Journeys Farther Afield (Cont'd):

Victoria and other Points South: Victoria, the smallest state on the Australian mainland, is just below New South Wales on the continent's southern tip. It includes Melbourne, the country's second largest city, and it also possesses some of Australia's most beautiful and dramatic coastline. Because, unlike New Zealand and the Red Centre, it's fairly close to where we'd been living, we decided to drive. And because we wanted to experience Australia in a somewhat different way, and because we were eager to save some money, we decided to camp for several nights. So just after New Year's, our little white station wagon packed full with suitcases, a tent, a big cooler ("eskies" they call them there, for "eskimos"), sleeping bags and pads, cooking gear, a camp stove, a liquid propane tank, a good deal of camera equipment, and field guides to Australian birds, mammals, reptiles, butterflies, and sea creatures, we set out from our home in Wollongong and headed south. The car was so stuffed, in fact, that we were only able to leave a tiny square of space on the driver's side so that whichever one of us was driving could see out the rear window.

We started our holiday in the town of Healesville in the Yarra Valley just north and east of Melbourne. The Yarra Valley is best known as one of the leading wine producing regions in Australia -- and that was certainly one reason why we wanted to visit -- but it's also a lovely area of rolling farmland and forested hills. During our two nights in Healesville we stayed at a beautiful bed and breakfast. We had a small, old farmhouse to ourselves. The back deck overlooked a pasture and each night we were treated to marvelous sunsets. We spent a day exploring the Healesville area. In the morning we went to the Healesville Sanctuary, a wildlife park that specializes in native Australian species. All the favorites were there -- kangaroos, koalas, platypuses, wombats, wallabies, and echidnas. There were aviaries populated with varies species of Aussie birds and a reptile house filled with several of the country's thirty species of venomous snakes. We also visited a couple of wineries to taste some of the Yarra Valley's excellent Shirazs. It needs to be said here that our daughters were remarkably patient with us during the course of the afternoon, allowing us to sample some wines at a leisurely pace. We're also grateful to our seven year-old for driving us back to the B&B....

(Below: A street scene recreated in the Sovereign Hill historic park near Ballarat)

From Healesville, we drove west, to the town of Ballarat. Ballarat itself is an old gold mining town -- gold was discovered in the area in 1851 and the mines continued to produce great wealth through the end of World War II. Sovereign Hill, just outside the city, is a living history museum, a recreation of a mid-nineteenth century gold town, complete with actors portraying the townspeople. Some of them had learned (or already knew) trades like blacksmithing and brassworking. Others gave demonstrations on the firing of nineteenth century muskets and the use of old mining equipment. We took a tour of a recreated underground mine and saw a wonderfully entertaining show at the town's "Victoria Hotel." We had expected Sovereign Hill to be a tourist trap, a place the kids would enjoy but that we would find a bit cheesy. Instead, we were all entralled. And, perhaps more to the point, we all found the town and what we saw there enlighting and fascinating. We spent a total of eight hours at Sovereign Hill -- one full afternoon and most of the following morning -- and though we felt when we left that we had seen all of what there was to see, we never once were bored or at a loss as to what to do next.

While in Ballarat, we also visited the site of the 1854 Eureka Uprising, an armed conflict between the goldminers of Ballarat and government soldiers that led to the killing -- some say "massacre" -- of thirty miners. The miners were protesting government-imposed license fees, corruption and brutality among the mining police, and their own political disenfranchisement. Without any representation in parliament or even the right to vote, the miners complained that they should not be subject to government fees. And while their protest was broken at a dear cost in lives and blood, they ultimately prevailed, winning the abolition of the license fee and securing for themselves the right to vote. One of the rebellion leaders was eventually elected to Parliament, and to this day the Eureka Rebellion is considered a milestone in the development of Australian democracy.

