TheBanyanTree: Travels with a purpose 2

[Peter Macinnis]

The next day, I headed off for Yass, a town not too far from Canberra, 
and the home for many years of one of the great explorers, Hamilton 
Hume.  Hume got on well with Aborigines, had a good relationship with 
the convicts in his party, and got a great deal back in return, but he 
settled back in Yass and became just a solid citizen and farmer.  He 
bought a farm, extended it, had built a brick barn where the bricklayer 
followed tradition and set circular holes at each end on each level, to 
let barn owls in, but there was a problem here.  In Europe, barn owls 
keep rodents under control in the barn, but Australia has no barn owls!

Old habits, it seems, die hard, but this surprised me.  Most Australian 
architecture was developed more by what the British had done in India: 
they even gave on of our marsupials, the bandicoot, an Indian name, 
because it looked like a rodent found in parts of India which bears that 
name.  It seems they never did much agricultural building in India, so 
the 'home' styles came, unmodified, to our shores.

Australians, of course, love to criticise the British, and even their 
Anglocentric forebears (though conservative politicians can still see 
nothing wrong with that).  Hume travelled from Yass to Melbourne with an 
English sea captain named Hovell, who seemed to think that as a seaman 
who could navigate, he was in charge, but Hume, a seasoned bushman, 
thought otherwise, and Hovell is usually deprived of credit – which is 
probably unfair, but that's the way it goes.

I drove into the township of Yass to mooch for a bit and decided to move 
on to Gundagai, but then I talked to the local tourist people (who sold 
me a most excellent book on the old Aboriginal tracks through the area. 
  They suggested heading south to Wee Jasper.  Great scenery, they said! 
  So I cancelled a cannonball run down the highway, and diverted.  Just 
as I was leaving, I heard two of the tourist people grizzling.  In 
country towns, the tourist centre is also where coaches pull up, and 
that meant battered women had taken to congregating outside, a fine 
advertisement for the town, they thought.  I bit my tongue and thought 
harsh thoughts.

The geology outside Yass is fascinating, and I have often seen it in 
photographs.  The hills are made of folded strata, and every so often, a 
hard bed stands out on the hillside, and below it, another one will 
parallel it.  In fact, the whole geology is revealed on the 
sheep-spattered hills, so I turned off down a side road, and drove for 
about 15 km, stopping every so often to take photos.  This diversion was 
almost a bad move, I realised later, when fuel became an issue.

Driving back to the main road, I set out again for Wee Jasper, with my 
heart set on having a pie and a beer, and filling my tank with petrol, 
but first the road plunged down to cross the Murrumbidgee River at the 
Taemas Bridge, high above the Murrumbidgee.  The land was fenced and 
carried a scattering of sheep, but there was a convenient welded steel 
stile for the active to climb over, and a steep gully for the active to 
stumble down into the thistles, so I did.  I walked about a kilometre up 
the river, taking off my sandals and paddling in the warm shallow water 
and the warm sand, but noting the flood levels on each side: the 
Murrumbidgee is not a river to trifle with.

Sheep are stupid animals.  I was now inside their paddock and a few of 
them ran the whole kilometre in front of me, then just as I turned, I 
found they had circled me so I had the pleasure of chasing them all the 
way back, but now they were upwind of me, so the dust they raised was 
annoying.  I kept throwing rocks, just to the right of them, trying to 
turn them up the hill and out of my path, or at least keep them far 
enough ahead so the dust did not affect my camera.  Occasionally, a car 
would trundle over the bridge, so I would have to stop throwing rocks 
for a bit.  Then the sheep waited until I was a few metres behind, 
before running dustily away again.

By the time I got back to the car, I needed sustenance, so I cut a hunk 
of salami, a lump of cheese and a handful of dried apples, washed this 
down with a litre of water.  A pie, a beer and petrol seemed a better 
idea, so I headed once more for Wee Jasper, which was shut.

It was Monday, they had entertained lots of tourists on the weekend, so 
they had closed up.  No petrol, no beer, and no pies.  Well, I had a 
choice: drive 60 km back to Yass, past the congregating battered women, 
and then head down the highway to my target, Gundagai, or take a 
shortcut over a gravel road to Tumut, which was close to Gundagai. 
Without much thought for the petrol supply, I headed off onto the 
gravel.  I had a quarter of a tank, after all, and it was only 70 
kilometres, so off I went.

And came to a sign saying "not suitable for caravans", which I took as 
meaning it had tight bends and a few steep bits, and that was right, but 
it also went up and down a lot, was home to flocks of recalcitrant 
sheep, had large trucks running on it and locals who knew the road well 
enough to drive at high speed.

Roads that go up and down a lot require one to engage lower gears, and 
that uses up petrol.  I drive a manual car, because you can get out of 
more trouble that way, but under those conditions, an automatic is 
slightly more economical, they say.  I started to yearn for fuel economy.

