding gravel road with blind crests and curves! And it was a thoroughly enjoyable drive, with sightings of kangaroos bouncing along among the eucalyptus trees, and a short stop for a walk beside Rendezvous Creek, among huge rocks and some pretty red-trunked gum trees, with the sweet sound of the creek running close by. Finally around 6pm we arrived in Garran, a suburb of Canberra, where we were met by Matthew, our host for the next couple of nights.

As well as adding to our list of state capitals visited, Canberra is also home to the National Museum, where we had been told there was a fund of information about Australia, both after and before it was settled by the early white immigrants. We had come to realise that the fate of Australia’s original inhabitants was not something that seemed to cause much concern to many people, including some of our own family, and we were eager to learn more about these neglected people who had once lived so proudly in such harsh lands. The first few galleries in the museum focused on the white settlers, how they struggled to adapt their European ways and the farming knowledge they brought with them, to live successfully in the very different conditions they found surrounded by nature that was completely alien to them.

Their story was interesting enough in its own way, but it was bizarre to realise that they appeared to make little or no attempt to learn from the locals, indeed finding them to be more of a nuisance than a fund of knowledge. So we were very pleased to finally find ourselves in a couple of galleries where we learnt the aboriginals’ side of the story as told by many elders with first-hand experience of their treatment as second-class “citizens”, and gleaned much historical detail passed down through their families. The fates of many of the Stolen Children, the half-caste children of Australian Aboriginals and of Torres Strait Islanders who had inter-married with the white settlers, who were forcefully removed from their families to be brought up in mission schools and white foster homes, is another particularly dark period in white man’s relations with Australia’s native peoples, and was well documented in the exhibits.

We ended up spending most of the day in the museum, which was just as well, it being a grey rainy day outside. When we eventually left, we took a tour around Canberra’s CBD and the artificial lake overlooked by The National Carillon. This latter edifice is a bell-tower gifted to Australia by Great Britain to celebrate the 50^thanniversary of the founding of Canberra, a purpose-built capital city that had been much maligned in its early years as “a cemetery with lights”, “the ruin of a good sheep station” and “six suburbs in search of a city”. And after driving around the CBD I’m sorry to say that neither of us was overly impressed by this rather ordinary city, full of post-war concrete architecture, and having a city-centre that was both dirty and untidy and had little about it that was graceful. It was in fact a pleasure to get back to our little pad out in the ‘burbs’ and the welcoming sounds of the birds in the trees.

Leaving Canberra the next morning, we continued heading north towards Orange. The drive took us  through yet more agricultural lands with the now familiar scatterings of sheep and cattle, and as the day wore on, the scenery became more hilly and greener. As we got closer to Orange, we passed lots of fruit orchards and vineyards, though with many more kilometres still to travel, we decided against stopping to taste the latter’s produce! In the afternoon, as weariness began to take its toll, we arrived in the small town of Cowra where we came across one of the usual brown tourist signs saying “Japanese Garden”. During WWll there was a prisoner-of-war camp near the town confining a mixture of Italian and Japanese POWs. The story goes that there was a mass escape attempt by the Japanese prisoners that resulted in the deaths of two hundred of them along with three of the Australian soldiers guarding them.

After the war, both sides let bygones be bygones and the result of this rapprochement was a charming peaceful garden with waterfalls, large koi carp swimming in the ponds, and many beautiful plants and trees; it was, in fact, the ideal place for us to slough off our fatigue, eat our sandwiches, and enjoy an afternoon ‘cuppa’.

A few miles further on, we stopped briefly to look at the “Historic Main Street” of the small township of Canowindra and buy some fruit and veggies before driving on to Orange and another night’s stay courtesy of an AirBnB host.

My dear Celine was still under the weather, so the next morning we visited a local doctor to get some idea what was ailing her. Somewhat buoyed by his prognosis, we collected the prescribed medications from a local pharmacy and took a quick turn around the city of Orange before going on our way and driving at a leisurely pace towards Coonabarabran.

The sun was strong, the day was hot, and the scenery became flatter and drier.  There were still many herds of sheep and cattle, but in the main they stood around listlessly and often sheltered in groups in the small amount of shade to be found beneath the scraggy gum trees;  the farming conditions were by no means as attractive as we had seen closer to the south and east coasts. We pulled off the road for lunch at what was at the time a quiet ‘B’ road but rapidly turned into a noisy, major thoroughfare as several of the 34-wheel ‘B-double’ juggernauts thundered past, many of them transporting livestock; so much for our own hopes of a peaceful half-hour in the shade.

