From Gembrook to Forbes

On day one of our recent holiday Lib and I rose about 6am and did some final chores and packing and drove off about 8 o'clock. We fuelled up at Yarra Glen and bought a coffee to go. I talked about our family history as we went through Dixon's Creek, explaining to Lib how Lyle and Elvie spent their first year or two of marriage on a few hundred acres there. And of their neighbours the Hargreaves who were to be lifelong friends. Lib found it interesting and let me rave.

Eildon weir was nearly full. I told Lib about my introduction to fishing by George Edwards, Bill's father. My first catch was a brown trout in the Goulburn river where we camped overnight with one of George's WW11 army mates and his son. Shortly after that again with the Edwards, I spent several days at Christmas camping at Bonnie Doon. Billy and I caught 52 redfin in an hour. It was 1967 probably, I can't be sure. Bill and I were supposed to be giving up smoking, but we sneaked a few km along the railway line and bought some fags. When we caught the fish we rowed across the lake to have a smoke on the sly but put our rods in and bang it was on, fish after fish.

After Swanpool we saw the result of a small mini tornado that had ripped through some months earlier. A strip of trees had been broken apart, some knocked over, others with limbs missing, and others sort of sheared of halfway up. It was a peculiar sight.

We went into Benalla which we had not done for many years, since the freeway bypassed. When I lived in Wang you had to go into Benalla to pick up the Hume unless you you turned off at Swanpool and went the back way through Mollyullah and Greta, which takes longer. Benalla looked great. We went up the old Hume a little way and took the Yarrawonga Rd. We cut across on a minor road from Lake Rowan to pick up what looked like a more direct route to Echuca but we must have taken a wrong turn and soon we were having quite a time driving along narrowing dirt roads, with a dead end twice, through wheat and canola crops.

We eventually found some bitumen. We burst out laughing when we saw an election poster on a tree with Sophie Mirabella's face beaming. It was just the funniest thing, given that she got the arse from Indi, losing the unloseable safe national seat. She was a regular on Q+A and Gord can't stand her. I should have climbed the tree and taken the poster as a souvenir for him.

We lunched on salad rolls and water on the grass bank above the town beach at Corowa on the Murray. I could see I was going to be on a health food diet for the duration of this holiday. Lib said we both needed to lose weight. I was fine about it, I like healthy food.

At Tocumwal we again saw the aftermath of another mini tornado, this one more recent and perhaps even stronger. I'd hate to be in the path of one of those things. It reminded me that I saw a TV program about the Canberra bushfires of a few years ago. Apparently it was a mini tornado that blew that fire into Canberra from where it was burning but not threatening much. Very scary when you think about it.

As we went north through the Riverina it was a delight to see the various crops including rice plantings and the expansive dry land crops being harvested and paddocks dotted with hundreds of big bales of hay. The further north we got the drier it became. It was soon full on drought but the countryside was interesting, many old homesteads deserted over the decades when prosperous years enabled new houses perhaps, or maybe abandoned in droughts as people sold up to neighbours and farms got bigger to have a better chance. I'd like to study the history of  central NSW. I loved the towns with their big old pubs by the railway stations.

We settled on Forbes as our first stop for the night, in a motel, and went out for a Chinese meal. The town was very quiet we thought for a Friday evening. I guess a lot of farmers were busy harvesting.

West Wyalong

  

Forbes