19 October 2012 - New Yachting Point, Kosciuszko National Park, Snowy Mountain Way, New South Wales

It is late afternoon and we are parked up beside the Blowering Reservoir, part of the Snowy Mountain Power Scheme. The sun is shining and I should really change into shorts or even less, however have stubbornly remained in appropriate mountain spring wear; jeans and a ¾ sleeve shirt. Chris is outside washing the caravan with broom and buckets of water from the dam and I have just finished washing a bag of spuds purchased this morning at Woolworths in Gundagai. Picture if you will, a middle aged woman squatting in the shallow waters of the dam, scrubbing spuds with the sandy mud; it is actually more efficient than using a brush. However that is probably as awful as you wish to stretch your imagination for one day so we will leave it at that.

We woke early this morning to the sound of trucks, the same sound that we had heard on and off all night, and yet despite that, we both felt relatively rested. For me that could have had something to do with the fact that I beat Chris resoundingly at Scrabble last night. He has taught me well. While this rest stop is not without its charm, its proximity to traffic flowing between the two major cities of this nation does detract from any pleasure one might otherwise have in the surroundings.

While Chris was outside readying for departure, our neighbours who had come in later in the afternoon, thus rendering the small camp full, started conversation. After ten minutes or so, I thought I’d better go join him, however this was a major mistake. The couple from just out of Kingaroy were absolutely delightful, chatty, warm and familiar. I remembered them from the Mildura Country Music Festival because like many of us, have their oddities, and I have quite a good memory for such. It was well over an hour before we were able to prise ourselves away and on up the highway to the “Dog on the Tucker Box”.

The Dog on the Tucker Box

Here beside the road is a small statue celebrating this little working dog who was the subject of first a poem and then many a song to come after. A whole tourist industry has sprung up about this; a café, gift shops, craft shops, picnic area. There were busloads of tourists and school children, several caravanning folk such as ourselves, a group of motorcyclists and a dozen or so travellers in cars. It really was all a bit too kitsch but then it is all of this that brings the tourist dollars to Gundagai, so who am I to say more?

We returned to Gundagai, shopped at the Woolworths supermarket then headed south east to Tumut on one road through Gocup which is marked on the map but in reality only a farm building or two.

It is only about forty five kilometres through to Tumut, 280 metres ASL, across beautiful grazing country becoming steeper by the mile. And then we were at Tumut and so surprised to find this place, which is marked in a far smaller font than Gundagai on the map, having more than twice the population and at least one industry evident by the chimneys and smoke. While it is a rural service centre and one of the gateways to the Kosciusko National Park, it also has a substantial timber industry and more particularly, the Visy Pulp and Paper Mill which employs a number of the population.

After lunch we wandered up the hill from the park, up and down the main street, and then back down to the Tumut River, quite a raging torrent. This is of course the same water I have recently washed my potatoes in and will eventually flow on to the Murrumbidgee and the Murray and on to the sea in South Australia. What a pretty town Tumut is and as the council worker we chatted with on the bridge said, only one hour’s drive from Wagga Wagga and two from Canberra, obviously if you are not towing a caravan.

Satisfied with our exploration of Tumut, we travelled on toward Cooma, tomorrow’s destination, until we found this most satisfactory camp beside the reservoir just thirty kilometres from Tumut.

As I finish the day’s instalment, the chap camped up the slope from us has ventured into the lake for a swim. It is warm; twenty eight degrees. Perhaps I should do the same?

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.

17 October 2012 - Wilks Park, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales

Still here in Wagga Wagga, enjoying the sun and this lovely city, says I who was so dismissive when we arrived yesterday. One’s attitude to a place is also tempered by the service and facilities so this free camp beside the river which we, together with about another twenty travellers, enjoyed last night and will surely again tonight, certainly sways one’s attitude.

We unhitched after breakfast, having decided that we would indeed stay on, and then headed up to the Museum of the Riverina on the hill after popping into the Sturt Mall to pick up a few necessities. We were too early, so sat in the cruiser out of the gentle cool breeze reading the newspaper until ten o’clock had come and gone.

