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From the Australian Alps, we travel from Gippsland to Melbourne to Tasmania.

We spend a few days at Cape Conran, in East Gippsland. The beach is deserted.

We create a shelter against the sun from whatever we can scavenge in Matilda, in addition to driftwood, because we leave most of her awning materials – pegs, guy-lines, etc – back at the campground.

On the way back, a wallaby crosses our path.

It would be interesting to see an Eadweard Muybridge-style study of macropeds in motion. They’re so graceful.

We drive across Gippsland – basically the south of the state of Victoria – on our way to Wilsons Promontory.

It’s very scenic.

The wildlife around Tidal River, where we camp, is famously tame.

The next morning, this bird follows Maria around, waiting for a handout.

Back in Melbourne, I reconnect with Philip, an old Melbournian friend. He’s also a worker in words.

It’s rainy and cold, as it often seems to be here.

At Flinders Station is a mural by Mirka Mora, another Heide habitué.

Melbourne has a lot of wedding-cake-style Victorian office buildings, besides a skyline full of 21st-century architecture.

While in town, we visit the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Among its old Skippy the Bush Kangaroo clips and Mad Max memorabilia is the piano from Jane Campion’ s The Piano. Still one of our favourite films. (Has it really been 25 years?) It is in fact an early-19th-century, made-in-London antique.

It’s with great sadness we drop off Matilda at the rental depot. She kept us safe and mobile for over 24,000 kilometres around Australia, in all conditions. Goodbye, old friend.

Our flight arrives late in Hobart. We like this sculpture in the arrivals hall.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Melbourne to Tasmania

We pick up our new camper-van the next day. This is the license plate:

We like the stylized Tasmanian tiger drinking from a stream. We download and re-watch a good Willem Dafoe movie from 2011, The Hunter. Check it out.

Also, notice the dearth of letters and numbers in the plates of sparsely-populated Tassie. Like Prince Edward Island. Or Luxembourg.

From Canberra we make our way to Jindabyne, a gateway to the Australian Alps.

Jindabyne is one of the towns that benefit from the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a giant hydro power-and-water-conservation project.

It’s strange to see snow in Australia. Above is the Perisher Valley ski resort. It’s on the way to Charlotte Pass, from which you can walk to the peak of Mt. Kosciusko, Australia’s highest mountain. We see many masochistic cyclists working their way up to Charlotte Pass, no doubt looking forward to the gravity-powered return trip.

In the background is the Snowy River, a household word in Australia thanks to the poem The Man from Snowy River. The river has its origins around Mt. Kosciusko.

(By coincidence, a few days later we pass through Marlo, Victoria, where the Snowy enters the sea.)

‘He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko’s side,
Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough,
Where a horse’s hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,
The man that holds his own is good enough.
And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,
Where the river runs those giant hills between…’

A rare photo with both of us, thanks to passing couple.

Maria rests on a snow gum.

We backtrack to Jindabyne and head to Thredbo on the other side of Mt. Kosciusko. Thredbo is the Whistler of Australia – such as it is – including sky-high prices for everything.

It’s a breathtaking journey from Jindabyne to Omeo on the Great Alpine Way, via Khancoban.

The scenery driving through the mountains is spectacular. We don’t have many pictures because that means stopping every few minutes. You can get an idea of what it looks like here. (Thanks, Google.)

After crossing the Murray River back into the state of Victoria, we spot another echidna and help him cross the road.

We spend the night in Omeo, Victoria. Our caravan park sits on Livingstone Creek. There are platypus in the river, but we don’t see any.

We make a point of visiting the Buchan Caves, after seeing this antique  tourist poster in the Australian National Museum.

Turns out to be worth it. The formations in these caves are on the mind-blowing side.

Once again, we can’t stop every few metres to take photos, so we enlist the help of Google images here.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Australian Alps

We drive across Gippsland to Wilsons Promontory. At the Tidal River campground where we stay, the wildlife is very tame.

From northeast Victoria, we travel through New South Wales to the Australian Capital Territory.

We call ahead to several caravan parks in Canberra. They have no vacancies. Probably because many people are in town for the 100th anniversary of the end of WWI. We find a place near Yass, NSW on Lake Burrinjuck for the night.

It’s pretty idyllic. We have the place to ourselves. Except for a very friendly dog that adopts us. (We assume she belongs to the proprietors.) She behaves perfectly and doesn’t make a sound. She sleeps outside the van and is still there in the morning. We name her Molly.