After passing through the town of Wellington, Google Maps diverted us off the main highway and onto a very narrow country road which eventually included ten kilometres or more of ‘gravel’ road which was bumpier and lumpier than any we had encountered earlier and, rather surprisingly, had many puddles in the ditches alongside.  Eventually, being in dire need of liquid refreshment, we did what we perhaps should have done more often on our trip, we stopped at The Royal Hotel (= ‘pub’) in the very small township of Mendooran, population about three hundred!

The obliging young barman who looked very much the typical street-wise city lad surprised us by telling us that he had never travelled outside New South Wales, though he had once visited Sydney! We then chatted briefly with his uncle, the proprietor of this worthy establishment, who dressed like one of the local stockmen but when asked if he now preferred owning a pub to life on the range, assured us the pub was definitely the better option in view of the lack of beer in the outback!  He also resolved the mystery of the puddles in this very dry territory; a couple of days previously they had received a very localised, brief but extremely heavy dump of rain, the unusual nature of which partly explained the jovial nature of the bar’s occupants!

As the hot shimmering sun sank to the horizon, we arrived in Coonabarabran and our lodgings in a very dilapidated old house and were met by our charming hostess Grace. As we entered her home, the very original state of the hallway caused us some misgivings about our choice of abode, but when she showed us our beautifully clean, comfortable, newly decorated bedroom, and the open plan kitchen and living room which had been similarly refurbished, we realise we had actually found ourselves a real gem. We learnt that the building had originally been constructed as the town’s maternity home where Grace herself had been born. Grace and her husband had bought the property some twenty years previously, but it was only recently that she had finally found time to start giving the heritage building the TLC it desperately needed.

Grace told us about the local Warrumbungle Observatory, privately owned by the retired astronomer Peter Starr, and we decided to go there that evening. Josh, the young man who made the presentation to our small group, was very knowledgable and had four or five different telescopes set up enabling us to get wonderful views of the Moon, Jupiter and it’s four moons, and several galaxies. We also met there an amateur astronomer from Wales, who leased one of the small observatory “pods” where he kept one of his three telescopes he has around the world to study and photograph “dying” galaxies; some people have  fascinating hobbies!

The next morning we awoke to find that Grace had left for her work at a shop selling school uniforms and the like, and so we took a leisurely breakfast while meeting Jo, the young “woman who does”, and the neighbour who mowed the lawn. We were somewhat sorry to leave as this was such an interesting place, and it would have been lovely to stay a long time and help Grace fulfil her dreams of fully restoring her graceful home to it’s former glory. We hung on till well past 11am but we had to move on  eventually; and so we continued our gentle progress north, aiming for the city of Inverell.

But first of all, we retraced our steps past the observatory and up into the hills to visit Warrambungle NP where we walked the short trail up to Whitegum Lookout from where we had great views of the extinct volcanic plugs of the “Crooked Mountains” – a loose translation of the park’s aboriginal name. Like so many places we had visited in Oz, the park is recovering from a major forest fire; in 2013, this fire had passed through mainly at ground level, so the trees we walked past were bursting with new growth as young shoots sprouted optimistically from the flame blackened tree trunks. Later in the day we would drive through another fire damaged forest, where the fire had been mainly through the tree-tops and the blackened branches were sending out masses of little leaves which made the trees look as if they were covered in moss.  It is truly wonderful to see how nature handles these catastrophes, many of which are nature’s own doing anyway.

The drive there and back took us through some lovely scenery and we were also well amused by the locals’ very artistic postboxes at the roadside. Passing  back through Coonabarabran we filled up the fuel tank and drove out into some more really flat countryside, still mostly pastoral with some croplands, but all of very poor quality.

After a couple of hours however, we arrived in a quite hilly, rocky area, and following a sign for a much-needed rest stop, we found ourselves in the car-park for Mount Kaputar NP. After eating our sandwiches at a well shaded picnic table, we walked along Sawn Rocks Track, another trail among low-level fire-damaged trees, which led to a spectacular cliff of hexagonal basalt columns, some of which had fallen down and looked like neat piles of sawn stone logs.

There we met a couple of English gentlefolk about our age, travelling in a very luxurious Mercedes camper van, and had an amusing chat in posh accents; this was much to my linguist wife’s delight as it confirmed for her that I really wasn’t exactly the well ‘brung up’ English gentleman she had once imagined!

Our digs that evening in Inverell were very different from the previous night. We were met by our hostess who, excited to be receiving her first “foreign” guests, gushingly showed us into our quarters through a side door off our “en-suite” garage.  The apartment was rather bare though clean and spacious enough, but the bathroom was miniscule and the kitchen decidedly limited. At least we had a working television, in front of which we sat eating our tasty salad supper with some of Grace’s chooky eggs, before retiring to our slumbers.

