Flinders Island Day 3: Exploring the Island's Edges

Fotheringate Beach, with the Stzrelecki National Park in the background

Today’s main goal is to find a prehistoric shark tooth. There’s a location on the island known for these. We take the long route there.

We cover a lot of the island today.

First up is Trousers Point – an oddly named cove alongside the island’s national park in the south-west. Legend has it that the area got its name from a crate of trousers that washed up ashore from one of the many shipwrecks the island is known for. The other potentially apocryphal story is that a survivor of a different shipwreck made it to the beach sans pants.

I think this is Mount Chappell Island in the far distance

Red-necked wallabies graze along the roadside as our car winds through the bush; they dart back a few metres and watch from behind trees while we pass. As we alight from the car and explore the beach, a beautiful secluded cove in the shadow of Stzrelecki National Park’s towering granite mountain, Green Rosellas chirrup over our heads. We follow a bushwalk to the other side of the point, sandy paths of faded pink sand surrounded by windswept beach shrubbery – a gentle slope that overlooks rocky outcrops in the sea, a nice photo opportunity interrupted by occasional tiny clouds of sea spray that float down around us.

After this we head to Cameron Inlet on the eastern side of the island. The biodiversity on Flinders Island is incredibly diverse for such a relatively small place – so much of the island is filled with completely different environments. We drive along salt-encrusted sand roads surrounded by lagoons and black cockatoos sighted for the first time since we got here. This area is also filled with Australian Shelducks, goose-like relatives of ducks with sunburst-orange necks. Eventually, after wondering how far this remote drive will take us, we arrive at a small clearing and pick out path through to the inlet’s beach.

Cameron Inlet

More than anywhere else, this feels like another planet. The grey sand whips around us in tendrils of mist as fearsome winds sweep across the sea and roar in our ears. Bobo is armed with earphones today to cut down on the overwhelm and he helps as we begin our search. The lagoon is vast enough for us not to see the other side and so it looks just like the sea. The sand is riddled with shells and prehistoric remnants that have been carried up to the beach from millions of years ago. It’s renowned for shark teeth – obsidian-like artefacts from Megalodons. We search for as long as we can manage in the freakish weather and Nicole finds something long and tooth-like with a strange texture and weight. Is it a shark tooth? We’re not sure.

Next stop is Lady Barren where we take in a nice lunch at the Furneaux Tavern, a lively pub that overlooks the collection of islands to the south – Little Green Island, Dog Island, Vansitartt Island, and in the distance, the large mass of Cape Barren Island. Cape Barren Island is the only other island in the Furneaux Group (aside from Flinders) that has a permanent human population; something like 90 or so people, an Aboriginal community who care for this island and the more remote Clarke Island underneath it.

The bar room inside is filled with locals who seemed to have been bussed in by two vans for a quick lunchtime swill. They’re all gone by the time we finish lunch in the bistro area and I take Bobo into the main area to see a pilot whale skeleton suspended above the bar, a cigar glued between its teeth. The bartender tells me it’s a Flinders Island Flathead but then admits that’s just what they like to tell visitors – about 35 years ago a pod of these whales became beached in the area. Nicole shows this bartender, Maxy, her treasure from Cameron Inlet. Maxy suggests it’s most likely a prehistoric whale bone. It’s definitely something fossilised.

The Furneaux Museum at Emita. Only open from January to May.

The last part of our day is spent back on the eastern side of the island. We navigate our way through the coastal settlement of Emita, briefly visit Allports Beach, and set down at the neighbouring area of Wybalenna. I hop out of the car and walk several hundred metres to the chapel – a building nearly 200 years old and a remnant of the island’s dark history.

As I approach this chapel, I notice hundreds of bones dotted alongside the road in the short grass, all bleached white by the cold Bass sun and the island’s relentless winds. I see a skull and later spot a long hind leg – Wallaby remains; a traditional food.

Wybalenna is a place I’ve read about, and written about. At the end of the Black War, when Tasmania’s colonists finished their conflict with the Aboriginal Tasmanians in the 1830s, a line of convicts, settlers, and soldiers joined forces and swept across Tasmania’s rugged landscape – driving the last survivors of the Aboriginal people to the edge of the isle. The Aboriginal Tasmanians were then forcibly relocated to Flinders Island and ‘settled’ at the Wybalenna Mission. Conditions were miserable, and over 100 of these survivors perished in just two years.