As the sun sets, the surrounding hills turn red.

The only sound is sheep bleating in the hills.

Our first stop in Canberra is the Australian War Memorial. Essentially a war museum. It is extremely well done.

The scene of lots of activity the day before we arrive, November 11, but now quiet and uncrowded.

It contains lots of nifty hardware, including a Japanese midget submarine that attacked Sydney Harbour, a WWI tank, and a Lancaster bomber.

We spend four nights in Canberra. Like most planned-from-scratch cities, it features sweeping boulevards that look great. As long as you’re not a pedestrian.

Being the national capital, Canberra has some great museums. We see a special exhibit about Rome at the National Museum of Australia.

We visit the superb National Portrait Gallery. Ottawa has been dithering over creating a national portrait gallery for decades. Jeeze, just friggin’ build it, already.

I like this portrait of Nick Cave.

We visit the Museum of Australian Democracy, housed in the former Parliament House.

Australia and Canada are similar in being burdened with less-than-impressive, mediocre, self-serving politicians, yet both countries manage to be great places to live.

We visit the new Parliament House.

By design, it is a delightfully open place. After a security check, people are welcome to poke around its interesting features. A pleasant change from the Iron Fortress isolation from the public found in most other western countries’ government buildings.

Still, there are enough men and women around toting machine guns to discourage any would-be jihadis yearning for martyrdom.

Sight or Insight of the Day

You can see the fields of red in the photos of Parliament House above.

This is an ocean of poppies.

Our interest in the Ned Kelly story continues. From Melbourne we drive north east to Kelly Country.

First stop is the village of Beveridge. This is the house Kelly’s father built in the 1850s. His brother and fellow gang member, Dan, was born here.

Next to the town of Avenel. As a boy, Ned saves a seven-year-old Richard Shelton from drowning near this spot on Hughes Creek. Shelton’s grateful parents present Ned with a green silk sash.

‘I do not pretend that I have led a blameless life, or that one fault justified another, but the public, judging a case like mine, should remember that the darkest life may have
a bright side …’ – Ned Kelly

The Kelly name still means something in these parts.

After an excellent pizza in town, we go to Euroa. The Kelly gang robs a bank here, takes hostages, and treats the locals to daring feats of horsemanship.

Our next stop is Benalla. They have a lot of Kelly memorabilia here, including Ned’s famous sash, which he wears at the siege of Glenrowan.

The Benalla Gallery also has a tapestry based on one of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series.

Benalla cemetery contains several Kelly-related graves, including that of gang member Joe Byrne.

We like the stylized Ned Kellys that indicate Kelly-related graves.

It’s based on a contemporary etching that appears in the press.

Further down the road is Glenrowan, site of Kelly’s last stand.

This is Glenrowan train station. A train full of policemen arrives from Melbourne to take down the Kelly gang.

This pony paddock is the site of the Glenrowan Inn. Police besiege the inn and eventually burn it to the ground.

This is the spot where the police capture Ned after his collapse.

We move on to Beechworth, a pretty town now, once a centre of lawlessness in the gold rush days.

Many of the Kelly family spend a lot of time here, um, doing time.

Or otherwise appearing before a magistrate.

In the basement of the Beechworth courthouse is a cell regularly occupied by Harry Power. Ned Kelly is ‘apprenticed’ to this bushranger at the age of fourteen.

Murdering thug or avenging friend of the oppressed? Probably just a flawed individual like the rest of us. But so iconic is the Kelly story that the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 featured a troop of Nolanesque Kelly figures.

Sight or Insight of the Day  – Kelly Country

On our way north of Yass, NSW, we see another echidna.

Tradition says if you see an echidna, you’ll have good luck for the next three days. (I just made that up. We simply like them.)

From the relative calm of Geelong, we arrive in the urban maelstrom that is  Melbourne.

(This entry is brief and at least a week out of date. As usual, finding reliable WiFi in Australia is always difficult. At the moment, we’re reduced to sitting in a McDonald’s in Canberra to leech off of their one hour of free WiFi.)

To navigate these streets is enervating. We are more accustomed to driving in conditions like this:

By accident, we arrive on the day of the Melbourne Cup. This is a big deal here. We toy with the idea of attending, but a deluge of rain on the day puts us off.

Instead, we head for Heide.