The museum is excellent, and free but for the donation one may feel inclined to make. The exhibitions include a small but informative area about Wagga Wagga and the surrounding rural Riverina area, the famous Tichbourne case where a butcher from Wagga Wagga claimed to be the rightful heir of the Tichbourne estate in England way back in the latter part of the 19^th century and an area celebrating local sportspeople which included croquet and coach driving heroes, along with those who had excelled at more mundane sports such as cycling, touch rugby, tennis, and more familiar pursuits.

Alas for us, no sooner had we arrived than a small busload of oldies, obviously from a retirement home, also arrived escorted by their very own entertainment director, a women with a strident voice more unattractive that that of Julia Gillard. She wandered through with her visually and aurally impaired charges reading each interpretative panel as she went. It was impossible to concentrate on one’s own interpretation of the history with that racket going on. We wandered outside to view the excellent collection of farm machinery and other outdoorsy stuff which included a drover’s wagon and a chaff kitchen, the former a sort of support caravan and the latter, the catering wagon for the chaff cutters, both with excellent explanations. It was delightful to be out in the sunshine, and even better to be out of hearing of Mrs Foghorn, however the inevitable happened. She was still at it when we returned to complete our exploration of the museum. We gave up and came back to our camp, enjoying our picnic lunch in the caravan while listening to the second election debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney. After that, we set off out again back to the museum. The oldies had all gone home for their lunch and afternoon nap, however museum workers were busy setting up a new exhibition, advice from all sides being given from particularly vocal types. It was not our day.

I did find out about the large buildings we had seen a little to the south west of Uranquinty; a gas processing plant which caused great consternation among the Uranquinty locals before its erection. I also learned that the air pilot training centre in the same locality was later used as a migrant reception centre in much the same way as that at Bonegilla.

I also asked about the wagga rugs of which there were several examples in exhibit drawers. These are basically patchwork rugs using sacks as backing sheets, something I am sure we did at sewing classes when I was at primary school. So why “wagga” rugs; what was so special about these made here? It seems that the sacks used for the flour and grain here at the Wagga Wagga mill (now standing unused beside the railway here) were of particularly good quality and sought after to make into these coverings which in turn used recycled clothing or bits and pieces and were in high demand all over the country as cheap warm “blankets”. The sacks had the distinctive Wagga lily printed on the bag, and so were clearly from this source. Mystery solved.

We drove the short distance to the Botanic Gardens and wandered about enjoying the azaleas and the extensive bird aviaries, along with the rest of the zoo which is home to donkeys, kangaroos, swap wallabies, emus, a shy wombat, and a few other creatures to humour the children who come to enjoy this, the playground, the ice-creams sold at the kiosk and the miniature railway when it is in operation. It was a pleasant place to be this afternoon and so we will head away tomorrow satisfied that we have seen Wagga Wagga. 

16 October 2012 - Wilks Park, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales

It was disappointing to find the skies overcast and suggesting rain when we woke, however the rain came to nothing more than a few splashes on the windscreen as we travelled up here to Wagga Wagga.

Its only about a hundred and twenty kilometres from Albury to Wagga Wagga, travelling up on the Olympic Highway through lush flat grazing lands interspersed with bright yellow canola crops. There are few settlements on the road which runs adjacent to the Sydney – Melbourne rail line. Culcairn is the most significant with a population of 1,400, sitting at 215 metres ASL, and like the others on the line, is a small rural centre boasting a post office and large grain silos beside the rail.  The main road does actually run through Culcairn and so one gets to see the grand buildings of old, such as the stationmaster’s house, the police station, et cetera. But we did not stop here or in Henty, Yerong or The Rock that followed. At the oddly named Uranquinty, we stopped briefly and took the opportunity to read the signs that threw light on the large strange shaped buildings to the south west of the settlement. During World War II Uranquinty was a major pilot training centre so we supposed the buildings must have been hangars of some kind.