Wybalenna Mission Chapel

Today, the chapel and accompanying buildings stand as a testament to both Indigenous spirit and colonial cruelty. The island’s Blonde Wombats watch from nearby tussocks as we walk in reflection, darting into their burrows if we get too close.

One thing I’ve noticed among the residents in the last three days is an underlying respect for Indigenous culture and a willingness to acknowledge the atrocities of the past. Tasmania’s Aboriginal lineage is perhaps no stronger than here in Flinders Island and the other islands of the Furneaux Group.

We drive back to Whitemark, scaring a pheasant off the road at one point. The customary one-finger wave seems like a game of chicken – which car will crack and wave first? I challenge Nicole to not give the wave first but she is reluctant to seem rude to the other drivers. Some of them seem to wait to the absolute last millisecond to lift their hand in greeting as they drive past. Eventually, Nicole proudly points out that she waved second to one of the drivers.

We stop by a cluster of turkeys once again and call to them out our windows. They cluck and gobble, the patriarch’s tail spreading out in pomp.

Convenience Store at Lady Barren

I'm not sure what this thing is. I told Bobo it was a sea mango. I probably shouldn't have picked it up.

Flinders Island Day 2: Out and About

There’s a custom on the island where all drivers wave at each other. It also extends to pedestrians but seems friendlier when drivers all lift one or two fingers from their steering wheel in greeting. We make a game of it – Nicole will count down from three and then all of us will wave at the same time. We’re probably a little too enthusiastic for the even-paced laconics of the island but it’s a nice tradition; a sign of community in a bottle realm where all people could feasibly know each other.

Being without network coverage or a GPS throws us back twenty years into a world of driving with more active executive function. Signs matter. Maps matter. Taking a wrong term requires critical thinking skills and a marriage counsellor.

Thankfully it doesn’t matter too much as our plans are fluid and we have one singular goal – to see the island.

We accidentally head south instead of north and find ourselves at Lady Barren, the second largest of the island’s settlements. We walk along an empty beach, sifting for shells amongst cuttlebones the size of footballs. So many cuttlebones and all so massive.

One of the highlights of Flinders Island is the unique wildlife. Most of the human-inhabited parts of the island are quiet, idyllic farmland – filled with cows, sheep, and the occasional pony. Filtering in and out of this agricultural environment are Cape Barren Geese. These large stocky-legged native geese are the rarest geese in the world, a bird almost driven to extinction in the 1950s but a species that continues to thrive on Flinders Island and its close neighbour Cape Barren Island. They are plump-grey with fluoro-lime bills, expressively honking if confronted.

The Bass Strait Wombat, known locally as the 'Blonde Wombat'

Today is also our first sighting of the island’s Blonde Wombats, a subspecies of the Common Wombat once found throughout the Bass Strait Islands but now restricted to Flinders. It is unbearably cute, and the rolling paddocks make for a charming backdrop when dotted with these floofy, lightly-toned, plush-toy-like marsupials.

We also see many birds I’ve never seen before – Firetail Finches, New Holland Honeyeaters, Sooty Oystercatchers, Pied Oystercatchers, magnificent Caspian Terns. There are also feral peacocks and more of the large feral turkeys, which hang about in packs, their tails fanning out as they gobble aggressively in response to our turkey calls.

It’s fair to say we see far more wildlife then we do people.

A pack of feral turkeys

We travel to the northern end of the island to Killiecrankie, a place of wild and breathtaking coastlines and multiple historical shipwrecks. We visit a local, an elderly woman married to one of the descendants of the first Europeans to settle the area – a fishing family originally from South Australia. More than 100 years ago, their boat was damaged ashore and they were forced to set up home. They discovered they liked the area so much that they would remain permanently, even after their boat was repaired. Anyway – the local woman specialises in Killiecrankie Diamonds, the colloquially-named topaz that can be found along the beaches in this area. Nicole hires some pans and a small shovel and takes to some of the known areas, sifting through the bracken rockpools and finding all manner of tiny treasures, but probably no topaz.

It’s bittersweet as Bobo is a curmudgeonly mix of under- and overstimulated by this point. It rains on and off all day, and it’s an annoying rain picked up by the wind so that it hits you sideways. It’s also cold and very windy, and Bobo has to sit in the car a lot as we travel from place to place. His patience wears out and he hits tantrum-town in Killiecrankie. He’s crankie in Killiecrankie.

