We left Tasmania with heavy hearts for not only had we enjoyed such a happy relaxed week with Alistair and his family, but we both thought that the State itself was the best piece of Australia we had seen to date. The major objectives of our Aussie trip had been achieved, we had been warmly welcomed by five arms of the Mckenzie family, we had visited three State capitals and had already driven around more than two thousand kilometres of Australia’s wonderful coastline. Furthermore, we had seen a veritable plethora of some of the amazing Australian wildlife that seems to be so abundant, albeit rather too much in the form of roadkill, especially in Tasmania, I’m sad to say. We still had one special trip up our sleeve involving sea-water crocodiles, and there was still the sixth arm of the family to meet, my youngest niece, Philippa, who was scheduled to soon be flying in to the Sunshine Coast from her home in Margaret River, Western Australia, a destination that we had decided was one too far to include in this already very busy vacation.
However, we had not really experienced very much of inland Australia, we had failed to visit the country’s capital city, we had not seen Mt Kościuszko, the country’s highest mountain, and we still had to experience the famed Great Ocean Road. So, instead of taking the direct route back to Bli Bli, a journey of around eighteen hundred kilometres for which I had reckoned about five days of relatively easy driving, we decided to take a few detours and ended up taking twelve days and driving nearly twice as far!
Once we had disembarked in Melbourne and bought some supplies for the road at the local IGA, instead of heading north, we turned southwest following signs for the Great Ocean Road which we eventually joined at Anglesea – a very different place from the eponymous island off the north coast of Wales that I remembered from my childhood!
Some of my readers may be aware that Australia has a bit of a reputation for its surf and surfers, and as we had already learnt from my nephews, the south Australian coast has some of the best surf in the world. Thus it was no surprise that as we drove west, the surf breaks became bigger and wilder and the shoreline got rockier and more dramatic.
But to make sure we understood the true significance of this splendid coastal drive, we stopped first of all at the Memorial Arch, which celebrates the three thousand returned Australian servicemen who built the Great Ocean Road a few years after the end of the Great War in memory of their fallen comrades. After a couple of hours, we reached the small seaside village of Lorne, where we sat at a park bench by the ocean and shared our sandwich lunch with a pair of parakeets, not to mention the usual gaggle of ‘flying rats’, a.k.a. seagulls. The parakeets made themselves seem so friendly that a young lady even asked us if the birds were ours; evidently, she hadn’t been in Australia long!
An aspect of Australia that is not so very different from California is the ever-present danger of forest fires. Wherever we had been, we had seen signs indicating the current danger-level of fires occurring, and on many a day, we had come across the latent effects of the multitude of fires that had occurred in recent months and years. This particular day there were several fires burning inland from our route and whilst in Lorne we met a detachment of fire-fighters, ready with their off-road fire engines to be called to action. With no reports of fires reaching the coast, we continued on our way stopping a second time for coffee and a very yummy brownie at “Balhanna Cottage”, a health-food café in Apollo Bay, another charming small village on this coast where such communities are few and far between. Many of these places were originally established in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was easy to imagine how remote the settlers must have felt before the Great Ocean Road was built. After Apollo Bay, the road turned away from the sea for several miles skirting inland of Cape Otway, and apart from a quick peek at the Cape itself, we didn’t see much more of the coast until we were close to the Twelve Apostles Marine Park.
The weather had become more threatening by the minute, and as we started on the short walk to see those much-photographed hunks of rock sticking out of the Southern Ocean, the heavens opened making picture-taking an impossibility and the likelihood of spending the rest of the afternoon sopping wet a distinct possibility. So, we jumped back into the car and drove on to Port Campbell, where we booked into the Loch Ard Motor Inn and Apartments, bought more supplies at the small grocery across the road, and finished the day noshing on very garlicy ‘home-cooked’ pasta in our fairly commodious accommodation.
The next morning, we really had to face it, we weren’t going to see the sea again for another ten or twelve days. So, we took a stroll along the tidy main street to join the seagulls on the beach for one last walk at the seaside watching the breakers in the distance dissipating their force on the bar at the mouth of a pretty little cove before rippling gently up onto the sand. And then it was time to set off into the unknown Australian interior, our destination being the 1850s gold-boom town of Bendigo. We had very little idea what to expect on this part of the journey and were nicely surprised by the quality of the towns we passed through that first day.