Our next stop was Melbourne, which, while easy to find (it's a pretty big city) was somewhat less simple to navigate. We had a bit of trouble finding our hotel that first afternoon, circling it several times and managing to break a few traffic laws along the way (including, but not limited to, driving the wrong way down a one way street). But we got there eventually and then went for a walk, hoping to see a bit of the city in the last few hours of daylight. We got even more than we bargained for, in a good way. We stopped in at a store to look at some jewelry and in the course of speaking with the store clerk, told her about our travels through Australia. She, in turn, started to tell us a bit about herself and her family. It turned out that her son is married to a woman named Fiona Burnett, one of the most famous young jazz musicians in the country. It also turned out that Fiona Burnett was going to be playing in Federation Square at a free live event that was to begin about fifteen minutes from then (it was just before closing time). And this woman, who we'd known for all of a half an hour, took us over to the square for the concert and then introduced us to her daughter-in-law after the set. What an amazing treat! After the music, we walked back toward our hotel, which was located right on the edge of Chinatown. Needless to say, we ate well every night we were there.

The next morning we visited Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market, an enormous outdoor market where people sell produce, meats, fish, and all sorts of other foods, as well as crafts, clothing, toys, and just about anything else you can imagine. There was so much to look at, a lot of it junk, some of it quite nice, all of it very entertaining. After having lunch at the market, we went to Science Works, a kids science museum with some wonderful hands-on exhibits. It also has a planetarium, where we saw a terrific presentation on the search for life in other parts of the galaxy. The girls had a great time, and we did, too.

On our second full day in Melbourne, we went to the city's zoo, which is generally considered the finest zoo in the country. We spent a good part of the day there, seeing pretty much everything there was to see. After the zoo, we went to see a different set of cages -- the old Melbourne Gaol, a brooding, somber, but fascinating place, where Australian folk hero Ned Kelly was executed. Kelly was an outlaw who, while guilty of both murder and robbery, also managed to gain hero status for defying the law and, in the minds of some, targeting the wealthy and powerful with his crimes while showing regard for the common men and women of the land. Like John Brown in the United States, Kelly faced his execution with courage and eloquence, thus further enhancing his standing in the public mind. His last words, "Such is life," remain one of the most famous quotes in Australian lore. The gaol was quite interesting, in a dark way. Over one hundred of its inhabitants were hanged on the premises and a death mask -- a ceramic casting of the head -- was created for each one. The prison offers night tours which are supposed to be pretty scary. We would have liked to go, but they didn't admit children under the age of twelve.

From Melbourne, we made our way to Australia's Great Ocean Road, which runs some two hundred and forty kilometers along the southern coast of Victoria. The road twists and turns constantly, and at times it's disconcertingly narrow, but it's always dramatic and beautiful. For long stretches it hugs the coastline, following every contour of the rocky shore. At other times it cuts inland, curving through towering rainforests and rolling farmland. For those of you who have driven the Pacific Coast highway through California's Big Sur or along the Oregon coast, that's what this is like. It would be hard to say that anything is more beautiful than Highway One along the West Coast of the U.S., but certainly the Great Ocean Road doesn't suffer for the comparison.

(Below: The London Bridge formation -- at least what's left of it -- in Port Campbell National Park.)

Port Campbell National Park, in many ways the biggest attraction along the Ocean Road, is a sprawling complex of beaches, rock formations, and coastal scrub that stretches some fifty kilometers along the coast. It borders Otway National Park near the southern tip of the continent and, in fact, it's hard to tell exactly where one park ends and the other begins. The Great Ocean Road runs through both parks and all along the coast there are scenic stops where one can get out of the car, hike a short distance and look out over the churning waters of the Southern Sea. Our first afternoon there, we went to two such stops, which were named for the rock formations. One was called London Bridge, because it once resembled the double arches of that famous landmark. A few years ago, one of the arches, the one closer in to shore, collapsed, leaving two tourists trapped atop the other arch. They were eventually rescued by helicopter. Even without its twin, the remaining archway at London Bridge was beautiful. The sandstone along the southern coast was a rich golden orange, and the water was a stunning shade of aqua. Later than day we returned to London Bridge, hoping that the sun might break through the clouds for sunset. It didn't. But while we were there, we spotted a colony of Little Penguins, the world's smallest penguin and the only one that breeds on the Australian mainland.

