This morning the road took us back out down the Ovens Valley, through Myrtleford to Bowman which is no more than a place name on the map, where we turned north east toward Beechworth, crawling up and over the Buckland Gap Road.
Beechworth’s history is very like that of Bright, but is situated up out of the valley, well spread out over undulating hills. Like Maldon just south of Ballarat, the town is now protected with heritage status, however has a vibrancy that Maldon lacks. Maldon, for me, was how I often see history, in sepia; Beechworth is all in bright vibrant technocolour.
Through the 1850s and right through until the first decades of last century, Beechworth was the centre of the Ovens Goldfields and the administrative centre for North East Victoria. During those lucrative years, the population rose to 30,000 and numerous public buildings were erected to support its eminent status. Now known as the Historic and Cultural Precinct, these buildings are registered by Heritage Victoria and the National Trust.
The town is situated on the Murray to the Mountains Rail Trail and is serious about providing accommodation and dining options for those undertaking this ride. The commercial precinct is full of fascinating shops and boutiques, all in these wonderful old buildings; shops with names like Splatoons Cartoon Shop & Gallery, Beechworth Honey. The Ardent Alpaca, The Beechworth Sweet Co., Crime Scene Gift Shop, Beechworth Provender, Larder Fromagerie & Provisions, and so on. The tourist blurbs suggest that touring Melburnians should delay their shopping until they arrive here and I can well imagine what a delight it would be to exercise one’s credit card in this charming town.
We utilised few of these services, except for the newspaper, some stamps and some delicious sourdough bread from the Beechworth Bakery which does the most amazing trade, and this was Monday!
After exploring all the streets of the centre, we retired to the local lake, Lake Sambell, where we parked to have our lunch. Apart from being wet and having a good population of birds, we did not find the lake hugely inspiring, but it did provide a refuge from the busi-ness of the town.
After lunch we headed toward Wangaratta, but joined the Hume Freeway heading toward Melbourne before reaching Wangaratta visited just days ago. It wasn’t long before we reached the exit for Glenrowan, the capital of Kellyana. This was the setting for Ned Kelly’s last stand against the law, where his three gang fellows were slain and he was finally laid low enough to be taken into custody.
In 1880, the year of this big show down, Glenrowan had a population of about one hundred, two pubs, a railway station and little else. Today it is about the same, but with only one pub.
Armed with a self-guide brochure we walked about the spots now famous in this final chapter of great Australian folk lore, including Ann Jones’ Glenrowan Inn where Kelly holed up for a couple of days with his hostages, the Police Shelter Site, the capture site, the railway station from where he was finally taken from to Melbourne for sentencing and hanging. There are excellent interpretative panels in each spot, however for the complete experience one is encouraged to enjoy the animated show where you are guaranteed to be frightened, and warned off if you have a heart condition. We recently reread Bill Bryson’s DownUnder, or at least the section that relates to this part of Victoria. He has a hilarious account of the show at Glenrowan; we decided that was enough for us.
There are several shops just full of souvenirs all based on the Kelly story; we managed to avoid temptation, and instead returned to the highway and pressed on to this rest area we had checked out when we came past nearly a week ago.
We are within view of the railway line and a body of water that was once known as Lake Mokoan, but today the Winton Wetlands. The swamps all about were flooded back in 1971 to create a reservoir for water supply. Thirty nine years after problems with weed and no doubt, Greenies, the reservoir was decommissioned and today nature is back in control. It is quite a noisy rest area, with large trucks sharing the space and while the trains do not seem very numerous, there was one who appeared to take delight in tooting as they approached a crossing in the distance. Hopefully this was a one off. There are currently three other camping parties here with us, one of whom came a moment ago to borrow our lighter. We were pleased to oblige but begged that they take care. They are recently arrived German tourists who may not be familiar with the dangers of bush fire. I read today in a small Forestry Museum at Beechworth that the north eastern part of Victoria has the best conditions for bush fire. Those in 2003 were caused by a series of lightning strikes all occurring over the region at the same time. Even today as we travelled down the freeway, we were surprised to see a farmer working his way around a so called controlled grass fire.
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