They Shortened the World's Longest Bar?

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We wake to the sound of raindrops. Mildura's technically in the desert, so this wasn't part of the plan.

We drive along the riverbank past the same palatial houseboats that we saw in the half light last night, including one called "Mungo Creek Rehab". I suppose if you needed rehab of some sort there'd be plenty of worse places to do it. We stop for lunch at a cafe at the impressive and relatively new Mildura Marina, which is also lined with wall to wall houseboats.

The Marina's surrounded by mansions which look like they probably house the local well-to-dos. No expense has been spared. The two palatial manors closest to the cafe have solar panels on their rooves. That wouldn't normally be worthy of comment, but what makes these ones stand out is that they're completely enclosed in netting. I'm not sure I've ever seen this before. We can only guess that the local billionaires might be a bit wary about a large flock of pelicans suddenly deciding to take roost and interrupting the power supply to their hot tubs.

As we leave the cafe we watch on as a toddler and her mum throw chips into the water, resulting in a tug of war between a duck and a school of carp. The carp seem to be winning, which is putting a slightly alarming new slant on the concept of fish and chips.

It's still raining, so we give up on the idea of more strolling and drive downstream to Apex Park, where there's an attractive sandy beach on the riverbank. It seems that it is indeed a very serious beach, as it‘s also home to the Mildura Lifesaving Club. I'd only ever associated lifesaving clubs with pounding coastal surf, so it’s comforting to know that our brave lifesavers are also keeping a watchful eye on inland bathers. Now that I think of it, it's not at all unusual to hear news reports of swimmers drowning in our lakes and rivers.

There's also a caravan park here, with on-site cabins for rent. We see a sign warning visitors to be aware that large limbs of gum trees can suddenly come crashing down on them, even on windless days. I've never known quite what to make of warnings like these. The trees are everywhere so you can't really avoid them. You'll never know if half of one of them's going to fall on you until it already has, by which time it‘s presumably too late. The only obvious option available to deal with this risk would then seem to me to be not to come here in the first place. I hope I'm not missing something here.

We head across the river again to the New South Wales town of Wentworth, which sits at the confluence of the Murray and Darling Rivers. I leave Issy snoozing while I take a quick tour of the town's heritage listed jail and its museum. The jail was built between 1879 and 1881 and operated until it was formally decommissioned in 1928. I suspect that not a lot of good things happened here. I don't think too vivid an imagination is required to work out what the museum's "flogging stool" would have been used for. The cells are all tiny and we're told that prisoners baked in summer and froze in winter. The men's block is an order of magnitude bigger than the women's, but it seems that the architect may have underestimated the criminal tendencies of the local female population. The two tiny female cells apparently sometimes had to hold up to fourteen prisoners at a time, and it seems that the good ladies of the Salvation Army were frequent inmates. The locals apparently considered their singing in the street an affront to traditional religious practices, the penalty for which was a few days in the lockup. The museum also tells us that the jail's haunted, and that this has been proven by scientific experiments. Of course it has.

We head back across the river into Victoria, and are again disappointed that there are no border guards in place demanding to see our COVID re-entry permits. It's become very windy, which is whipping up the dust and making visibility a bit limited. We narrowly avoid missing a turn and ploughing headlong into a row of grapevines. It's also turned very icy. We came north partly to get at least slightly warmer. Issy was hoping for tropical heat, but I think the most we could have expected was a couple of extra degrees during the day, but offset by much colder nights. That's pretty much what we've got. My beloved's not looking overly happy.

We head into Mildura's famous Grand Hotel in search of a meal, but all of its eateries seem to be closed. The Hotel's infamy has come about as a result of its Workingman's Club being the one time home of the world's longest bar. It seems however that this is no longer the case; it was apparently shortened during renovations in the 1990s. Huh? Where was the public outrage when this happened? I thought Oz was the land of beer; surely they should have heritage listed such an icon, and hung, drawn and quartered any tradesmen who dared lay a finger on it. A couple of Melbourne's modern eyesore concrete bridges have recently been heritage listed, so I'm not at all sure how something as notable as the world's lengthiest drinking surface somehow managed to slip under the radar. Hmmm.....

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