5 September 2013 - Horsham Caravan Park, Horsham, Victoria

After days of temperatures up near 30 degrees, today has been miserably cold. It takes so little time to become acclimatised to better weather and we were warned by the weather woman on the television that we should not stow our winter clothing about. She was right. This morning we lingered under the covers far too late, or at least far too late for our neighbour who was wanting to park his vehicle on our site up close to his caravan for further repair work. Our own vehicle was in the way.

I planned to change the linen, something that is done far too infrequently these days much to my shame, and googled Horsham weather for an up-to-date accurate forecast. Cloudy but no sign of rain for the rest of the day. How silly I was to trust this; rain has fallen intermittently all day and the washing remains on the line, limp and unchanged from when it was hung.

After lunch of toasted sandwiches, always a good backstop for such a day, we drove up into town, a distance that could just as easily have been walked on a better day. Having a population of 15,890, it should have been no surprise that the town should be as busy and  vibrant as a rural regional city can be. In fact it was buzzing more than our own home city, a rural regional city of over 40,000 in New Zealand ever does. And this was all on a drizzly dull day.

We decided to call into the Art Gallery, having read in one of our travel bibles that it is “one of Victoria’s key regional galleries wih an extensive collection housed in a 1930s Art Deco Building”. All we found in Wilson Street was a note on the door explaining that the buildings was undergoing serious renovation and the gallery had been temporarily shifted to another address. We made our way there, serenaded loudly in the rain by a uninhibited magpie standing on a raised roundabout in the main street, and soon found the modest makeshift home of the one exhibition on offer to the art hungry public. Local artist Anthony Pelchen earned himself an Asialink artist residency in Malaysia, and out of that came this rather abbreviated and weird collection of work titled Kuang Road Prayer. Neither of us were impressed with the work and we wondered why the Gallery people bothered to rent space during the closure of the main gallery if they couldn’t exhibit pieces the average punter might appreciate. However art is all very subjective, and after all, what would we know?


I had seen a note in our travel information about the Wool Factory just a few kilometres out of town where one could do a tour. Their product was apparently superior to all others and I thought this could prove to be quiet interesting. We asked about this at the Visitors Centre and learned that it had closed down toward the end of the drought years and when the bottom dropped out of the wool market. We were still however welcome to go out and see their new enterprise, a sheltered workshop for the needy locals where they assembled all sorts of bits and pieces. I declined the opportunity; that all seemed a little voyeuristic. I did mention that it was a bit silly that the location of the Wool Factory was still marked as a tourist destination on the map.

I found a salon that looked a little less glitzy than the many others, advertising itself as Family Hair Care, and had Peter cut my hair most satisfactorily at an equally satisfactory price. Looking sharp and well groomed for a change, I accompanied my husband around the Safeway supermarket reprovisioning our fridge with fruit, vegetables and meat. Here, like much of Victoria, Woolworths supermarkets operate under the nom de plume of Safeway.

Back at camp we settled in for a sedate afternoon, again following the unfolding political scene before preparing a soul warming dinner. Hopefully tomorrow will bring better weather to dry the washing and to encourage exploration of the region beyond the park gates.

Much later when I ventured across the park in the dark, I was startled by a grey form darting across in front of me. I froze and watched as the form first thought to be a cat, scampered up a small tree then turned and examined the frightened woman below. It was a delightful bushy tailed possum and here in Australia I am allowed to be charmed by these protected creatures. We stared at each other for some time, I admiring him, he now the more frightened, until he climbed further up and across a bigger tree and into the night. I returned back to the caravan happy with my encounter.