The following day, we headed east from our campground into the heart of Port Campbell National Park. It was cloudy still, though we could see blue sky near the horizon. We stopped first at the Loch Ard Gorge section of the park, a tract of coastal wilderness laced with a network of intersecting trails that led to several spectacular viewpoints. Loch Ard Gorge itself had a particularly interesting history. It was the site of an 1878 shipwreck of a vessel called the Loch Ard. Fifty three people were killed. The only survivors were an Irish woman named Eva Carmichael, who saved herself by clinging to a piece of the ship, and a young British ship's officer named Tom Pearce, who eventually helped her to shore. Both were eighteen years old, and when their story reached Great Britain, the press tried to turn their shared plight into a romance. It didn't take. Eventually Eva returned to Ireland and their paths never crossed again. There's a book there, I think, but I'd have to change the ending.

(Below: The Twelve Apostles in Port Campbell National Park. Note the pile of rubble just to the left of the monolith in the foreground. That was once an apostle.)

From Loch Ard Gorge we continued east to the Twelve Apostles, the most famous rock formation on the Great Ocean Road, and one of the best known tourist attractions in all of Australia. The Apostles are a collection of twelve sandstone monoliths standing near to the shore where they are battered endlessly by the surf. Standing at the various lookouts, you can see only some of the Apostles, and now there are even fewer to see. Less than a year ago one of the Apostles collapsed, leaving a pile of rubble that's still plainly visible from the viewpoints. Along with the collapse of half of London Bridge, the crumbling of the Apostle is a reminder that this coastline is constantly changing, recreating itself, weakening under the constant onslaught of waves and wind and storms. It's only a matter of time before all of the Apostles are gone. And yet the erosion of the cliffs that created the monoliths in the first place continues as well. So in a sense, the same process that is destroying these Apostles and washing away the arches and spans of stone, is creating new formations. It's strange, and even humbling, to think of a rocky coastline as being so dynamic; it forces a person to conceive of time on a different scale, one that makes a year away from home, or an impending birthday, or even a lifetime, seem pretty insignificant. In a way, that pile of broken rock, while perhaps detracting from the beauty of the view, gave us a truer sense of the power of the place.

On this night we watched the sunset from the 12 Apostles. It was beautiful, and while we were there, we spotted yet another penguin colony. This time, after the sun had set, we saw the penguins returning from the sea to feed their young. Flocks of twenty or thirty birds at a time would emerge from surf and gather in tight clusters on the beach before marching up into the dunes to their nests. In all we must have seen two hundred penguins. Very cool.

(Below: A young, wild koala in Otway National Park. My daughters named him Adorable, and you can see why.)

Our next stop was Otway National Park which includes some beautiful beaches, and, most notably, the Cape Otway Lighthouse. The southern Victorian coast was known as one of the most dangerous stretches of the entire Australian shoreline. Unpredictable weather, offshore reefs, and unforgiving terrain all contributed to more than eighty shipwrecks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Cape Otway Lighthouse was operational until the early nineteen nineties, when it was replaced by a two meter high, solar-powered, computer-operated beacon that stands just beside the old lighthouse. It's not as romantic or as scenic, but it does save a good deal on power and no one has to maintain the light twenty-four, seven. Our campground in Otway was called Bimbi Park, but we called it "Koalatopia." It was forested and pretty, and there were koalas everywhere. These were the first wild koalas we'd seen in Australia, and they were just as cute as we had hoped they would be. Koalas sleep twenty to twenty-two hours out of every day, waking just long enough to eat a few eucalyptus leaves, or, if they're feeling particularly ambitious, to climb a meter or two higher in their tree. Occasionally one might actually climb down to the ground, walk to another tree, and climb that one. Of course, after such exertion the poor creature would need a little nap. The funniest thing about koalas, though, is the sound they make. Looking at them you might expect them to make some cute little noise -- a squeak or a mewing sound; maybe a whistle or a purr. But no. Koalas make this incredibly loud noise that is part growl, part belch. It sounds more like a gastrically distressed camel than it does like a cuddly, furry little bear. And they make this noise all the time, even, it seems, while they're sleeping.

