Tonight we are parked up beside the Broken River, just upstream from a weir, again part of the irrigation systems that make this whole area famous and fertile.
We passed an uneventful night on the side of the road, hearing the dozens of trucks making their way up and down, and also finding that we were not too far from the rail. Shades of the Bruce Highway! We woke to find that we were not alone after all; several travellers in trucks, vans and cars had joined us after our blinds were down.
Last night Chris had checked our power levels and found the battery system blinking red lights at him, not a happy sign. So we skimped on all electricity and checked this morning to find the same unwelcome message. Needless to say that our first stop in Shepparton was at an auto electrician and we passed the rest of the morning there while the young man tinkered with wires, detaching and re-attaching, and finally announcing that all was working correctly. Hopefully if I were to rise off this seat for Chris to check the battery system beneath, he would now find that the battery blinking green lights telling us that our brief motoring and the bright sun has been enough to fully charge the batteries.
Shepperton is a rural centre of over twenty seven thousand souls, reaping its wealth from dairying and fruit growing. The SPC Ardmona and Campbell Soups processing and canning factories are situated here and big employers, and the town is doing its utmost to promote itself as a conference centre and a family tourist destination. There are numerous walks along rail trails and the river, and the Victoria Park Lake is just lovely, a destination to runners and walkers and families with its Splash Park. The lake was constructed earlier last century making the most of the unemployed during the Great Depression however it is only since late in the same century that it has been developed to be such a first class attraction.
After lunch we visited the Art Gallery also known as SAM (the Shepparton Art Museum) which we thoroughly enjoyed. The current star exhibition is a collection of portraits by Sir John Longstaff titled Portraits of a Lady. Chris was not as impressed as I however I am no connoisseur. I simply know what moves or delights me, and these portraits of women painted through the late 1890s to the 1920s did just that. There was also an excellent exhibition of ceramics by Aboriginal artists; this I also enjoyed very much. Upstairs there was the collection; ceramics and paintings by Arthur Boyd which appeal to the warped part of one’s personality (don’t we all have that?), other art by other members of his family and his friend John Perceval, Arthur Streeton, Rupert Bunny and other artists we have come to recognise. And the one piece that grabbed us was a sculpture by Sam Jinks titled Woman and Child, done in the style of those by Patricia Piccanini that had so impressed us in Mount Gambier. There was also a piece of sculpture by this same Patricia, but in fibre glass and not suggesting any animate form. Needless to say, we were impressed with the gallery and would recommend it to anyone passing through this rather lovely town, even as briefly as we were.
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| A canoeist sharing our river camping spot |
And brief our visit was, because after a quick walk around the block and around Furphy Square where there is a large collection of the cows “On the Mooove”. There are more than one hundred life-sized three dimensional fibre-glass cows about the town, with designs ranging from the artful and fanciful to whimsical and those representing stories behind the local community.
Soon we were once more on the move ourselves, heading east toward Benalla. We have reviewed our short tour away from Melbourne and realise that we will be hard pushed to travel and see those places planned within the time frame, hence our speed. However this evening we will enjoy the cicadas and the birds, already in evidence, and try to avoid the mosquitos, which have already announced their presence.
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