This is the former home of John and Sunday Reed, patrons of the arts in the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Probably most well-known for bringing the talents of Sydney Nolan to the world.

Most of Nolan’s famed Ned Kelly series (which we were fortunate enough to see in Perth) were painted at the kitchen table as the Heide circle thrashed out artistic solutions to the world’s problems.

The Reeds and Nolan were engaged in a ménage à trois that was unconventional and, um, interesting, to say the least.

There’s also a wonderful library.

habitué.

The surrounding grounds are now a sculpture park. Signs warn to beware of snakes, especially at this time of year.

We visit the impressive State Library of Victoria.

In keeping with our interest in the Ned Kelly story, we seek out Ned’s famous armour.

The SLV also has the original Jerilderie letter on display.

The weather in Melbourne continues to be cool and wet. Good weather for visiting the State Gallery of Victoria.

Our luck continues, as the Gallery has an exhibit co-featuring Brett Whiteley, whom we first learned about in Sydney.

The other artist is George Baldessin.

But we prefer Brett.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Melbourne

We never free-camp. Often, when people speak of traveling around Australia by camper-van, visions spring up of overnighting on a deserted beach or under the stars alone in the bush. We thought like this as well.

As it turns out, we prefer the luxury of having electricity and proximity to a hot shower. Worth the AUD30 or so, in our opinion.

From the Barossa Valley, we arrive in nearby Adelaide

Poor South Australia often gets missed by overseas visitors – people with time restrictions usually limit themselves to the east coast. This state has so much going for it.

We take a tram out to Glenelg, where there is a beach.

The water is a beautiful blue, but cold at this time of the year.

Yep, South Australia has it all; great seafood, rich wheat-belts, mineral wealth, superb wineries, opals, former nuclear weapon test sites, and a classy state capital.

We visit the National Wine Centre. Explains the history of the ever-more-successful Australian wine industry.

We take a city bus from our caravan park into town every day. Beside the bus stop is a palm tree that doubles as a sort of bird condominium.

We depart for the Victoria border. But not before visiting one last South Australian wine-producing area: McLaren Vale.

We restrict ourselves to a single vineyard, d’Arenberg. We already carry as many bottles of wine as we can reasonably transport. (But we make room for a few more.) The proprietor, Chester Osborn, is quite a character.

This is the visitor centre. It’s ‘different’, as my mother would say. It’s her polite code-word for ‘weird’.

Among its oddities is a smell-o-rama room, where you squeeze bulb horns (mounted on bicycle handlebars) to get a whiff of the distinct aromas to look for in wine.

The urinals in the gents are, um, unique.

It’s wonderfully warm in this part of South Australia.

We arrive in the state of Victoria and follow the Great Ocean Road.

It has pretty coastal scenery, of course.

Parts of the GOR pass though forests that look like Canada.

There are grand views over the white-capped Southern Ocean.

Many remote rock formations.

We stop at the Twelve Apostles. (Spoiler alert – there aren’t actually twelve.) It is very popular, attracting the busloads of visitors that make us uncomfortable.

We hike to the beach below and try to keep warm in the cool drizzle by performing some interpretive dance.

The landscape in Victoria is a far cry from the parched rocks of central Australia in which we’ve spent so much time.

We arrive in Geelong and visit the engaging National Wool Museum.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Adelaide & the Great Ocean Road

Until a few weeks ago. Beginning on the road to Norseman in WA, we start to see snakes both alive and flattened.

This bad boy is a death adder. We can tell by the worm-like tail appendage (hard to see in this photo) that they use to lure their prey.

We hear snakes are appearing now after a winter spent semi-hibernating. Still doesn’t explain why we didn’t see any in the always-steaming North.

From Ceduna, we drive through South Australia down the seafood-rich Eyre Peninsula to Port Lincoln.

By the way, these locations have nothing to do with ‘Abraham Lincoln’ or ‘Boston, Massachusetts’: they’re named after places in Lincolnshire in the UK.

On the way up the peninsula to Port Augusta, we stop for lunch in village of Cowell, on Franklin Harbour.

According to local info:

‘This area was first seen by Captain Matthew Flinders in HMS ‘Investigator’ in 1802. In 1840, Governor Gawler visited the area from Port Lincoln, and named Franklin Harbour after a midshipman on Mathew Flinders’ vessel – John (later Sir John) Franklin.’