Our last stop of this road trip was Canberra, the national capital. We only had a day and half there, but we managed to see quite a bit. One of the hightlights was the beautiful new Parliament Building with its thoughtful, intelligent architecture and indigenous artwork. The Parliament House also possesses one of only four existing copies of the 1297 Magna Carta. After leaving Parliament, we spent a good deal of time at the National Museum of Australia, a fascinating collection of memorabilia, art, and media. The museum seeks to define what it means to be Australian through interactive and creative displays. It's almost impossible to describe the place without going on for hours about each exhibit. It kind of has the feel of going through the attic of a beloved old relative and discovering tidbits about the family that you never guessed at before, except that it does this on a national scale. We found it interesting, educational, and entertaining. Had we been Australian, we probably would have understood far more of what we saw, and we might have appreciated it at a deeper level.

Tasmania:

Tasmania is the smallest of the Australian states. It's also the southernmost of the states, which, in the Southern Hemisphere, means that it's the coldest. And it's an island, separated from the Australian mainland by the icy, rough waters of Bass Strait, and surrounded by the Tasman Sea and the Southern Ocean. Located between the fortieth and fiftieth latitudinal lines, the island is subject to the high winds and stormy weather of the "Roarin' Forties," particularly during the Southern Hemisphere's winter months. Frequent rains, raw temperatures, constant gales -- it's no wonder this was the place where Australia's worst convicts, the ones who were too unsavory for life on the mainland (which, of course, began as a penal colony), were sent to be punished. Originally it was known as Van Dieman's Land, and according to histories of Australia, it was the most feared penal colony in the entire British Empire. It was also the site of the most shameful episodes in Australia's dark history of Aboriginal relations -- within less than a century of European settlement of the island, Tasmania's entire Aboriginal population had either been killed or forcibly relocated off their ancestral lands. In 1856, transportation of prisoners to Van Dieman's Land was ended and the island was renamed Tamania after Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer who first discovered the island two hundred years earlier.

The state's capital city, Hobart, is located on the island's southeastern shore, and this is where we began our holiday. We planned our trip for a Friday night arrival so that we could go to the famous (well, famous in Australia) Salamanca Market, a huge open air market in the city's historic Battery Point waterfront area. Salamanca Place is lined by old (1830s) warehouse buildings that have been restored and converted into shops, galleries, and restaurants. Every Saturday, hundreds of craftspeople and retailers set up tents on the street and sell their wares. Clothes, souvenirs, woodcarving, gemstones, photography, art, toys, candies, fresh-baked breads and pastries, gourmet foods, even wines and mead -- we found it all during our day at the Market. And while we didn't buy everything we saw, it wasn't for lack of trying....

(Below: Some of the ruins of the Port Arthur prison. That's the facade of the old hospital in the center of the photo and the side of the penitentiary to the left. In between in the distance, the orange-ish building is an old residence.)