It’s not much more than another ten kilometres to Wagga Wagga, and just south we passed the entrance to the Army Defence Training Centre at Kapooka . We later learned that Wagga Wagga boasts another Defence Training Centre at Forest Hill, this one for the Australian Air Force, and the Australian Airline Pilot Academy. Perhaps the latter still utilises the operation at Uranquinty? No doubt we will discover the answer to that in time.

We came in to Wagga Wagga, through a rather dowdy untidy part of town, but arriving at the Information Centre and subsequently walking up the main street to purchase fresh bread for lunch, decided that it was quite lovely after all. The city is home to 72,000 people and is apparently the largest inland city in New South Wales. The Murrumbidgee River runs through the city before travelling on some distance to meet the Murray.

We popped into the Regional Art Gallery to see a couple of exhibitions that did not do much for me, or Chris for that matter. When we discussed how we felt about most of the work, he described it as “introspective” as well as something slightly more derogatory. So right, I thought, and like so much modern work one comes across in galleries.

The Gallery is also home to the National Art Glass Gallery which owns five hundred pieces of work, much of it out on display. We were rather ambivalent about the featured exhibition however did find some absolute treasures amongst the permanent collection. This is all shown in a special purpose gallery with the wall on one side of the two storey building, one great big window. Quite appropriate, I thought.

From here we checked out this free camp on the north side of the Murrumbidgee and found another sixteen camping parties had done the same. While it is near the approach to the most recently built bridge across the river and quite a busy road, we feel quite safe and “legal”, so here we will stay.

We went for a wander back into town, across the bridge and along the river bank. A lovely walk of about an hour to shake any cobwebs away.

It is still overcast but quite warm. Hopefully tomorrow the sun will shine on the solar panels.  

15 October 2012 - Albury All Seasons Tourist Park, Lavington, New South Wales

Our last day has been spent taking in a few more of the attractions Albury-Wodonga has to offer; we will leave tomorrow morning not having seen all there is but so be it.

After dealing with the mundane chore of laundry, we headed off into the sunshine down into Albury to visit the historic railway station which is still in use and today was undergoing redecoration. We were still able to make our way around the taped off areas to appreciate the special features of this grand Italianate building opened for business in 1881.

As mentioned a couple of days ago, the railways through both Victoria and New South Wales were particularly odd.

By the 1850s, all six British colonies in Australia were independent, making their own decisions regarding transportation and communication in isolation of their neighbours. New South Wales used the standard railway track gauge of 4 foot 8 ½ inches (or 1.435 metres) while Victoria used the broader gauge of 5 foot 3 inches (1.6 metres).

By the 1870s the two states had decided to link the two colonies by rail at Albury-Wodonga. Victoria’s rail reached Wodonga in 1873 and eight years later, New South Wales’ rail reached Albury. Two years later the Victorian line was extended across the river to Albury and it was here at this station passengers were required to change trains. Amazingly it was not until 1962, after almost eighty years the standard gauge was extended to Melbourne making it possible to travel from Sydney to Melbourne without changing trains.

The station here at Albury has one of the longest covered platforms in Australia which would have made the waiting for transfer a little more bearable.

The clock tower of the railway station

Our next destination was the museum which shares its premises with the council library. The hallway was filled with photos of kids “Coolections” to which we gave our cursory attention. The serious part of the museum is an exhibition titled “X Crossing Place – A Story of Albury” which weaves together the story of Albury from its first contact with the Wiradjuri people, traditional owners of the land, through the centuries of pioneers, immigrants and the city as it is today. The explorers Hume and Hovell first came to this spot on the Murray in 1824 and named the river the Hume River. Five years later, Charles Sturt discovered the same river downstream and named it the Murray River. After some time, Murray only came to be used however there is frequent reference to the aboriginal name of Millewa.

Pastoralists followed through the 1830s and the town was surveyed in 1838. Germans and Lebanese followed the settlors of British origin, Chinese settled distracted from the gold rush of the region and much later, post WWII, immigrants from all over the world. In 1972, Albury was chosen as a town for the Families Resettlement Scheme, which created new mainstream communities for disadvantaged and dispossessed Aboriginal people. The Albury- Wodonga Aboriginal community is thus a “mixed mob”, coming from many different regions and tribal backgrounds.