We had our morning coffee break and did a bit of shopping at Ballarat, enjoying its wide main street and lots of elegant late 19th/early 20thcentury buildings. Then we went to Daylesford to taste the waters at the natural springs; they were all fairly horrible and definitely not suitable for filling up our water bottles.
Near to Mt. Franklin, we turned off at a sign saying “Chocolate Mill” where we used the loo, admired the artistic ironwork, and came away with four hand-made chocolates that we consumed immediately, after we got back into the car.
We shopped for knitting wool in Castlemaine which seemed to have some interesting shops, and much to our surprise, we found the ideal wool in a MaxiFoods supermarket.
A few miles further on, we went ‘offroad’ up a steep trail following a sign to a “Diggings Trail” hoping to see where gold was found in the old days but gave up after a mile or so and instead stopped atop a rough gravel knoll to have our picnic lunch and giving our driver some much-needed energy!
The final stop of the day was at Maldon, a very charming original old gold-mining town; the oldest building that we found there dated back to 1854 along with a butcher business which was established in 1857. It also had a traditional part-time fire service that we watched in action as the firefighters responded to the siren arriving by foot, bicycle, and truck to jump on the – very modern – engine as it departed up Main Street. We were once more reserving our accommodation using Airbnb, and we were grateful to that evening’s hostess, Jo, for her suggestions of places to visit that had made our day so interesting. Bendigo is a fair-sized city of 96,000 or more inhabitants, but Jo’s home was in a quiet green suburb, and the accommodation she provided was probably one of the nicest of our whole trip.
So we were glad to meet her the next morning, along with her young son, Jack, and their friendly border collie, Missie, and learn how the house and garden were very much a work in progress for her and her firefighter husband – firefighting seeming to have become a regular theme on this part of our trip!
We drove into Bendigo’s CBD before travelling on and once again found ourselves admiring these Aussie cities. The city planners of the early twentieth century seemed to have had a very good idea of what makes a city livable, and this one with yet more fine architecture, broad main streets, and green parks was another fine example. However, we did have some disappointments, Shepparton being one of them. Around mid-morning, after driving through a lot of uninteresting flat dry farmland, we thought we had arrived there and stopped outside a Salvation Store with grain silos across the street and more of the enormous ‘B-Double’ truck trailer rigs thundering past.
We wanted some plastic containers with lids for our comestibles, and the Sally Army store proved to be a good place for such stuff. Chatting with the sales ladies as we do, we were surprised to learn that this rather downtrodden town was actually Mooroopa, still a few miles from Shepparton. So we jumped back into the car, hopeful of an improvement, only to find Shepparton if anything a whole lot worse. The main feature of the town was a dilapidated steel observation tower open to the public but not offering any very promising views; the architecture was mainly ‘60s concrete ugly, and most of the locals seemed to be overweight and looked thoroughly bored hanging around the streets rather aimlessly. We did manage to find a reasonable cup of coffee and the public loos were very clean as we had come to expect in Oz, but we certainly weren’t inspired to walk the main streets any more than necessary.
Our next chosen waypoint was the small town of Cobram, where we intended to turn east and drive along the Murray Valley Highway to Albury. Somewhere in Cobram’s vicinity, Google Maps seemed to get totally discombobulated and took us off on a minor road towards goodness knows where, till finally we took control ourselves and eventually reached the highway, missing Cobram completely. It was a hot afternoon and shade was scarce, so spotting a house with a tree-filled garden down a well-kept gravel road, we parked next to the garden gate and ate our sandwiches in the relative cool. Up till then the drive that day had been along miles of very straight roads through bone-dry pastureland, from which the poor cattle were grazing ‘living hay’, and the only menace had been the occasional 34-wheeler monster breathing down our necks.
Several miles east of Cobram, the scenery became much greener, and we stopped just past a bridge across the very lifeless River Ovens to take one or two pics. Up close, it looked more like a swamp, but all the same, it was pretty photogenic; we just had to breath in and press ourselves against the concrete parapet when the big trucks swept by, taking no prisoners as they careered along at their 100kph legal limit.
At Yarrawonga, a few miles further on, we drove over the bridge across Lake Malwala, created by damming the Murray River. The lake seems to have made Yarrawonga a bit of a tourist town, but it has also resulted in a stark landscape of bear white skeletons of dead trees standing in the shallow water for miles around.
