4 September 2013 - Horsham Caravan Park, Horsham, Victoria

I do love to bush camp, but I cannot deny I love the convenience of long showers, good internet  signal and endless electricity. I know I have stated this ad nauseum, and so I shall yet again.We were up early this morning, soon after the birds and the sun, today determined to get back out onto the road and head for new pastures. 
 

The road continued south through little places often with no more than clusters of grain silos; Goyura, Rosebery, Beulah, Galaquil, Brim, Lah, Batchica and finally the more substantial Warracknabeal. Beulah sounded familiar to me; recent floods reported on the television? When we reached Warracknabeal there was a large display by the Yarriamblack Creek documenting the floods of January 2011, the largest experienced in the area in living memory.


All of these settlements listed above, and those to the north of Hopetoun; Game, Speed, Tempy and Gypsum are part of the Yarriamblack Shire and all part of the Wimmera district. The creek with the name almost too hard to pronounce runs into the Wimmera River to the east of Horsham, and all of this is part of the State’s richest grain growing area.

And as an aside, when we passed through the tiny settlement of Speed the day before yesterday, there were numerous road signs playing on the name: “Speed Kills” being one of them.

Rural themes artworks

The first white settlors, the Scott Brothers arrived in November 1845 with their flock of sheep and established Warracknabeal Station on the banks of the Yarriamblack Creek. Since then and those that came after, the sheep industry has provided income for the community and the prosperity of the town and the Mallee. Today the grain, the sheep and working dog are all memorialised in sculptures up and down the wide main street of Warracknabeal. Alas the town is not as it used to be; it is now tired looking, the buildings shabby although those busy working or calling in for provisions or service are in contrast, bright, warm and friendly.

We called into the Wheatlands Warehouse, a second-hand shop run by the local Historical Society, the largest and best laid out I have seen for a long while. Here everything is sold on consignment and when you consider that most and many of the items sold are just a few dollars, like the book we bought for $3, are recorded in a notebook, matched with numbers to the seller and the sellers commission calculated, it is mindboggling. The friendly elderly volunteers who staff the shop told us the shop turns over about $5,000 a year, the society taking 18%. All I can say is that it is a good thing that they don’t pay wages or they would be running at a massive loss. Still it brings the community together and keeps otherwise idle hands busy, and is once again evidence of the great volunteer attitude that Australians have.

That same Historical Society runs the small museum in the old State Savings Bank and the Farm Machinery Museum a few kilometres out of town, a rather ramshackle collection that could well have held my husband enthralled for hours.

We continued on down the Henty Highway, bouncing and bucking along on this terribly uneven bitumen road, one of the worst travelled according to the man at the wheel. Endless green crops, sometimes broken by patches of canola, filled our view and we recalled the Hopetoun’s “ambassadress” telling us that rain was desperately needed to finish the harvest. Rain is initially required to germinate the seed and then again to swell the heads. There is much call for “swollen heads”. (This brings to mind the last throes of the political campaigning of this week.)

Back to water, the Wimmera Water Scheme is all about water for the towns, the homesteads and for the livestock. The grain crops are totally reliant on rain. This should be quite obvious; can you imagine sprinklers across the thousands of hectares of grain, or great irrigation machinery being dragged through the crops, squashing everything in their wake?

We arrived in Horsham about midday and parked up by the Wimmera River to satisfy our hunger before sorting out accommodation and related matters. At the Visitors Centre we raised the matter of the showgrounds as an alternative to the two commercial campgrounds. The women there were not at all forth coming, saying that the showgrounds were only ever an overflow measure; this was totally contrary to the advice we had been given by the motorhomers beside Lake Lascelles. We decided to check it out for ourselves, however there was no signage about or any sign of the caretaker, so we relented and took the commercial option, checking in to the council owned, YMCA managed campground. It is adjacent to where we lunched, right on the river and next to the Botanic Gardens. If it were privately owned or managed, it could be so much better. $34 a night is too much however we were able to secure our 10% CMCA discount, but even this is too much for a camp in such a state. Location is everything they say, and it does have that. Despite my negative comments, we have booked in for a couple of nights and may stay longer. 

Once we were set up, we walked back to the Information Centre, to pick up brochures on a few National Parks and State Forests within drive distance. Weather permitting we will spend some time walking in the bush as we like to do. This afternoon we wandered about the Botanic Gardens, a small part of the original sixteen hectares reserved for public activity, established between 1873 and 1880, obviously one of the first considerations of the town fathers. Like most such parks, it is divided up to specialised zones; a large garden of spring flowers; jonquils and daffodils all looking past their best, the last few day’s warmth just too much.  The New Zealand area was full of familiar hebes but looked as if they would be happier back home. The Tasmanian section was bare and dead and I lamented to Chris that this did not bode well, given we were heading to the Apple Isle within the month. He added that it was too late for regrets, the tickets were bought and we could just hope that Tasmania in reality was greener than its representation here.

On the subject of Tasmania, my younger son had remarked that it did not seem very sensible to be allowing only six weeks for this place given how long it had taken us to explore New Zealand. I promised to do some research to prove the error of that remark, something I have yet to do. However I did learn today in the Botanic Gardens that almost 37% of Tasmania lies in reserves, national parks and world heritage sites and that it is the 26^th largest island in the world. 

We also came upon a display established by secondary school students all about the Wimmera Water Scheme and the part salinity plays in the agricultural area. We learned that the Wimmera catchment extends from the Grampians north to Lake Alacutya, and from the South Australia border east to Navarre, an area representing about 10.3% of Victoria’s total land area, with a population of about 44,000. 

The catchment contains the Wimmera River and part of the Millicent Coast Basin to the South Australian border. The land locked region covers about 23,500 square kilometres and forms the southwest part of the Murray Darling Basin. It is a diverse region with mountains, plains, desert, moist foothill forest, box ironbark forest, woodlands, grasslands, and mallee heath. Annual rainfall varies from up to 1000 millimetres in the Grampians to as low as 300 millimetres on the northern plains.

The Wimmera River is the largest landlocked river in Victoria. Its tributaries from Mt Cole and the Pyrenees Ranges in the southeast and the Grampians in the south to a series of terminal lakes including Lake Hindmarsh and Lake Albacutya, two of the largest freshwater lakes in Victoria. Due to changes in land and water use in the catchment, Lake Albacutya and beyond into the Wyperfeld National Park are frequently dry. Lake Albacutya, internationally recognised for its environmental value as a  Ramsar wetland, has only filled four times in the 20^th century, the last time in 1974 following two exceptionally wet seasons. More than 3000 wetlands across the Wimmera support a diverse range of flora and fauna, and these have been described as more diverse than Kakadu in the Northern Territory.

Since arriving here in the Horsham Caravan Park, many more vans have arrived, one right next to us that is a little the worse for wear. The owners and their friends all set off from home this morning, passing a large truck on the road, as you do. The pop-top was caught in the draught and lifted off causing considerable damage. This afternoon the two guys were in damage control mode, hoping the temporary repair will last the two weeks holiday they have ahead of them. It put our own little tree hole into perspective.

Tomorrow will take us one day closer to the Federal Election and the unfolding results on Saturday, far more exciting than even a Rugby Test, the Ashes or even the Vuelta a Espana we have caught up with tonight. Alas SBS was not available at Hopetoun, the only negative about that excellent camp by the lake.