TheBanyanTree: Travels with a purpose 3

[Peter Macinnis]

Tuesday saw me up bright and early, wandering the streets of Gundagai 
and observing the rush hour of one milk van, one tractor, and three 
self-important dogs.  On the way back, I went across the road to a 
general store, where the woman who sold me milk for breakfast also gave 
me maps, told me about the best rural roads in the area and more, in 
between serving other customers who were taking a shortcut to avoid the 
rush hour.  Her information was marginally better than the professional 
information at the shire council tourist information office, but that is 
no reflection on the professionals.  She just did it better.

Gundagai is the sort of place where people in the street say g'day as a 
matter of course.  It's like Ireland or Memphis, a place where 
friendship is natural and unforced.  There are only 2500 people in the 
town, so outsiders are known to be such, but that doesn't matter.  As I 
drank a coffee at the bakery, I was told not to miss the museum.  In the 
post office, I got the same message, only now with detail on the 
collections.  The hardware store, the fruit shop, the bakery and the 
newsagent's all filled me in on what to see, and the museum rated high.

Rural museums are generally a hoot.  An old building is filled with junk 
from every family in the district, but among them, some gems stand out. 
  In an outer area, there is a collection of farm machinery, a few 
pieces restored, most of them slowly rusting, including a grand old 
Ransome, Sims and Jefferies steam engine and a few other key pieces, but 
all from later than the period I was targeting – but I knew there was a 
steam mill, just behind the museum in 1852, so I had the key element I 
needed.  There were steam engines in Gundagai in the 1860s.  I bought 
three local history tales collections – they were cheap, and there is a 
wealth of local colour there.

I took in the view of the town from the top of Mount Parnassus, and 
headed out to the cemetery to find Yarri's grave, parking under shade 
and walking a hundred metres, rather than parking in the sun and walking 
10 – it was hotting up.

Then I took off on the Brungle Road, but before long, I got lured by the 
Tallabandra Road.  As Tallabandra was on the map as being on the Brungle 
road, I thought I would go the long way around, but names on Australian 
maps can be misleading, as they often refer to locations, not towns, and 
I was already in the heart of Tallabandra, which consisted of me and a 
pixillated cow.  My road would take me 30 kilometres before dropping me 
on the Brungle road again, 5 kilometres back.  I had failed to realise 
that, at some point, the Tallabandra Road reaches Tallabandra, and just 
because a sign says "Tallabandra Road", that is no reason why it should 
GO to Tallabandra.  It also comes FROM Tallabandra.

No matter -- the Tallabandra road follows the Tumut River for much of 
the way, the first river that I have ever heard gurgling.  This is 
inland Australia, but most towns have a "marine centre" where aluminium 
runabouts and outboard motors can be bought, traded and serviced, so 
rivers have access points where trailers can be backed down to launch 
boats.  That meant I could get down, dabble my feet in the water, and 
stare down recalcitrant cattle and sheep that wanted to contest my right 
to be there.

It was a gravel road for the most part, and just before I got back onto 
tar, I encountered the suicidal sheep.  There was a large truck parked 
off to my left, and I paid little attention to it until a sheep came 
hurtling out from behind it, and then fell on the road as it tried to 
corner and head at me.  I slowed, and as I did, two incompetent 
sheepdogs, no more than pups, came racing after it, excitedly nipping at 
its ears to try and turn it, but with one on each side, they were having 
no luck.  I sat watching them diminish in my rear vision mirror, and 
then a small rural man emerged.  I jerked my thumb to say '"they went 
thataway", he waved and I drove on warily, before any more sheep could 
decide the open road was preferable to being up on the truck.  I tossed 
up whether to eat mutton that night, and ended up eating steak.

The joy of driving on back roads is that I was slow enough to have the 
windows down, and I had three litres of cold water with me in the Esky, 
so I travelled happily.  I also had a large bunch of refrigerated grapes 
from the fruit shop, and each stop, I took a small bunch from the Esky 
and ate them, but in the end, my fluid were running low.  It was time to 
find a pub, and I recollected that there was an old inn called the 
Beehive, a few km up the highway.

I got there to find the yard full of big macho motorbikes, and people 
close to retirement, in leathers.  I drove in and sat, waiting for them 
to finish discussing where the motel was, who was going to see the 
doctor about their ailing fundaments, and other trivia, and head off, 
leaving some shade for me to park in.  It was hot by this time, and I 
began thinking about going back to the river for a swim, but rivers are 
treacherous places, with currents and cold patches, so I went back to 
the motel, where the currents were in the pool spa, and the cold patches 
were where bottles of beer had sat.