Next day we set off much earlier, there being little reason to tarry. But before we set out on the road we stopped in to look around Inverell’s CBD and were pleasantly surprised – though I don’t know why we should have been, considering the many fine towns we had seen on our travels. We took our usual stroll up and down the main thoroughfares, taking photos and looking in shop windows, and were struck by the unusual sight of several groups of aborigines, especially around the Law Courts, as we had previously seen very few signs of aborigines living among the whites. When I asked one of the guys, as he was leaning against his truck enjoying a snack of chips and gravy, “What’s going on?”, he replied “Nothing special”. When I explained that we were tourists interested in their ongoing problems he said “I guessed that. None of the locals ever take photographs of the Court House!” We found out later that there had recently been a rather violent fracas between a couple of the families resulting in police being called, and that was the combatants’ day in court.

Back towards the town centre, Celine stopped at Aboriginelle, a small art gallery, and while we decided which of the beautiful paintings to buy, we chatted with the artist, Elenore Binge Harrison, and her partner, Leroy, both of whom were teachers in the local school. It was an interesting conversation, Leroy in particular having some very strong views about the lack of a treaty between the native tribes and the white settlers, that left the original peoples in a much worse position than say the Maoris in New Zealand or the N.American Indian tribes.  Then with our delicately detailed painting of an echnida in hand, we headed to the car again, stopping briefly for coffee and hot-cross buns at Funki Munki, a café-cum-health food store.

With the car and us refuelled, we soon arrived at the outskirts of Glen Innes and an old hospital dating back to 1902, now lovingly(?) referred to as the “Land of the Beardies” Historic House Museum. We decided there probably wasn’t enough to see beyond what we read on the various plaques outside the buildings, and so we took a quick look at the old farm machinery in and around the adjacent “Bill Cameron’s Machine Shed”, before driving into the town. This town was even nicer than Inverell, being both very old and charmingly laid out with wide city streets, many of which were tree-lined. We noted another common factor among Australian country towns was the large number of independent bookshops selling both used and new volumes.

And in Glen Innes we also came across a couple of gun shops, notably one in what was originally a bank building. The proprietor of the second shop came out to talk as I was taking a picture of her window and assured us that, unlike in the States, she wasn’t allowed to sell any automatic weapons, and gun controls were far, far stricter ever since the 1996 massacre  in Tasmania.

As we drove along the New England Highway looking for a good place to stop for our usual mid-afternoon luncheon picnic, we happened upon yet another national park, namely Girraween NP in the midst of the so-called “Granite Belt”.

We ate our lunch elegantly seated at a picnic table, and then walked along Granite Arch Trail alongside Bald Rock Creek where it flowed across and around large flat slabs of granite. The trail then started upwards through another forest of gum trees among a jumble of enormous rocks, three of which formed the impressive arch. A large kangaroo stood tall as he watched us warily before loping off into the undergrowth.

We had been so lucky in finding so many delightful places on this journey. And then as we drove away from this particular find, two more kangaroos gave us a perfect demonstration of why so many of them end up dead at the roadside. They hopped along the ditch beside us for a short way and then one of them suddenly decided the few feet lead he had on us gave it ample space to dart across the road in front of us, an exercise he repeated some yards further on; sadly they seem to have absolutely no idea of the danger that vehicles present.

Our last night on the road was spent in the home of a pleasant easy-going lady in Warwick, where we had booked a little en-suite arrangement that suited our needs ideally. We even treated ourselves to a tasty evening meal at Soban House, a Korean/Japanese restaurant in a town with very few eating establishments. Our short drive back to Bli Bli the next day took us along mostly narrow country roads, past well-husbanded mixed farms, through Gatton and Esk. Finally we arrived at the edge of the highlands and went down the steep twisty rocky-sided road from Peachtree to Woreema before joining the M1 motorway for the last twenty miles or so.  We had forgotten about the change of hour between Queensland and New South Wales, and much to my big sister’s surprise arrived an hour earlier than scheduled; well actually a day earlier, as our e-mail telling them our expected day of return seemed to have been lost in the ether!

Nevertheless we were glad to get ‘home’ and relaxed contentedly in the knowledge that the next day we didn’t have to drive anywhere at all. All the same we still had our final adventure to look forward to, three days in Kakadu NP in the tropical lands around Darwin.

Coming soon:

Oz 2018 – part 5 – Excursion into the Top End

We go north to Darwin, look for seawater crocodiles in Kakadu NP and bathe beneath the waterfalls of Litchfield NP.

Postscript: “We’re here”, a poem written by Phyllis Pitchford in 1984, succinctly stating the difficulties that Australian’s aboriginal people have in gaining equality.