Day 67
Friday 17 March and it is freezing. Well, 15 degrees at any rate. There is a bitter southerly wind blowing, though the sun is shining in a bright blue sky. We are off to the Australian Grampians today, to stay at a place called Halls Gap, which sounds even colder than where we are now.
It was a longish drive, about three hours, and we saw more of Victoria on the way. It slightly reminded me of rural France, with the road lined with trees, scrubby vegetation, and almost empty roads. We passed through several towns, almost frontier-like in appearance, each with wooden lodge-type bungalows, raised above the ground and with a veranda, some quite well set up, others rather ramshackle such that you expect to see an Australian hillbilly sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch. Apparently you can buy a house; that is to say, buy the house, and have it transported to where you want it after disconnecting mains service; they cut it in half so that it will fit onto a low loader, and then you are away.
Water is a very scarce commodity here, and Victoria is permanently on water restrictions. Several homesteads and houses that we have seen for sale are not on mains water, and some of those do not even have an artesian well. All the houses have a large tank to collect rainwater, and some have it tanked in by road tanker – quite expensive. All farms have large ponds, known as ‘dams’, for the cattle and these are filled during the rainy season that starts in June. Apparently Australia has a reputation for being the driest continent in the world.
We stopped at one town, Carrisbrooke I think, to use the facilities and they were well signposted off the main road in a large park, very clean and well appointed. In the middle of the grassy area was a sort of gazebo – almost like a shrine – in which was sited a communal barbecue, or rather (see earlier) a communal hot plate, which doesn’t sound quite so impressive. This would appear to be quite common in this area: parks with public barbecues for you to use, and the latter clean and well set-up too.
We stopped at Ararat, a slightly larger town than most, and picnicked in the park. It was still pretty cold, with the wind cutting like a knife across the park lake, but Jane managed to find a sheltered spot in a little herb garden and we snuggled in there for our sandwiches. Pity we hadn’t thought to bring a flask of hot tea!
Finally, we reached Halls Gap: a small but very popular tourist hamlet in the lee of the majestic Grampians, with camp sites, caravan parks and budget hotels spread out along the main road. It vaguely reminded me of the Lake District – Ambleside perhaps. Not much there, just enough to service the tourists and the holiday accommodation, but quite a nice place. Our dwelling for the weekend is a basic wooden lodge on a busy caravan site, set four feet above the ground, somewhat rustic and careworn, but clean and adequate for a couple of days. Sadly there is only one lavatory, and that without a lock on the door, so we will have to start practising whistling Dixie.
To make up for our somewhat plebeian accommodation, the evening produced a mob of kangaroos and their joeys bouncing across in front of the lodge, nibbling at the grass and generally just naturally grazing. There must have been about a dozen of them. To add to that, Derek put some scraps of meat from the barbecue on the newel post of the veranda, and we were treated to the kookaburras swooping down and eating them; it was almost like feeding from our hands. The kookaburras commonly eat snakes and we watched as they beat the strips of meat on the railing to ‘kill’ them before eating. Jane got some good snaps and a video of it all just before one of them defecated on her head; she always did want thicker hair.
Chatting on the veranda with a little snifter, Derek revealed that he had killed a large spider at the last place in Kyneton when we were there. He hadn’t mentioned it at the time lest we become disturbed. Of course it might not have been poisonous, he said (in Australia? Yeh, right).
The barbecued steak in the evening was excellent, and we washed it down with a bottle of chilled Mateus Rosé, acquired purely for sentimental reasons. Actually, it wasn’t too bad – I don’t think I have drunk it for nigh on forty years. Just to prove we hadn’t totally lost our taste for wine, we followed up with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Derek and I wanted the girls to dress up in mini skirts to complement the nostalgia, but we received very short thrift on that suggestion; I think that ship sailed a long time ago, taking most of my hair with it, and leaving behind a considerable amount of ballast.
Day 68
Saturday 18 March. Well, I think we have reached the point where the temperature in Australia going down has met the temperature in the UK going up. It was perishing this morning and Mrs Shacklepin was hanging on to me in bed like a drowning man grips a lifebuoy. Flannelette nightdresses were mentioned (wistfully, as hers is still in QM2). I’m not sure what was in that rosé last night, but the two of us ended up visiting the lavatory every three hours during the night for a tinkle, scuttling along through the freezing living room in the pitch black, and holding hands like Hansel and Gretel.
You couldn’t quite see your breath this morning, but I swear it was a close thing. Paradoxically, the forecast for today is bright sunshine and 29ºC. For now, it is long trousers and a sweater. Definitely the Australian autumn, I think. Asking around, it is apparent that my conception of a baking hot Australia is a myth. In the winter here in Victoria, temperatures of minus 7ºC are not uncommon, and even Ballarat on the lowland can get as low as -5ºC. Conversely, the visitor’s book here reports temperatures of 40ºC in December. Quite a contrast.
After breakfast we headed for the local Aboriginal Culture Centre to learn a bit about the natives. Australia has done a sharp about turn on treatment of the Aborigines, and there is now a concerted effort to honour the traditional tribes and cultures, almost to the point of flagellation. Anyone with Aboriginal blood (as low as 10%) gets all manner of allowances and discounts, no matter what their income; the Aboriginal flag must be flown alongside the Australian flag; sacred sites, whether genuine or not, have to be honoured. Australia has an enormous and irrational guilty conscience. I came away from the Centre with a better appreciation of how badly the Aborigines were treated by the ‘European invaders’, but also wondering how things could have been done better. What would they have had us do, other than not have settled in Australia at all in the first place? Not killing them arbitrarily and not stealing their lands, certainly; treating them properly after they had fought in both world wars, definitely; but there appears to be an objection by the Aborigines to having been educated and civilised, and at attempts by the settlers to integrate them into European society. I found this odd: would they rather have been left to live in the bush eating beetles and living in tribes? Overall I found the Cultural Centre to be unsettling. I felt a sense of guilt as a European, but also felt that applying reparations 200 years after an event, and indulging in two separate cultures, was not the best way to go forward as a united nation. As it is, the Aborigine has an unfortunate reputation for being high on petrol, unemployed and unemployable, and living with a permanent grudge. Of course, that is not true for all of them.