On the Wednesday, I headed for the Victorian border, fully intending to 
get to Yackandandah which is as beautiful as its name, but somewhere 
near Holbrook, as I relaxed in the shade of a submarine, I decided to 
change that.  Of course, if you have been following this on the map, you 
may be wondering about the submarine, but there is a perfectly logical 
reason for there to be a submarine, several hundred kilometres from the 
nearest sea.

After 1848, lots of Germans settled in Australia, many of them in small 
parts of South Australia, but the ones who went to the gold fields went 
mainly to an area in New South Wales dubbed  Germanton, which was in 
existence by 1858.  Come World War I, though, nobody liked the name any 
more, and after some shilly-shallying, it was dubbed Holbrook, after Lt 
Norman Holbrook, RN, who took a submarine in, sank a Turkish battleship, 
and escaped, for which he was give an Victoria Cross.  Here was a hero, 
suitable for naming a town after.

When the Australian submarine HMAS Otway was scrapped, a subscription 
was taken up, and $100 000 came from Holbrook's widow, and now the 90 
metre statue lives in ex-Germanton, a warning to marauding Huns who pass 
up and down the highway.  It seems to have scared them off . . .

Many Australian towns have a big something: Goulburn near Marulan has a 
"Big Merino" that you can walk into, Marulan used to have a painted 
water tank with a sign saying "The Big Pav", a joke for Ozians and Kiwis 
only, I suspect.  These, with the exception of the Big Pav, are 
manufactured tourist items intended to draw tourists off the highway, to 
spend some money, and almost anything goes: I have a web page describing 
the giant African dung beetle of Cootaburra, and every so often, I get 
e-mails asking where this mythical town is (it must be real, there's a 
picture of the river . . . no, silly, that's the Darling River near 
Bourke . . .)

I loathe manufactured tourist attractions.  They offer marginally less 
value than a theme park, they are dishonest, they set out to exploit. 
They blunt the sensibilities, reducing ordinary Australians to gullible 
drooling cretins who will even believe in giant animatronic dung 
beetles!  (Let me say, looking ahead, that Echuca is NOT a manufactured 
attraction!)

Anyhow, there I was, slurping my coffee in the dwindling shade of the 
conning tower, making desultory PING! noises like a sonar to confuse the 
people on the other side, and I decided that paddle steamers had to come 
first.  I would get over the Murray River into Victoria, and then turn 
right, and follow the Murray down to Echuca, one of the major inland 
ports in the hey-day of the paddle steamer.

The towns of the Murray are generally twinned, starting from a village 
on each side of the river.  Like Buda and Pest, they are now run 
together as Albury-Wodonga, Echuca-Moama, Mulwala-Yarrawonga and so on, 
but they remain separate entities, unlike Budapest.  In what follows, I 
will generally use one name or the other, but not both.

After expressway conditions, Albury is a hole.  When I as there in 
November, the long-awaited bypass that will take most traffic around the 
town, instead of through town streets at 60 km/hr (generally a bit more, 
to the joy of the radar cops).  Some Albury people regret this, but I 
can't wait.  It’s a nice town, and I could have gone along the Murray on 
the Albury side, but I decided to try the Victorian side.  It was a mistake.

The problem is that on the Victorian side, the roads do not follow the 
river, so after about 80 km, I switched states again, and found myself 
close to the water, most of the way.  Just near Corowa, soon after I 
crossed, I stopped for lunch at a point where I could drive down to the 
water.

Before I leave for anywhere, I program the radio with the most likely 
frequencies for the ABC's classical music network, so that usually, all 
I have to do is press various preset buttons until I get a signal, but 
at Corowa, the reception was excellent.  I found a seat and table of 
sorts, fashioned from logs, got cheese, dried apples, salami, biscuits, 
grapes and beer, pulled a portable radio that I carry to use in motels, 
and settled down, listening to 'Scheherazade', at peace with the world. 
  Research, I decided, is a pain, and I must stop doing it.

The road was good for about 90 km/hr, I had filled up with petrol before 
leaving Victoria, and all I had to do was carry on, but I kept passing 
signs to places with interesting names, and at last I succumbed.  I 
parked under a tree, and walked down past the sign that said "Snake 
Island", wondering what I would find.  I found a river.



-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis        petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Chair of Remote Linguini Sensing and Interior Demography,
  \.--._*   Coach, Australian Non-invasive Taxonomy Olympic Squad.
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm