18 October 2012 - Gundagai North Rest Area, Hume Highway, New South Wales

My first priority this morning was to send a text to my younger sister who was hopefully taking time to celebrate her 56^th birthday. Wonder of wonders, I managed to do this with my Vodafone cellphone; I just hope she received it however my conscience was appeased and is this not how we really operate? Or is this just a quirk of my own?

As we left our excellent free camp at Wagga Wagga, we topped up with water and set the Tomtom for Gundegai. A normal person would have resumed the highway directly eastwards to the Hume Highway and then travelled north on the freeway, however our navigational device has learned or presumes (correctly) that we like to go off the beaten track. And so we travelled the seventy five kilometres or so through to Gundagai on a back road, up through beautiful pastoral country, passing the tiny settlements of Oura, Wantabadgery and Nangus, up and down the rolling hills with the Murrumbidgee River always on our right.

We find it fascinating the way roads over hills here in Australia go straight up and straight down, no mucking about, while those in New Zealand wind their way up in a more gradual manner, following the contours of the land. We also marvelled that we could have been anywhere in New Zealand, passing through such landscape, apart from these straighter roads. Chris remarked that Australia had so much more land like New Zealand, than New Zealand had itself. How true. We both remarked that my father would have just loved this landscape we were passing through.

We arrived in Gundagai, a place full of character and 2,230 people, famous for reference to the place in so many songs including “The Road to Gundagai”. We bought some fresh bread and parked down by Morley’s Creek, enjoying our lunch serenaded by dozens of magpies, before setting off for a walk around the town.

The town nowadays sits on the side of the hill above the river, but did not always do so. The first settlers came and established the town on the flat island between the river and the creek, ignoring the advice of the local aboriginals who told of huge floods. Years of drought followed giving proof that the location of the town was indeed quite safe, but alas in the early 1840s there was a flood, and the occupants of the flat land begged the government to be relocated to the more elevated land away from the river. The response was, “You chose to buy and settle there; your problem. If you want alternative land, buy it”. So nothing was done. And so when subsequent floods came, people simply climbed up into their attics and sat the flood out, waiting for the waters to recede. And then came another long drought, and memories of past disasters faded, as they do, until one day in June 1852 the rains came after a prolonged drought and the river came down through the town as never before, or at least not in white memory. One third of the 250 inhabitants were drowned. A couple of heroic aboriginal men, named Yarri and Jacky, saved many lives, ferrying men, women and children to safety on their flimsy bark “canoe”. Yarri has since been immortalised with a park and bridge named after him.

Subsequent to this disaster, the town was rebuilt on the higher slopes and the town became better known for its encounters with bushrangers and ballads.

We called into the museum, a great warehouse of eclectic mix of memorabilia; collections of prams, cigarette cards, egg beaters, axes, silver tea services, farm machinery, mechanical tools, photos; you name it, it’s there. In fact, it’s really all too much and yet I do despise the museums run by modern curators who select just two or three collections from out of their basement stores and in all fairness, construct a wonderful exhibit, but you feel short changed on the other aspects of the history of the place. Here you would never feel that!

We wandered down the main street, reading the signs on the old building walls, making reference to the gold rush at Adelong and surrounds, Australia’s oldest working bakery, the Niagara Café that served tea and pies to prime ministers over the years as they paused on their way from Melbourne to Canberra, and so much more.

We walked on out of town to the river edge, passing a class of school children in their gold polo shirts, green shorts and hats, all carrying fishing rods and corn and worms for bait. I do not recall going fishing when I went to school!

We could have checked out more such as Rusconi’s Marble Masterpiece housed in a backroom at the Information Centre, a structure made of 20,948 pieces of twenty different types of Australian marble, constructed over twenty eight years. The mind boggles regarding his family life! It was he who sculptured the “Dog on the Tuckerbox” we will see in the morning.

And so here we are between the north and south lanes of the Hume Highway, a very busy route for large and noisy trucks. There are some lovely gums about and no doubt equally lovely birds, however I doubt I will hear them. The camp is free and we are making the most of such places having spent so much time in commercial camps over many months.