Yes, it’s that Sir John Franklin, so prominent in Canadian history.

At a seaside kiosk, we enjoy tasty fish and chips, with calamari for Maria.

In Port Augusta, Matilda gets a long-awaited bath.

From Port Augusta south, the landscape is more hilly.

We like to stop in small towns and check out the frontier architecture from pioneer days.

North of Adelaide, we spend three nights in the Barossa Valley.

We visit many wineries. Some are international giants, like Jacob’s Creek, Penfolds, and Wolf Blass.

Incidentally, there really is a body of water called ‘Jacob’s Creek’. It’s tiny.

Some are large and well-known in Australia, such as Yalumba, Seppeltsfield, and Kellermeister.

And some are smaller boutique wineries that we find online, such as Two Hands,  Yelland & Papps, Tscharke, and Lou Miranda. These are probably the most fun.

Largely because we’re less likely to find ourselves elbow to elbow with other avid wine-slurpers than at the big-name cellars.

We don’t think we’ve ever seen grapevines this early in the season. Our caravan park has vines growing and we observe how the grapes-to-be are at this point like tiny dewdrops.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Barossa Valley

Well, Adelaide actually. We check into a caravan park near Adelaide and discover there is a koala living nearby.

We’re lucky enough to spot him. He’s darker than his East Coast brothers.

From Pemberton, we make our way to the Nullarbor and points east.

While in Pemberton, we take the Karri Forest Explorer drive.

The woods are full of clematis in bloom.

It’s all very environmentally friendly.

The southwest of Western Australia gets a lot of rainfall. It’s very green. Parts of it even look like England.

We continue down to Albany.

Albany is pleasant city. It was the first capital of Western Australia, briefly.

Due to its location, it was the departure point for the fleets of ANZACs sailing off to the First World War. So their last sight of home for years.

This is detailed in the National ANZAC Centre, an exceptionally brilliant interactive museum. Tells the stories of those who left and came back, or came back greatly changed, or never came back at all.

Among the exhibits is this touching sculpture of an ANZAC sharing a hatful of water with his horse.

Like many places of interest that we’ve been to relating to 20th-century wars, it’s full of old people. Apparently, younger people are not interested in past conflicts and assume our present era of peace and plenty lasts forever. Hope they’re right.

There are other things to see on the hill.

For example, the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial. This was originally in Egypt.

The Lonely Planet guide euphemistically says:

‘The memorial was originally erected in Port Said, Egypt. However, it
was irreparably damaged during the Suez crisis in 1956, and this copy was made from masonry salvaged from the original. ‘

When I read this, I immediately imagine by ‘irreparably damaged’, they mean ‘mindlessly torn to pieces in an orgy of destruction by a rabid mob of felaheen whipped into an anti-Western frenzy by Nasser’.

Of course, a bit of digging and it turns to be the case, as stated here.

Albany is also the home of Australia’s last whaling factory. The site is now the Historic Whaling Station.

Silos on the harbourfront sport a cool seadragon mural.

the first ship sent from Sydney to establish Albany.

From Albany we drive to Esperance. When I was here in 1980, the local museum featured chunks of Skylab. They’re still here.

At the time, I stayed in the local hostel. It’s still here too.

We begin our drive across the Nullarbor.

We have three stopovers along the way; Balladonia, Eucla, and Ceduna.

It’s famed for being very desolate, but we’ve been through a lot of desolate places on this trip.

We come to the Great Australian Bight.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Pemberton to the Nullarbor

Matilda needs a new battery as we approach Albany. At the battery shop, the owner’s vintage wheels are outside. I try to convince Maria that our next car should be something similar.

Before moving on to Margaret River – our next destination – we enjoy an extended stay in Perth. We do big-city things; renew prescriptions, I get a haircut and new lenses for my glasses, pick up mail, buy new shoes.

We revisit Fremantle to see the Shipwrecks Museum.

Below is the surviving timbers from the Batavia, shipwrecked in 1629 off the coast of Western Australia. This is only a small portion of the original hull.

In the background is a stone portico that was carried as ballast and meant for the walls of the Dutch city Batavia (now Jakarta) in present-day Indonesia.

If you like shipwrecks – and who doesn’t? – you can spend hours here.

We eventually set off for Margaret River. In case you don’t know, MR is a well-known wine-producing area.