Exhibits in this intimate museum celebrate this medley of people and highlight events and people who have put Albury on the world map. Memorabilia from the lives of tennis players Margaret Court (who has subsequently suffered “a crisis of faith” – don’t you just love that?) and Jack Crawford, opera star Malcolm McEachern, “Eagle Pizza” founder and entrepreneur Tom Potter and the world famous Flying Fruit Fly Circus, among others are on show. The emergency landing of the KLM Uiver DC2 airliner in 1934 is also celebrated in detail, along with the Bonegilla Migrant Experience. It is a great little museum and certainly worth a visit but probably should be avoided on Monday mornings while the interactive exhibition is still on and being enjoyed or suffered by pre-school children, babies and their mothers. I did struggle to hear much of the audio in the “X Crossing Place”. Still one cannot complain, the whole facility is free to the public.

From here we drove out to the Wonga Wetlands, about five kilometres west of Albury on the Riverina Highway. This is an eco-system of lagoons and billabongs covering about 80 hectares and a haven for wildlife, especially birds.

Wisteria growing over water tanks at the Wonga Wetlands

The wetlands have been years out of sync since the damming of the Murray River at the Hume Weir, but since 1997 when the Council took the land over, the wetlands, which are alternatively man-made and natural, are being restored from the many years of farming and grazing by the use of reclaimed water from the city’s wastewater treatment facility.

The wetlands are today home to over a hundred and fifty identified bird species, ancient river red gums that are sometimes described as a hundred and fifty years old and sometimes six hundred years, a Wiradjuri campsite, several bird hides fashioned from shipping containers and delightful walking tracks. We spent well over an hour there loving every minute. We observed hundreds of ducks scatter frantically away from our foot fall, swimming faster than we have ever seen before and some seeming to run on the water before rising on the wing. We heard frogs croaking and booming and stood by the muddy swamp edge trying to catch sight of the source of these weird sounds. We crashed and banged our way through the strange heavy metal doors and shutters of the containers, frightening any birds we might have otherwise caught from the hide. Dozens of wonderful superb blue fairy wrens darted about our path and we caught sight of half a dozen rabbits playfully running in circles. We loved the place.

Our last destination was yet another lookout, that on Huon Hill out past Wodonga and Bandiana. The park is a working farm of 238 hectares and the dirt road winds its way steeply up the hill to an elevation of 438 metres ASL. From the top one has 360 degree views up and down the Murray Valley, over the two cities and south to Mount Bogong and Mount Feathertop. And immediately below the Bandiana Army Camp is laid out for all the world to see and take stock, rows of tanks and other military machinery. We had at last found the ultimate lookout over Albury-Wodonga.

We returned to camp, sorted the dry laundry and settled down for a final night in this excellent camp.

14 October 2012 - Albury All Seasons Tourist Park, Lavington, New South Wales

The weather did not disappoint this morning, and so we remained on track with our plans, away from the city before 9 am, initially heading back toward the Hume dam on the road travelled yesterday. Again we crossed the bridge below the dam, passed the entrance to the migrant centre, then turned eastwards onto the Murray Valley Highway, following the shore of the southern arm of the lake.

We paused at Tallangatta to learn that this small township of just 950 folk, originally established in the 1870s as a rail gateway to the Mitta and Murray valleys, was relocated to this spot beside the lake between 1952 and 1954. It was not until the expansion of the weir and the reservoir area that the original town was threatened with submersion, although uncertainty had reigned ever since the weir was mooted back in the 1920s. The old town across the lake, just eight kilometres west, is barely discernable today although it was more so during the drought years when the original streets rose out of the falling lake levels.

Soon the valley carved out by the Mitta Mitta River veered south and left us with the lower western reaches of the Snowy Country to climb over. A wonderful looking rail trail stretches from Bonegilla to Tallangetta, and from there evidence of a past railroad remains but undeveloped as yet for tourist traffic. The Cudgewa rail line once wound up over the hills to Shelley, the highest rail station in Victoria at 781 metres ASL. We walked into one of the several trestle bridges remaining although barricaded off for safety reasons and imagined the cost of restoring this to current safety levels would make the restoration of the rail as a cycle trail uneconomic. Pity really.