Eventually when he calms and after Nicole has returned the equipment to the lady and found some topaz she likes, we travel a little further north to Palana – a rural settlement at one of the island’s two northernmost tips. There’s a certain awe in looking out into the misty horizon of the Bass Strait, knowing that Australia is somewhere there in the distance. In between us and the unseen mainland are the Sisters – two smaller islands once inhabited by the farmers who eventually settled in Palana.

We return to our base at Island Quarters in Whitemark and shelter in our room away from the wind and sea spray cold.

Cape Barren Goose

With Goslings

Sea-bitten mooring from years gone by

A house in Palana

Stone hut in Killiecrankie

Flinders Island Day 1: Launceston Launchpad

The first thing you should know about going to Flinders Island is that it isn’t a direct route. This means we get up at 3am. This means Bobo is so excited that he doesn’t even wake up grumpy at this time and he doesn’t go back to sleep as we drive in to the airport. It means we fly to Launceston and then have some time to kill while we wait for the flight to the island.

We catch a taxi from Launceston airport and the taxi driver offers to take us to Cataract Gorge to give us something to do. He’s a 40 year old Indian guy with a neat beard and a black turban on. He gives us his business card so we can call him when we’re done… it’s Bobo's first time in a taxi and afterwards he confusingly keeps asking when the doctor is coming back to pick us up. It takes us a little while to realise he means the taxi driver.

Nope.

Cataract Gorge is beautiful but I was almost have a heart attack watching Bobo and Nicole float above my head on a 50 year old chairlift without seatbelts. On the other side, the Bobo is entranced by the many peacocks and starts getting amongst it, twirling around alongside one resplendent male as it puts on a show with its giant fan of feathers. Nicole starts filming, however, the Bobo gets a little too close to the bird and it shrieks and starts running at him – scaring him to tears. We later show the footage over lunch and he laughs himself silly.

We return to Launceston airport and make our way to the huge shed to the side of the airport that houses Sharp Airlines. These are chartered flights who specialise in trips back and forth to Flinders and King Islands; small planes that can fit up to about 12 people on them.

I try not to think about it.

Meanwhile, as we sit in the waiting room with the other 7 passengers, Bobo acts out the plane crashing and exploding!

It starts raining as get on the plane. The flight has been brought forward due to the unclement weather. As I stand over Bobo, frantically trying to get his seatbelt as tight as possible while the pilot politely waits for me to have us both buckled in, I sense the serious tone our fearless captain takes. He explains all the safety rules and then his co-pilot comes over to run Nicole and I through some extra rules due to our seats being adjacent to the emergency exits.

Tiny plane.

(Later, when we disembark, the pilot is suddenly relaxed and ten tims friendlier. I don’t appreciate the difference in demeanour. Was he worried at the trip’s beginning?)

As we fly into the grey fog that closes in on Launceston, I find myself nervously watching the captain a few seats ahead of us. His dials and readouts look like gibberish to me. All numbers and switches and nothing approaching a user-friendly interface. His hands grip the yoke and I’m struggling to understand what the function of the front window is – all we can see is the pure white of dense cloud. We’re kilometres above the ground, all we can hear is the fever-pitch chainsaw roar of the propellers, and we can’t see shit. How the fuck does someone steer a machine full of people through that? I just don’t understand it.

Bobo is beyond excited but towards the end of the half hour flight he falls asleep. The seatbelt is basically a sash around his waist so he starts flopping to the side, and I’m forced to reach across and hold his head up. Nothing will wake him at this point. Nicole and I take turns holding him up as the plane hits air pockets and tilts this way and that. He doesn’t even wake up when we suddenly hit the ground and miraculously land unharmed. Unbelievable.

Sharp Airlines operate out of Launceston and Melbourne. They charter flights to Flinders and King Islands in the Bass Strait.

We alight from the plane, Bobo is awake again, and the person from the car hire is there to meet us at Flinders’ tiny one-room airport. He explains that the reason we hadn’t had any confirmation from the car company is because the previous owner threw in the towel last week and that he – Norm – was now taking over. It takes a bit of going back-and-forth to figure out what we owe him and then he shows us to the car, apologising for some of its quirks – including a door where the window can’t be wound down past a certain point. He shows me where he’s had to use his island ingenuity to repair the door – rigging up a two-button system (the normal window control plus a second button randomly fixed into the side panel of the door at thigh height). He starts explaining to me how we can wind the window down without losing the glass inside the door and I stop him – it’s an incredibly cold and windy environment compared to Penrith, we are more than happy to avoid winding the window down.