We visit, hmmm, let’s see, Robert Oatley, Credaro, Pierro, Vasse Felix, Cape Mentelle, Leeuwin Estate, and Voyager Estate.

There are over 200 wineries in the region.

Vasse Felix is the oldest estate in Margaret River.

Another winery has an interesting chandelier made from wine glasses.

Back in our caravan park, there are many ringneck parrots strutting around .

There’s something uplifting and heartwarming about seeing parrots everywhere. It’s like being in a sort of primeval Eden. This effect is helped by the lush bottle-brush trees surrounding our campsite.

We drive south into forests of enormous karri trees and arrive in Pemberton.

We pass a bucolic scene of sheep feeding placidly among some olive trees.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Margaret River

One of the wineries has a cool fountain with lifelike statues of cockatoos.

It is actually a memorial to Steve Irwin. He was killed by the same kind of creature that stung Maria in Flores.

From Carnarvon, we continue to travel down the west coast to Perth.

On the road to Kalbarri, we come across an echidna – the first we’ve seen in the wild.

He waddles into his burrow to escape Maria’s photographic harassment.

Kalbarri looks wonderful, but there is no place to be had in any caravan park. It turns out to be a school holiday of some kind. We carry on to the next town, Port Gregory, with its strikingly pink lake.

As we get further south, we see broad fields of wheat. This is a welcome surprise, after seeing little but rocks, dry scrubby bush, and spinifex grasses for a few thousand kilometers.

We wonder how they keep the kangaroos out.

Geraldton is a pleasant small city. It has a port from which a lot of the surrounding grain gets exported.

Geraldton has a moving monument to the men of the HMAS Sydney II, a warship lost with all hands in 1941.

Geraldton is also the home of the Museum of Geraldton. Like most of the museums we visit here, it is nearly new and excellent. Among the exhibits is a 3D film about the discovery of the Sydney II on the ocean floor in 2008, as well as the German ship HSK Kormoran; both ships sank in the engagement. The wrecks lie in 2,500 metres of water, 20km apart, about 200km west of Shark Bay.

The soundtrack is Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, which is so achingly apt for the film it almost hurts.

We stay on Sunset Beach.

It’s nice.

We walk around town, but the streets are nearly deserted. The National Rugby League Grand Finals are on, and a large part of the Australian population is glued to a TV screen. This phenomenon always puts me in mind of Lynn Miles’s ‘Hockey Night in Canada‘. If you don’t share the mania for the national sport, prepare to feel a little alienated.

We head down the scenic ocean route to Perth.

Near the town of Lancelin are enormous white sand dunes that look like snow.

Or sugar.

We arrive in the bright lights of Perth. Similar to our trip to Sydney, it takes some adjusting to be back in urban Australia again.

We make a day trip to nearby Rottnest Island.

Rottnest is the home of thousands of quokkas, which are as cute as all get-out.

It’s also the home of large King’s skinks.

Here, a skink and a quokka meet face to face.

Quokkas are endearingly unafraid of people. They browse contentedly on the grass and tend to ignore humans.

We rent bicycles and tour the island.

There are signs that say ‘Don’t touch or feed the wildlife’. However, I can’t resist a quick illicit petting.

Another day, we visit nearby Fremantle.

Our main destination is the wonderful Western Australia Maritime Museum.

A star attraction of the museum is its submarine tour.

Our guide, Keith, is a retired submariner. He served on this very boat (a sub is always a ‘boat’, and not a ‘ship’ apparently), HMAS Ovens, for 11 months, during his career.

There’s a world of difference between listening to a barely-motivated guide and one that has actually served in submarines for 20 years. Especially one with an Australian sense of humour and typical Aussie casualness to authority.

We learn that everyone on board is familiar with all the sub’s systems. To the point where many tasks can be done in complete darkness.

We also visit the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In another manifestation of serendipity, there is an exhibit of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series.

I recently finish Peter Carey’s ‘True History of the Kelly Gang‘, so coming across this is timely.

I react to one painting in particular much as I did to the Elioth Gruner work in Sydney.

It’s ‘The Butterfly’, by Freda Robertshaw.

There’s just something about this one that grabs me.

Sight or  Insight of the Day  – West coast to Perth

A few days ago was October 3. It’s our one-year anniversary of leaving Ottawa.

In one of those odd coincidences, the day we realized it was the third of October, I was wearing exactly the same clothes as in this photo.

Who knows what adventures lie ahead?