From Hobart we made our way to the Port Arthur Historic Site on the Tasman Peninsula. Port Arthur was the site of one of the most infamous of Australia's many prisons, and the prison was abandoned in shame and embarrassment after it was closed, its buildings abandoned to the ravages of the climate and the depredations of looters. By the time those in power finally realized the historical value of the site, many of the structures were barely standing and in ruins. Still, enough remained for a fine historical park, and in fact, the sometimes shattered skeletons of these old buildings have a ghostly look that actually enhances the mystique of the place. We spent over five hours there, taking a walking tour of the grounds, exploring many of the old buildings and ruins on our own, and also taking a brief boat cruise on the harbor that included a close pass by the Isle of the Dead, where many of the prison's staff and convicts were buried, the latter in unmarked graves. The site was set up to be kid-friendly, despite its dark history and the sometimes disturbing tales that we encountered during our tour and as we explored on our own. For instance, upon entering the site, each of us was given a playing card (literally -- I got the king of hearts) and using our card in the visitor center display area, each of us was able to follow the story of a single convict from the time of his arrival (and yes, the vast majority of them were male) to the time of his departure or death. The kids' cards directed them to children. Children as young as nine years-old could be transported to the penal colony, though most who were sent were at least twelve. My convict had a particularly strange story. His name was William Moore and he was accused of stealing two pence worth of tobacco. He was acquitted. That's right, acquitted, cleared of all charges. But the authorities thought him a man of unsavory character, so they sent him to Port Arthur anyway!

The Port Arthur prison, which operated from 1830 to 1877, was a place rife with contraditions. On the one hand it was surprisingly progressive. All the men who served there were taught a trade, so that if ever they left the prison and returned to Australian society, they could be productive members of the community. The children who served time there were also taught a trade and they were kept in a facility separate from the adult convicts (Point Peur), making Port Arthur one of the first prisons in the world to separate minors from adults. On the other hand, the place was absolutely brutal to those who would not conform to the rules. Prisoners were routinely punished by being placed in lightless, solitary cells for as long as two weeks at a time. So many of them went insane that a lunatic asylum had to be built on the grounds. Port Arthur was chosen as the location for the prison because it was so inaccessible and, thus, so immune to successful escapes. The small peninsula on which it was placed was connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land, only 100 meters wide, called Eaglehawk Neck. Vicious guard dogs were chained to posts on the isthmus in a line (called, appropriately enough, the dog-line), their chains kept just long enough so that animals adjacent to one another could eat from the same bowl, but could not tear each other apart. And just in case the frigid water temperatures weren't enough to keep prisoners from trying to swim to freedom, the guards circulated rumors that the waters around the isthmus were infested with sharks.

From Port Arthur, we drove north up Tasmania's east coast to Freycinet National Park. Freycinet is located on a small peninsula, and it includes some of the most dramatic and beautiful scenery on Tassie's eastern shore. The most famous spot in the park is a bowl shaped inlet called Wineglass Bay, which is included each year in Outside magazine's survey of the world's ten most beautiful beaches. Our first evening in the park, we took a couple of short hikes at various places along the eastern shore, including one at the Cape Tourville Lighthouse, where we were treated to some gorgeous lighting as low clouds moved over the rocky shoreline and a few rain squalls passed by. The next morning, we hiked to Wineglass Bay, across the peninsula to Hazards Beach (named for the four 300 meter high granite cliffs that dominate the coastline here), and back to the trailhead. It was a beautiful walk, though the day began with a bit of rain, which made our views of Wineglass Bay from the top of the trail a bit less spectacular than they might have been.

(Below: Sunset reflected in the still waters of Lake Saint Clair.)

We left Freycinet the following morning and drove west into the central part of the island to Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park. We visited the southern portion of the park -- the Lake Saint Clair portion, as it were. We saw some beautiful mountain scenery and, on the morning after our arrival, we took a boat ride north along the lake, were dropped off at a spot called Narcissus Bay, and then hiked seven kilometers back to another boat dock where we were picked up and returned to the southern end of the park. It was a very cold morning and, at first, overcast and foggy. In fact, the boat captain had to navigate back and forth along the north shore of the lake for several minutes until he finally spotted the entrance to the bay. The fog afforded us some lovely and strange vistas across the lake, and after it finally lifted, leaving us with a clear, cool day, we were amazed by the stillness of the lake water and the spectacular reflections of the mountains.