Now here is an interesting fact: not all boomerangs return (just thought I would throw this in – the fact, not the boomerang). I don’t just mean the ones that you threw incorrectly and they landed in the oggin, I mean that the majority of them (there are several types) are really just throwing clubs that the Aborigines use to kill prey. The returning boomerangs are only used for sport and competition and are recognisable by having an angle of almost ninety degrees between the wings. By the way, the correct way to throw them is overhand, with the flat surface against the palm, in the vertical plane; you don’t try to skim them like you would a flat stone. I read all this in a thin pamphlet in the Culture Centre (price $AUS8) before I put it back on the shelf. You could buy (returning) boomerangs too, but they were upwards of $AUS50 and I wasn’t convinced of the value of adding one to my portfolio. So there you are: you learned it here first.
You might think that political correctness would never touch bluff-speaking Australia but, alas, you would be wrong. The disease has seeped down into the Southern Hemisphere and is every bit as rampant as at home, if not worse. Two examples are that the Black Boy Bush has been renamed the Grass Tree, and the Fairy Penguin has been renamed the Little Penguin.
After the Cultural Centre we were off to Bellfield Lake, a large man-made reservoir in the shadow of the mountains, again a bit like the Lake District though with the difference that the heat was intense and radiating off the rocks like a furnace. We took a good walk – about 1½ km – across the dam and back and just revelled in the warmth and overwhelming scenery, which was beautiful.
We returned to the happy homestead for lunch and to divest ourselves of trousers, sweaters and socks: it was 32ºC, baking hot, and lovely: such a difference from this morning. Then off to an olive oil farm and then a winery for a little dégustation, buying a bottle of very pleasant Riesling. Decent, dry, Riesling tends to be hard to come by in UK, so getting a good one here is a bonus. By this time it was 1700 and we felt we deserved a rest after all that olive oil and wine, so back we went to the Ponderosa to settle for the day on the veranda, watching the hopeful kookaburras and the cockatoos, and looking out for kangaroos. We were rewarded by the sight of a kangaroos with a joey in its pouch coming up to the front porch to feed. Absolutely lovely and enchanting, and we took some good photographs. There were about forty of them on the adjacent recreation ground too, munching away and fertilising the grass. Good old Skippy.
Day 69
Sunday 19 March. We were woken at 0700 by the sound of raucous shouting, long vehicles reversing and bouncing balls. Rule 1 of choosing holiday accommodation: don’t pick a place next to a recreation ground. The local junior football team was practising at a God-forsaken time on a Sunday morning. At least it wasn’t quite as cold as yesterday, and it warmed up nicely to 28ºC later, but the rude awakening would put the memsahib in a grumpy mood for the rest of the day unless I trod carefully.
We decided to hit a couple of high viewpoints in the Grampian Mountains first thing: Reid’s Lookout and the adjacent Balconies, 1 km walk away. The views were spectacular and I managed to get some good photographs once my knees had stopped knocking together. There was almost a blue tinge to the distant atmosphere, as if it were smoke, but apparently it is caused by the gas or vapour emitted by the eucalyptus trees (hence, similarly, the Blue Mountains in New South Wales). We were just in time at the Lookout as, shortly after we arrived, a complete bus load of tourists arrived and we beat a hasty path to the Balconies, about 1 km away along a dusty path; we reasoned that most of them would not venture to use their legs in the intense heat (and we were right).
What is it about some people? There was an enormous woman at the Lookout, about my age but with long grey hair and wearing a bell tent and huge pantaloons that would provide cover for three troops of Boy Scouts. She was holding what appeared to be a conference call with some friend or relative on her mobile phone, bellowing away so that we could hear both her and the friend quite clearly. She was totally oblivious to the rest of the general public who were hoping to soak up the tranquility and scenery. I hoped a high wind would get up under her pantaloons and blow her away off the mountain like Mary Poppins but, alas, no such luck.
Mackenzie Falls was the next visit: a spectacular waterfall cascading 570m over the rocks, and we felt duty-bound to climb all the way to the bottom, just to say that we had done it (Derek stayed at the top). Several signs prohibited swimming but, sure as eggs are eggs, there were some people who apparent couldn’t read. More disturbingly, there was one moron swimming in the pool above the falls. Clearly he was practising for the Darwin Award. The climb up was a bit of a challenge, but OK if you did it in stages. Boys beat the girls by an easy twenty minutes, even if you disregard the fact that Derek had remained at the top. On the way up I passed one bloke going down with a cigarette in his mouth – I always wondered how those bush fires got started.
After all this touristy stuff and the not inconsiderable exercise undertaken by descending, then ascending, 570m we felt the need for a nice sensible cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. So we returned to the Ponderosa through the torturous mountain roads and relaxed for the rest of the day. The chocolate biscuits had fused into a molten mess long ago, but we munched away on three at a time anyway, with fingers and mouths covered in chocolate like refugees from a kindergarten.
Tomorrow we are off to Port Campbell, due south of here on the coast at the eastern edge of the Great Australian Bight. The Bight is noted for the many shipwrecks that have occurred there over the centuries and we hope to visit a good Maritime Museum at Warrnambool on the way. Signing off at 28ºC and clear blue skies – hope you have a good Sunday.
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 