Anzac Day at Portland and on to Adelaide

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Well it’s been a while since our last blog! We finally left Melbourne (for the third and final time) on 22 April, a beautiful sunny day, and drove to Ballarat, where we visited the Eureka Centre. Decided to skip the premier Ballarat tourist attraction, Sovereign Hill, as it is very expensive. The Eureka Centre was a really great (and well priced!) exhibition of the famous Eureka stockade (a miner’s uprising against the authorities, which ended up in bloodshed). While we were there, a group of high school students were doing a re-enactment of the court case, very amusing to watch their role plays!

Free camped down the road a bit at Lake Bolac that night and woke to find ourselves surrounded in thick fog! Visited the Ansett museum in Hamilton (where Reg Ansett started his air service), a small but interesting collection of memorabilia, run by dedicated volunteers. Then drove on to Portland, a really nice port and seaside town to the west of the Great Ocean Road, and discovered that there was to be a rather special Anzac Day service there on Friday, so we booked in for an extra night. This also meant we were able to relax in the sun, do some housekeeping stuff, and explore Portland at leisure while waiting for the parade. Portland has the distinction of being the oldest Victorian settlement, so lots of nice old stone cottages etc. to admire! (Australia is full of lovely old stone buildings of all shapes, sizes and colours by the way)

Now onto the Anzac celebrations -every year for the last 70 years, the town as done an amazing Anzac floral display and this year, it was also the 90th anniversary of the liberation of the French town of Villers-Bretonneux, when the Australian army took the town back from the Germans in 1918 (co-incidentally on the 25 April!). The floral tribute (see photos) this year was the logo of V-B, which is stylised in the shape of a kangaroo to honour their Aussie heroes. Interestingly the village primary school in V-B is called Victoria and was built by money donated by Australian school-children. All that aside, the floral display was amazing. As well as the main floral tributes, a cross and a fresh flower wreath are made and displayed in memory of each Portland service personnel from WWI onwards. We checked out the work in progress on Thursday, then attended the Anzac Day dawn service. It was an amazing setting with the sun rising over Portland Bay as the service took place. One of our trip highlights so far.

Later that morning we drove to Mt Gambier, stopping for lunch at the Umpherston sinkhole, created by the erosion of a huge limestone cave, which was turned into an amazing garden by the estate owner in the 19th century (the photos will show it better than I can describe it!). From here, it is a short distance to the Coonawarra wine growing region, nicknamed the Other Red Centre, and well known for producing lovely full-bodied reds. We just had detour through there, checking out Wynns and a couple of other vineyards on the way. Found a national park campsite down a badly corrugated road near Robe that night and it bucketed down just as we set up camp. Next day was wet and cold, so we didn’t linger in Robe, headed up through the Coorong (kind of a very long row of sand hills forming a narrow peninsula between the ocean and the fresh-water channel from the mouth of the Murray river). Camped in the Coorong National Park - another wet night - and woke to a cold day. At this point, we had run out of water and our caravan batteries were running down, so we decided to head for Adelaide!

Coming into Adelaide was a real surprise, such a lovely drive in from the south through the Adelaide Hills and lots of lovely small villages and towns with beautiful stone buildings and old stone cottages. The autumn colours were full on, especially the towns with lots of old English trees. Checked into Brownhill Creek caravan park, which is set amongst gum trees and old English trees in a gully at the base of the Adelaide Hills, only 20 minutes from the city centre but felt like it was out in the country! (we even had a koala in the tree next to our caravan one night). We decided we were going to like Adelaide very much!

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Photos

Lydiard Street, Ballarat
elegant buildings are one of the best legacies of the wealth from the gold rush in Ballarat

Ansett Museum in Hamilton
where it all started

Macs Hotel, Portland
a lovely old hotel (and we liked the name too)

another view of Portland Bay at sunrise....
you may have gathered by now that I like taking pictures of sunrises and sunsets!

Blue Lake Mt Gambier
which turns from blue to grey in the winter months no one really knows why...

Umpherston Sinkhole, Mt Gambier
hard to capture on camera

the Coorong
from Parnka Point, Coorong National Park

The Southern Ocean
on the ocean side of the Coorong