We descended into one valley after another, the Cudgewa and the Corryong, both spectacular rural lands, so reminiscent of those through New Zealand’s King Country. We paused in Corryong at the most eastern extent of the Murray Valley Highway and walked about this centre which hosts the annual Man from Snowy River Bush Festival. Corryong is famous as the final resting place of Jack Riley who is considered to be the hero of Banjo Patterson’s poem The Man from Snowy River, and plays on this fact (or fiction) for all it is worth. The two sculptures each end of the town celebrate the Man and he is again depicted with a more impressive sculpture on the town green.

We walked up and down the town, naturally very quiet on a Sunday afternoon. It is a more than adequate service centre for those who choose to live in this relatively isolated area, however many still choose to drive the one hundred and twenty odd kilometres to Albury-Wodonga from time to time. The delightful chap in the Information Centre confessed to doing so once a fortnight and he is no doubt pretty typical of many. Corryong does have a population of just over 1,200 so we should not have been entirely surprised.

From here we drove on over the Towong Gap at 450 metres ASL and down to the state border, crossing the bridge over the Murray previously visited when we travelled the Alpine Way from Jindabyne at the end of April this year. We parked beside the river and ate our lunch. The river seemed more impressive than when we were last there, fast  flowing with the first of the spring melt and the rainfall of a couple of days ago.

The far off snowy caps of Mount Kosciusko

We returned to Victoria via a loop travelled back then, and followed the Murray River downstream through the valley that was alternatively narrow and slightly less so.  The countryside was quite beautiful; the lush green farms populated by dry stock with a few canola crops to break the monotony. Looking back to the east we were able to see the snowy tops of Mount Kosciusko or at least that part not covered in cloud. It was indeed a sight to behold.

There are several reserves along the river offering recreational areas; we called into the Clarke Lagoon reserve which was not as impressive as other lagoon areas we saw as we proceeded on downstream. We passed Pine Mountain, a gigantic rock monolith reputedly one and a half times as large as Uluru, standing 1,062 metres ASL and then pulled into the Mount Lawson State Park and walked a short part of the Flaggy Creek Walk, just to the top of the ridge from where we could look up and down the valley. Here the Murray River had morphed into the northern arm of Lake Hume, here much shallower and revealing the submerged trees, many still alive and obviously the residue of the drought times. The road winds along the southern shore of this arm for well over fifty kilometres, emphasising how extensive this reservoir is. We finally reached the Bethanga bridge at Bellbridge, a 750 metre long steel truss bridge built in 1930. It is quite impressive.

As we had approached the end of the lake we saw great palls of dense black smoke rising however were unable to identify exactly where it was coming from. I thought that perhaps a powerboat had caught fire, or even a car. It did not seem to be a bush fire. Much later we learned a fire had broken out in a high voltage transformer at the power station. More than one hundred and forty people were evacuated from the nearby caravan park and the Lake Hume Resort which was hosting a wedding. We missed the action!

Once back across into New South Wales, we headed back to camp. We had spent about seven and a half hours covering this delightful loop of about three hundred and ten kilometres, travelling in an anti-clockwise fashion. To travel up or down river was a quandary, but in retrospect we would suggest two trips, one each way, that way optimising all viewing options.

The sun was still shining and the temperatures had climbed to a pleasant 20 degrees; it looks like we might be in for a warmer week.

13 October 2012 - Albury All Seasons Tourist Park, Lavington, New South Wales

It was just 4 degrees this morning however the skies promised an excellent day. Tomorrow is to be even colder hopefully a portent for an even better day. With the eski packed with lunch, we headed off for our day’s adventure.

Our first stop was yet another lookout, this time that on the Eastern Hill Reserve on the south eastern edge of Albury. The hill is home to several communication towers which does not usually bode well for picturesque viewing however we were delighted to find a gate and pathway out along a ridge offering fabulous views over the two cities, Lake Hume, to the distant snow covered mountains and extensive rural lands all about.