Getting through a mob of sheep, sprawled across the road requires a loud 
horn, an open window, a loud voice, engaging first gear, and time. 
Sheep are stupid, and will suddenly decide that the other side of the 
road looks great, and never mind this car, let's just go, and then all 
the other sheep think: hmmm. must be some good grass over there or those 
sheep wouldn't be going there, so they go as well, and they stink, and 
they raise the dust – you get the picture.  By the time I had roused, 
disturbed and passed through 300 sheep, they were already settling down 
to lie on the road again.  A few minutes later, when I was passed by a 
hurtling truck going the other way with a 4-wheel drive on its tray, I 
grinned.  The sheep were about to get theirs.

I stopped several times to listen and look at the bush, free of any 
motorised sounds, the birds that called, the sound of the wind in the 
branches, and the way branches occasionally creaked and rubbed on each 
other.  Not much has changed in areas like this, other than a road 
cutting through, so I did my listening, and made some notes.

Mainly, though, I stopped to chomp on a bit more salami, to drink water, 
and occasionally, to worry about the petrol, but in the end, I got back 
onto tar, and soon came to a sign offering a choice: go right and drive 
27 km on gravel to Tumut, or go left, and drive 31 km to Tumut on a 
sealed road.  I went left: now I could use overdrive on the flat, run 
down hills in neutral and use other ploys to conserve petrol, but I 
probably need not have bothered: my 40-litre tank only took 35 litres 
when I got to Tumut, so there had been 5 litres in reserve.

Then it was on, the last 25 km  to Gundagai, famed in song as the place 
where the dog allegedly sat on the tuckerbox.  That dog did nothing of 
the sort, but I will get to that later.

Gundagai is on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, and it had its beginnings 
as a poetic town, laid out with nice square streets on a river plain 
nice and close to the water.  Each street on the plain below a hillock 
dubbed Mount Parnassus was named for a poet, from Mrs. Hemans ('The boy 
stood on the burning deck') to Ovid, Byron, Milton, Pope, Johnson 
(Samuel was regarded by the surveyor as a poet – I only know a few bits 
of light verse by him, perhaps I need more education, but I think they 
got mixed up with Ben Jonson), Sheridan, Otway (never heard of him), 
Homer, Landon and Virgil.

Did I mention that the Murrumbidgee floods?  This is why it has 
magnificent bridges across the plain in several directions, one for 
rail, one for road today, and the old road bridge.  It is also, 
indirectly, why the main park is called Yarri Park, there is a Yarri 
Bridge, and a few other things.

Did I mention that the Murrumbidgee floods, from time to time?  The 
local Aborigines did, but the townspeople took no notice.  They 
established homes, shops, even a steam flour mill and went into 
business.  Yarri was a local resident, and when a drought ended in 1852 
with a flood, Yarri used a bark canoe to rescue many of the white people 
who were stranded on whatever they could climb.  By morning, 89 people 
had died, the largest known flood death toll in Australia, but many had 
been saved, and Yarri was a hero.  He had rescued 49 people, taking them 
to safety in twos and threes in his frail craft.

People gave him a nice shell badge, one family named their station after 
him, and when he died, he was buried in the town cemetery, in the 
Catholic section, and in later years, three parish priests were buried 
near him.  They got around to erecting a nice headstone, just a few 
years back – at least they still knew where he was buried.

I imagine there were other rewards as well, but there isn't much record 
of them, and Yarri is by no means as well-known to Australians as that 
stupid dog and the tuckerbox.  Gundagai, the town of poetic streets 
(when they rebuilt on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, they kept many of 
the poetic names) is famous to Australians by virtue of a piece of 
doggerel about how everything went wrong, ending with the nonsense 
statement that the dog sat on the tuckerbox, five or nine miles from 
Gundagai.

When things are going pear-shaped, the dog sitting on the tuckerbox is 
not a problem, and the original humorous verse was written by somebody 
with an earthy sense of humour and a deep familiarity with bodily 
functions.  The problem was not the dog sitting on the tuckerbox, the 
food container, but the dog shitting IN the tuckerbox.  Well, family 
values and all that, it got cleaned up, didn't it – and so the 
nonsensical dog became more famous than Yarri.  How many did Grace 
Darling save, I wondered – I looked it up, and the answer is nine.

I looked at the motels and their locations and chose one above the flood 
line, where I booked in for two nights.  I sort of knew Gundagai 
already, as I called in there last year while heading south to do an 
inservice course for librarians, so I dived around the corner and into 
the library to see when I would be able to access their local history 
collection.  Sod's Law prevailed.

It was then five o'clock, the library closed at 5.30, and it was closed 
the next day – my plan was to head out very early on the Wednesday, so I 
said I would call in on the way back, but they told me that they were 
closing on Thursday for three weeks to move into new premises.  It was 
clear I was going to miss the local collections, but they filled me in 
on the local museum, told me where to buy the local history, and where 
to find a gallery full of historic photos, upstairs from the hardware 
shop.  I went and had a beer, a shower, another beer, dinner in the 
motel's restaurant (pork and praties, cooked by a chef named Paddy who 
had more than a hint of Cork in his speech), and went to sleep.

peter

-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis       petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Designer of macroscopic diffraction gratings,
  \.--._*   collector of baroque vegetables and fruits
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm