The road trip …
“It’s a dangerous business Frodo going out your door, but if you step onto the road and you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you will be swept off to…” Bilbo Baggins. The Fellowship of the Ring
Rather than provide a blow-by-blow account of the trip, I thought I would take the advice of a university friend who swapped life as an academic engineer for management consultancy and never looked back. Incidentally, there are some features of a market economy that I simply cannot fathom. I mean how can a guy who has spent all his formative academic life talking about ways to cool gas turbine jet engines suddenly be signed on as a management consultant and immediately be sent to Zurich to tell the gnomes how to bank? But I digress. One of the important lessons I learnt from him was that contrary to accepted Jedi wisdom ("Always two there are") in the world of management consultancy three is the magic number. You only ever make three points to your client in any single meeting. I have decided to heed this advice and list three highlights of the trip and three lessons that I learnt during the time it took to drive from Brisbane to the Huon Valley. Arguably I should have divided this post into two, but then I was never cut out to be a management consultant.
In chronological order, here are the highlights.
1. Lunch in Bingara, NSW.
Unlike the charming towns of Glen Innes and Inverell that we passed through earlier in the day, Bingara appeared to have little to recommend it. To be fair it was early in the trip, and we were both feeling a little drained after a couple of weeks that were emotionally turbo-charged and physically demanding. To make matters worse, our buyers had scheduled a pre-settlement inspection for a couple of hours before the transaction was due to be completed. As we had already shown them around the house, this request struck us as odd, and we started to worry about the deal falling through at the last minute! It was only during lunch in Bingara that we got the call from our solicitor to say that all was well, and the house sale had settled. It was then that we realised that, for the first time since becoming a couple (a long time ago in galaxy far, far away), we were completely debt free! Suddenly Bingara was elevated to legendary status.
2. Lunch in Cowra, NSW
We arrived in Cowra just as everything shut down on a Saturday lunchtime, a quaint country ritual we will have to become accustomed to! A chance encounter with a local pointed us in the direction of the Cowra Japanese Garden and what a revelation it turned out to be. Completely unbeknown to us, Cowra was the site of the of the largest Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Australia during World War II. On 5 August 1944 there was a mass breakout by 400 prisoners and by the end of the episode 231 Japanese prisoners had been killed or committed suicide, 106 were injured and all surviving escapees were recaptured. In recognition of this tragedy, in 1963 the Australian government gave to Japan an area close to the camp for a war cemetery. All the Japanese dead from the Cowra breakout as well as other Japanese combatants who died in Australia (mainly airmen) are now buried there. In 1978 the renowned Japanese landscaper, Ken Nakajima, was commissioned to design a Japanese garden near the cemetery. The garden is simply stunning. Although we saw it in midwinter, just before the appearance of the cherry blossom, it was full of colour and radiated tranquillity. It was a just one of those serendipitous events that turned a routine lunch stop into an extraordinary experience.
3. Lunch in Daylesford, VIC.
Okay, so we are foodies to a degree but this obsession with lunch runs slightly deeper than hedonism. From past episodes of MasterChef, we had of course heard of the Lake House Restaurant (situated on the shore of Lake Daylesford) and its celebrated Culinary Director Alla Wolf-Tasker. However, it was not at the Lake House that we lunched but at the Convent Gallery. This iconic 19th century building was a convent and boarding school for almost 90 years and provided a shelter to many Melbourne children at the height of invasion fears in World War II. The faded pictures of all the nuns and the girls in uniform, and the spartan nature of the nuns’ quarters gave me a shiver – perhaps boys boarding school wasn’t so bad after all. Anyway … the building was eventually acquired in the late 1980s by the artist Tina Banitska and in 1991 opened as an art gallery which now lays claim to being the most beautiful art gallery in Australia. The gallery has several individual exhibition spaces and although I could take or leave most of the art, the balance between contemporary art and the celebration of the religious heritage of a grand old building is really interesting and extremely well done.
My top three lessons to take away from the trip are as follows.
1. Contrary to the widely held belief, Australia’s landscape is actually quite diverse.
We drove through what might reasonably be called "rural" areas of NSW and VIC and didn't get anywhere near to the outback. Yet even on these rural roads you can drive for hundreds of kilometres and only see a handful of other humans. Some parts of northern NSW were huge, flat, dry and unrelentingly brown. The occasional cluster of grain silos gave me the impression of moisture farms on the desert planet of Tatooine. But then soon enough you rejoice in the undulating hills around Orange, the cherry orchards of Young, the vast cultivated plains of the Riverina, the gentle beauty of the Victorian countryside around Daylesford the vineyards of the Bendigo region.
2. I hate Canola and Cath hates sea travel.
I am not sure that this counts as something I didn’t know before, but certainly the scale of the problem was made very apparent on this trip. The Riverina area of NSW is one of Australia’s most important agricultural areas. My research suggests that the Riverina (80,545 km2) is slightly larger than Scotland (77,910 km2) with about 3% of its population! Unfortunately for me, a large part of this sparsely populated expanse – in fact an area about the size of Northern Ireland – is planted with canola. Now while I can appreciate the beauty of endless fields of yellow, it turns out that my immune system can’t stand the stuff. I have always suffered with mild hay fever, but I endured apoplectic fits of sneezing while travelling through these endless canola plains.
I think I now know why airlines insist that you engage flight mode on your phone when the last door has closed. Usually, the pilot will make an announcement shortly afterward to the effect that smooth flying conditions are expected with perhaps a few bumps after take-off. Flight mode prohibits a mad internet search to verify this information and stifles incipient hysteria. Of course, there is no such deterrent in the case of a travel by sea. Just as we left Melbourne on the Spirit of Tasmania, the captain announced that sailing conditions were fine although a swell of 2-3 metres and winds gusting to 25-35 km/h were expected in the Bass Strait overnight. Of course, Cath got busy researching the difference between “rough” and “very rough” seas, “strong” and “gale-force” winds and at when a ferry might reasonably be expected to break up in rough water. Needless to say, she didn’t sleep at all on the overnight crossing as she awaited imminent disaster, while I was unconscious for most to the night. There was a certain tension in the air when we entered Devonport!
3. Bendigo is named after a common pugilist.
Bendigo in the 1850s and 60s can lay claim to being the richest city in the world. It was certainly Australia’s largest gold-mining economy, and this historical wealth is reflected in the grandeur of the Victorian buildings that remain. I knew a little about the gold rush history of Bendigo, but what I didn’t know was that it was first officially named Sandhurst. The name was later changed when gold was discovered in 1851 in “Bendigo Creek”. The creek was named after the English boxer William Abednego "Bendigo" Thompson and in a rather droll turn of events, one of the richest places in the world at the time was named after a bare knuckle prize-fighter!
It was a fun trip and certainly gave us ample time to relax and unwind after the tumultuous events of the previous month or two. All the same it was a great tonic late on the fifth day of the journey to see in the distance the majesty of kunanyi / Mt. Wellington covered in a welcoming blanket of snow, and know that the Huon Valley was only an hour away.
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