Island resourcefulness

He shows us the booster seat for Bobo but tells us he has no chance of being able to install it – bids us a merry farewell and leaves us to figure out how to get the seat in place.

Nicole manages it and off we drive.

There’s no phone reception on the island and the maps don’t really represent the nuances of the island’s various roads. It’s easy to figure things out though as every turn and junction comes with signage. Five minutes after driving through the Flinders’ countryside, observing Shetland ponies, hovering muttonbirds, thickset cattle, and a mob of feral turkeys (that’s regular turkeys, not the smaller bush turkeys you’re likely to see in Australia – the island has a feral turkey problem for some reason). It’s beautiful and very different to anywhere else I’ve ever been.

We reach the island’s largest (main) settlement, Whitemark. Approximately 300 people live here – about a third of the island’s permanent residents. There’s a grocery store, a nice pub, a post office, a flash museum, a chemist, and that’s about it.

 

One of at least two public phones on the island.

The main street of Whitemark. Pub is on the left - this is the Interstate Hotel, one of two pubs on the island.

Calamari at the Interstate Hotel.

Creating Worlds - Setting in Imaginative Writing

Imagined and literary worlds are always, in some way, a reflection of the world around us. The bedrock of worldbuilding is a keen awareness of setting - and students need to understand that setting has a precise function if they are to use this element well. When I read a great book or short story, I will find myself transported to that setting and sometimes it will be the one thing that stays with me longest after  I finish reading.

An effective setting will do some or all of the following:

• Remain constant in the reader's impression of the story, even when it isn't being explicitly mentioned. This can be achieved through the consistent use of detail and ensuring that nothing occurs in the narrative to contradict the setting.
• Make use of a set of rules - is everything we read a logical extension of the setting? If the setting is an unusual one, then this needs to interact with the characters and narrative in a way befitting this. 
• Be aware of time and place. A setting should have a particular geography but there also needs to be an awareness of the time of day and year, which may shift according to the progression of the narrative. If it is the height of an Australian summer, for example, then the characters need to act in a way that reflects the constant and often oppressive heat that comes with this.
• Reflect theme or a key idea. The most effective setting will often interact with characters in a way that reveals a concept or message that the writer seeks to explore. 

When we teach setting within a schooling context we need to also think about the syllabus. By all means, students should be encouraged to write for pleasure and to explore their imagination without limit, and time can be spent on this in the junior grades or (if your school has them) English creative writing electives. But if we're looking at the pointy end of the curriculum (in my case, NSW), we do need to teach students how to write within the scope of the Craft of Writing module for the HSC, or for  English Extension 1. This means having the ability to write a short piece within 25-50 minutes (depending on the HSC question and course).

So with this in mind, I would ask students to also think of setting in the following way:

• The previously mentioned dot points still largely apply.
• Come to a decision about whether character or setting will take precedence. Both should reflect the idea the student wants to explore, but if the amount of examination time is particularly short (for example, a double-barrelled Craft of Writing question that requires a reflection as well as a piece of original writing) then I think a student will struggle to give ample space to both characterisation and setting. 
• If focusing on setting, consider how it relates to the idea we want to explore. How does the setting reflect genre? Why is the writer writing about this setting? What is the purpose? How can we ensure that the detail included is consistently relevant to the idea or theme? 
• Don't fall into the trap of fantasy worldbuilding - there is limited space in an HSC examination and we need to consider the stimulus and the parameters of the question. It's great to write an evocative setting but this isn't the place to delve into said setting's extensive history and geography.  

What follows is an activity that uses real world locations to provide inspiration. In NSW it could be used for Years 7-10 English, Year 11 Reading to Write, Year 12 Craft of Writing, or Extension English Literary Worlds. 

Students are taken on a tour of 20 slides - 2 for each setting - and asked to respond to them in a way that will get them started on the above journey. The questions below aren't fixed, they're just a way to get students thinking descriptively and, more importantly, conceptually. 

1. Describe what you see in as much detail as possible.
2. Boil it down to just one key idea that could be used in a piece of writing.
3. What sort of short story could you tell in relation to this setting?
4. What would this short story be about in a single word? (EG. Desperation? Survival? Hope? Secrecy?, etc.)

