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Published: April 3rd 2009
Daylesford
Lake Daylesford is truly a beautiful spotOn the February weekend of the Black Saturday bush fires we left central Victoria for a trip back home. We’d congratulated ourselves for surviving 44.6 degrees and howling hot winds in Ballarat on the day that the mercury hit an all time record of 46 degrees in Melbourne. It was only watching TV news at Melbourne airport and coverage back home that we realised the extent of the disaster, claiming nearly 200 lives and destroying whole towns.
For the three weeks we were away, fires threatened several places we had stayed at. One - Daylesford - was where we had planned to leave the caravan, but I’d felt uneasy about its beautiful situation bordering onto a National Park, surrounded by mature bone dry eucalypt forest, when extreme fire risk had been declared.
Ballarat, a city of 90,000, didn’t have the high country charm of Daylesford, but it also didn’t have much vegetation left after their prolonged drought. We’d enjoyed historic walks round it’s beautiful gold boom era buildings, spent a day at Sovereign Hill, the excellent recreation of gold rush Ballarat (including panning some slivers of gold from the stream running through the original site of the first gold
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with a lovely walk all the way round mines) and walked around the sad dry remains of Lake Wendouree, famous for being the venue for the 1956 Olympic Games rowing course but now a dry expanse of reeds and weeds.
Ballarat is a very nice place, more genteel and historic than its gold rush rival Bendigo, but we couldn’t help feeling slightly depressed every time we walked past Lake Wendouree (roughly translated from the local Aboriginal dialect as meaning “bugger off” - what was said to the first white visitors when they inquired the name of the place.) At this time it was a swamp, but a very productive one, providing indigenous locals with a variety of food in the way of plants, fish and birds.
In their infinite wisdom the early settlers drained and dredged it for their pleasure, with paddle steamers, row boats, walkways and trams along its shores etc making it a very picture of Victorian Anglophilia. But lack of a natural source and any decent rainfall in the last decade has resulted in Lake Wendouree regressing to an even worse state than a swamp. It is so dry they have to mow it to lessen the fire risk. Rows of boat sheds
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and very shady when the mercury goes over 40 C. hang listlessly over the edge of...grass.
Ballaratites still use it furiously, jogging, biking or walking its 6km circumference at any time of the day. They have “lake-side” concerts, festivals, people sip coffee or wine looking out over the grassy depression to the other side of Ballarat.
The Begonia Festival was on while we were there, in the Botanical Gardens between the camping ground and the “lake”. Hundreds of begonias were crammed into a large and impressive glass house - the only way they can get any flowers to survive. Large beds of brown dirt, previously flower beds before water restrictions prevented any watering, were filled with large core-flute flower shapes painted by school children and stuck on sticks into the dirt. A nice touch, but it somehow made their predicament even more depressing.
We’d ‘done’ Ballarat but decided we’d have more peace of mind leaving the van in a safe city site than risk it melting in a bush fire. So we returned from NZ three weeks later to the same place, but a different season - it was 11 degrees, gloomy and showery.
However I was looking forward to our next bit of travel -
"Lake" Wendouree
I see no ships...I see no lake!! The Great Ocean Road. We’d driven most of this 400km stretch of Victorian coastline a couple of years ago, as many travellers do - in one day from Melbourne to Port Fairy. We knew then it was a travel crime and since we hadn’t been anywhere near the Australian coastline since we picked up the van, we planned to give it several weeks to do the scenery justice.
Everyone knows about The 12 Apostles, (Australians are obsessed by promoting their rocks in any shape or form) but there are lovely little towns dotted along the GOR and we wanted to get to know them. This is tricky at first as they all start with either P or A.
Port Fairy is a beautiful historic fishing village at the western end of the GOR where we’d stayed on our first trip. It has one of Australia’s biggest folk festivals in March and I’d tried to get tickets and accommodation, but no camping ground within 50km had a site Rhys was willing to put up with while I gallivanted off to the festival.
Our timing meant we’d be there the week after the festival, so rather than see tantalising
A dry warning
no risk of drowning here remnants of a fabulous event, I chose to avoid it altogether and start further east. I’ll get to that festival one day.
Peterborough was one of the ‘P’s we didn’t remember from the first trip and the caravan park, nestled beside an inlet, sounded great, so we started there.
I picked a route south from Ballarat that, on the map, passed between two lakes. It was a spooky experience to travel a causeway that was now a narrow road between two deserts, with grey dust blowing across the road and banking up on the wire fences like an American dust bowl town. At least Lake Wendouree had grass in it.
Down off the high country at the coast, the wind was blowing even harder. Peterborough is a small weekend fishing village, a links golf course, two idiosyncratic general stores and a pub.
We walked the un-signposted Bay of Islands National Park walk in between showers of rain, I walked the scary beach with eroding cliffs and pounding waves, we did London Arch - the rock feature which used to be London Bridge till a few years ago when the arch connecting it to the mainland collapsed, marooning a
Boat sheds on Lake Wendouree
Notice they have to MOW the lake... couple which legend has it were exposed as being illicitly together upon their rescue by helicopter.