My dear Celine was still suffering from a debilitating cold that she had been incubating for the last few days. So, as soon as we had got ourselves ensconced in our IKEA furnished burrow beneath a rather smart modern home in Lavington, a hillside community on the outskirts of Albury, I nipped out to the local grocery store for supplies, and, as I got back into the car realised, I didn’t have the address with me, and I had very little phone signal. Slight panic, but nothing that couldn’t be solved by a bit of “reverse-driving”, a bit like reverse-engineering! Anyway, got back safely, in the end, to find Celine tucked up in bed and ready to be fed our salad supper, like a baby bird.
So, come the morning, we decided a day of rest from driving was called for and opted to stay a couple of nights in Albury; luckily, our hostess obligingly accepted our changed plans, as long as we left at 9.00am sharp the next morning as it was Albury Cup day, the “biggest social event of the year”, in which she was playing an active part though not on horseback. As it happened, we chose a good place to spend the day as Albury is an attractive small city with lots of green space including a very peaceful Botanical Garden, an ideal place for a cool restful afternoon stroll.
The next morning, feeling much refreshed, we set off smartly at the appointed hour heading towards Jindabyne, a popular tourist destination overlooking the lake of the same name, near the Snowy Mountains and close to Kosciuszko National Park. This was quite a major detour which would eventually take us to Canberra, but the main objective of the day was to get as close as possible to Mount Kosciuszko, the highest peak in Australia.
A few miles outside Albury, we stopped briefly at the Bonegilla Migrant and Reception Centre, a camp set up for receiving and training immigrants to Australia in the post World War ll immigration boom. It wasn’t a very inspiring place and must have depressed some of the occupants escaping from the horrors of the war in Europe, but obviously, the authorities felt it was a necessary step in their integration into the Australian way of life. So we tarried not, and before long found ourselves at the entrance to the National Park at Khancoban, where we dutifully paid our $17 daily fee, stopped in the café for our mid-morning cuppa, and on the recommendation of a charming park ranger, drove to the Geehi Day Parking area, expecting to see one of the ever-elusive platypii (-uses?). We didn’t of course, but we did have a nice stroll along the river bank, before picnicking at a park bench and watching a rather energetic bunch of bikers from the Jindabyne Cycling Club preparing for the next stage of their arduous day’s ride along the park’s hilly roads.
Thwarted by the lack of platypus sightings but unfazed, we had fun driving the twisty mountain roads in scenery comprising yet more gum trees to the ski village of Thredbo, where there was a chair lift to take us up to the Mt.Kosciuszko lookout. The lift ride actually finished a good two kilometres hike away from the lookout, and as it was late in the afternoon, time was short. However, much refreshed by the clear mountain air, Celine set the pace, while I followed somewhat more slowly, and, I’m ashamed to admit, didn’t reach the goal. Finally, Celine came back looking radiant having seen the mountain named after her famous compatriot, General Tadeusz Kościuszko, by the Polish explorer Sir Paul Edmund Strzelecki.
Although the chairlift and ensuing hike was a bit of a rush, it had been exhilarating to be high above the tree line in a landscape of rocks and heather, so very different from the seemingly never-ending forests of eucalyptus trees of which we had seen so much on our travels. When we got back down into Thredbo at about 5 pm, everything was closing up, so we continued quickly on to our lodgings in Jindabyne. These turned out to be small, but clean and quite adequate, and they even had a washer and dryer which we made good use of as we watched “The Day of the Jackal” on TV while eating a Woolworths’ roast chicken for dinner. All in all, it had been a pretty satisfying day.
The next morning, we took a turn into the village and walked in the lakeside park, where we found an impressive monument to the aforementioned Sir Paul Strzelecki, who was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London and was awarded its gold medal for “exploration in the southeastern portion of Australia”. The Society still displays his huge geological map of New South Wales and Tasmania for public viewing. He was also made a fellow of the Royal Society, having gained widespread recognition as an explorer as well as a philanthropist. Nearby, there was a much more modest stone, topped by an Irish harp, dedicated to the Irish labourers who helped make the Snowy Mountain Hydro Project a practicality.
The locals were also out enjoying the day, with a group of youngsters risking life and limb on their scooters in the skateboard park, and a much more sedate bunch of senior citizens doing their thing on the bowling green. A very happy scene to have found, before getting back on the road, we rewarded ourselves with large slices of banana bread, the “best veggie juice in Oz” for Celine and a damn fine mug of black coffee for me!