Satisfied at last to have managed an elevated aspect of the area, we continued on to Lake Hume, aka the Murray River dammed by the Hume Weir, which has resulted in a reservoir covering 20,190 hectares, or six times the size of the Sydney Harbour (that ever present Australian measuring stick).

The original weir was constructed in 1936, with a capacity of 1522 gigalitres, but between 1950 and 1961 further work increased double this. A hydro-electric power station was added in 1957.

During the years between the two great wars, the project was equated with the Sydney Harbour Bridge as one of the mightiest Australian structures. On completion in 1936 it was one of the largest dams in the world.

The Hume Weir

The dam is currently undergoing major works, a mere $33 million being spent to reinforce the retaining wall against future earthquakes. The thought of this dam being burst by such an event just does not bear thinking about! Today it meant we were unable to walk across the weir, something that is normally possible. We have seen films showing great plumes of water spewing through the spillway; today there was little more than a trickle through that aperture, although a fair volume was coming through the turn stocks of the power station. This suggests that the water levels are not as they might be, and yet the dam is full. Research tells me that in 2007 during the drought years the levels fell to a mere 1%.

Today being Saturday, there were several fizz boats out on the water however it was still relatively early and many families were still busy with Saturday morning sport. No doubt there were many families out doing what Australian families do best by lunchtime, making good use of the excellent picnic and barbeque facilities. Lake Hume is indeed a very attractive lake, particularly so because it is surrounded by green hills as opposed to the red earth of so many of the reservoirs we have visited of late.

We drove on across the Murray River, below the dam and back into Victoria, stopping at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience centre, right on the southern edge of the lake.

The complex was originally built as the Bonegilla Army Camp during the Second World War, strategically important because of its proximity to the state border when the two states had different rail gauges causing considerable disruption to rapid deployment of men and supplies. Bonegilla became a transfer centre for army, just as Wodonga seems to be today for so much more, in new-speak, a logistics centre.

In 1947 it became the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, and until 1971 served as Australia’s largest and longest operating migrant centre. It had its own churches, banks, sporting fields, cinema, hospital, police station and railway platform. During the great influx of migrants in 1949 and 1950, officials estimated that Bonegilla could cope with up to 7,700 people in its unlined wooden huts with tin roofs and an extra 1,600 people in tents. There would eventually be 832 huts on the 240 hectare site.

During the 1960s, the centre could apparently comfortably house 4,000 people however more commonly, there were between 2,500 and 3,500 residents at any one time. Block 19, the restored section, now the only standing, was one of twenty four similarly sized and fully self-contained blocks and usually accommodated 350 people.

The prime purpose of the Reception and Training Centre was to act as a labour distribution point. Newly arrived migrants were provided with temporary accommodation, interviewed to assess their employment potential and then dispatched to jobs all over Australia.

We were the first to arrive this morning and were met by a couple in their seventies who had immigrated from Belgium in the very early 1960s and had themselves, with their two very small children, been inmates at the centre, spending about eight months there before being found employment in Melbourne. We were guided through the restored buildings by this charming man who told his own story as we went. He showed us through the large kitchen where he had gained paid kitchen hand work during his sojourn; it reminded me of the kitchen at the boarding hostel I attended during my secondary years, as did the prefabricated “huts”. (Sadly for the purpose of history but happily for subsequent boarders, my hostel was condemned and demolished almost immediately after I left.)

Here at Bonegilla’s migrant centre, there are a great number of interpretative panels, videos and other exhibits which we chose to take in having lunch. We spent some hours wandering about and absorbing the history, pleased to place our donation in the appropriate box to assist with further restoration. All the work has been undertaken by volunteers and is definitely a work in progress. Over the years more than 300,000 new Australians have come through the centre and today many or their descendants return for a dose of nostalgia.

We finally tore ourselves away and headed westwards to Wodonga where we walked up and down the main street, quiet on this Saturday afternoon before returning home. We decided we prefer Albury to Wodonga.