We were hanging out for fish for tea but the park manager couldn’t recommend either the pub or the takeaway. So our next stop was a huge 12km trip to Port Campbell, a slightly larger and more touristy fishing village. Again we were right by the sea - behind the surf club, although this offered little protection from the southerlies which were blustering in straight from Antarctica.
Port Campbell is a definite must to stay at while doing the Gt Ocean Rd as it’s the nearest accommodation to The Twelve Apostles and Loch Ard Gorge. We’d stopped at both of these previously, but only for the “photo shoot” - drive up, race up to the lookout, click, back into the car for the next one.
There are thousands of tourists from all over the world pouring along the Gt Ocean Rd every day doing exactly this to get their special ‘iconic’ Aussie photo, which will look like everyone else’s. Mine do too I know, but you can’t escape the windswept romanticism and power of the Southern Ocean gradually beating the coastline
Ballarat
chock full of gorgeous Victorian gold rush boom era buildings into submission - there was one less Apostle for me to photograph this time round!
It’s better to have time to wander around, do the walks, read the signs, linger on beaches and soak up the history and atmosphere of the tragic ship wrecks. If you’re planning a trip along The Gt Ocean Rd (and you should at once!) we recommend taking 3-4 weeks, especially if you’re going as far as Port Fairy.
Princetown is also close and it’s worth a stop if you’re keen to do The Great Ocean Walk as it starts, or more correctly finishes here - you are expected to do the 100km walk from east to west, although there are several places with easy access for shorter walks. I did the first section from Apollo Bay then dragged Rhys on the next section, which went through the van park where we were staying so he didn’t have much option. It didn’t really increase his enthusiasm for coastal walks as we got caught by the tide and had to scramble over rocks because the signage only goes east to west!
Apollo Bay is the first of the ‘A’s on the Melbourne side of
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this is the old Post Office the pointy bit of Cape Otway. It’s absolutely gorgeous with a long beach and busy fishing harbour where you can buy the day’s catch, which we did twice - blue grenadier, yum yum.
We stayed at the Marengo caravan park RIGHT on the beach and opposite a reef which is a seal colony. East of Cape Otway the weather improved, but the sound of the surf at night was so loud it would wake us up crashing on the rocks at high tide!
From here we did the Otway Fly, a tree-top walk in the Otway National Park with a 47metre high tower to take you up to the level where the gum trees sway wildly in the wind. Those koalas must have great balance to hang on up there. Rhys’ scepticism about ‘things you have to pay for’ was unfounded - definitely worth it as well as being a little scary on the cantilever walk - well for me anyway.
Our next stop was Anglesea, more a local holiday place than a tourist mecca, but the caravan park again had the best spot in town, bordering the beach and river mouth. The Surf Coast cliff top
buildings in Ballarat...
...honour both English and Chinese gold heritage walk began at the park and I did several treks along the crumbling cliff faces - you can see where the old tracks just disappear, with bits of retaining fence hanging off the edge. The whole coastline is being eroded at about 2cm a year on average, with the relentless crashing of the Southern Ocean.
We did day trips to Airey’s Inlet and Lorne, which likes to be different by starting with ‘L’ and being so trendy it’s like a little bit of Melbourne transported to the most scenic bit of the Gt Ocean Rd. And another fish wholesaler on the wharf - joy!
Now I’m ensconced at Barwon Heads, on The Bellarine - the peninsular which juts into Port Phillip Bay east of Geelong. We needed a place which was easy for Rhys to get to Melbourne Airport (he’s back in NZ doing a job which will earn us more petrol money in four days than four weeks of cleaning dunnies in caravan parks) and nice for me to stay at while he’s away.
I don’t want to sound like I’ve got the better part of the deal - I mean - someone has to stay
Sovereign Hill
The Ballarat of the 1850's is recreated in an impressively authentic way - you can walk around the miners shanties here and look after the caravan and make sure the ants don’t carry it away. But I’m writing this looking out to Bass Straight on my right and the lovely Barwon Estuary to my left. If any of you remember a whimsical Australian soap/drama that screened in the late 90’s called Seachange, it was filmed here.
Barwon Heads played Pearl Bay and Sigrid Thornton’s character Laura lived in one of the cabins in the caravan park (I’m sure they blue screened out the caravans). I have exactly the same view as the rather exclusive waterfront cabins that cost 10 times as much per night.
Although we took our time, three weeks on the Great Ocean Road just whizzed by and I’d love to spend another three just here watching the tides and the tame dolphin in the estuary. But it’s a popular part of the country and there’s not a spare site in any camping ground over Easter.
Besides we have to make our way to Rutherglen for our job as locum camp managers, so it’s back to the banks of beautiful Lake Wendouree, swampy jewel in the crown of Goldfields country. Strangely there are lots of
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the sights, sounds and smells of pioneer times vacancies over Easter at the Ballarat caravan park.
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Donna Lewin
non-member comment
Awesome
Great photography you two......and the narrative isn't too bad either ( just kidding) wonderful text, lots of detail and history in your travel blog. You should be getting paid for this stuff. All the best for your travels in 2009.