The slides can be found here - Creating Worlds.

Happy writing!

Disclaimer: The above activity was compiled specifically for this blog. 

On Bookstores and the Argyle Emporium

The Argyle Emporium

Nicole and I often pass through Goulburn at least twice a year on our travels but I never thought to see if there were any bookstores in the area before our stopover there today. 

Sometimes you just find pure book gold, and the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn lives up to its fantastic name.

I love bookstores, and they're easily where I spend the most of my disposable income, but it's not every bookstore that interests me. The franchises, like Dymocks and Collins, hold only a passing interest for me as they are - by and large - filled with the same books at any given time. The next tier of interest is any other bookstore that retails new books - again, these are usually filled with books that can be found pretty much anywhere.

Kinokuniya holds a special place for me because its sheer size (and inclusion of graphic novels) usually means I'll find something of interest there.

But, really, the kind of bookstore that usually gets my money is the Secondhand Bookstore. Here you'll find out of print books, books that I never knew existed, books I've been searching for, specialist international books that have accidentally found there way to some Australian backwater via an itinerant erstwhile owner, and small books that are specific to local regions.

For about 8 years I worked for a well-known bookstore chain before I was teacher and there are some things that customers often wouldn't realise when it comes to books, I'll list them below briefly before I get onto the Argyle Emporium:

• The mark-up isn't particularly high in Australia for booksellers, which means that new titles can be costly for customers while also not generating much of a profit for the seller. Part of the reason for this is that the Australian book industry fought hard against the introduction of parallel importation for books in Australia - this means that Australian book publishers get to determine which editions go into our bookstores and an Aussie bookstore isn't allowed to import in a cheaper version of a book from overseas. So... you can imagine how responsible Australian publishers are when it comes to pricing, considering they've been handed a market where price-fixing and monopolisation are very easily achieved.  
• One result of the above practices is that customers are often better off just ordering their books online from an overseas market where competition is allowed. Even with postage, overseas editions of books are often cheaper for Australian customers.
• New titles have a very short lifespan on bookstore shelves if they're not popular. After anywhere between 3 to 9 months, the big publishers will release a list of titles they're willing to take back and the bookstores can then send them back for credit. The titles that don't get sent back often get marked down so that room can be made for the next round of new releases.
• The sheer number of new releases means that books are continuously rotated through bookstores. Customers will often walk in expecting that any well-known book they want will automatically be sitting on a shelf - this just isn't possible, there are literally hundreds of thousands of books available in the market, which brings me to my next point.
• Books don't remain in print very long. Unless it's one of the 1000 or so recent high-selling titles, or a canonised classic, most books go out of print within a year. And they often don't come back into print. 

Anyway, the Argyle Emporium is an amazing secondhand bookstore in Goulburn that I never knew existed until today. The site is a former police station that was built in 1885, vacated by the police in 1975, and turned into a secondhand bookstore in 2007. The Emporium also sells comics, posters, music, videos, DVDs, and a few other curios. 

Sci-fi, fantasy, comics.

Some people come into the Emporium and enjoy it so much that they never leave.

Here are the books I picked up today:

Always up for a bit of natural history, and the Tasmanian Devil is an interesting marsupial.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1984.

When I was 8 years old we went to the World Expo in Brisbane and we got to see some replicas of the Terracotta Warriors. Dad hyped us up about it so I went in there with a real sense of awe at seeing these nearly 2000 year old lifesize sculptures.

This is an offshoot of Steve Jackson's 'Fighting Fantasy' series; Choose Your Own Adventure styled novels that employed the use of dice so you could fight monsters while you adventured your way through the different paths set out in the book. Don't worry, it's every bit as nerdy and fun as it sounds. There's an argument to be made that they're a basic form of ergodic literature. Anyway, I loved these when I was a kid and I used to borrow them from the library all the time.

Nicole found these ones - we both have nostalgic memories of this series from our childhoods.

An overview of the American and French Revolutions. I love a good revolution.

I'm always on the lookout for Aboriginal history texts, and it's never unhelpful to find some literature that unpacks and unravels some of the debates around complex issues like the 1996 Wik land rights decision.

What's impressive is the sheer size of the store, with some 10-15 rooms converted into different sections organised by genre. It's bigger than some libraries I've been to, and to think you're often standing in former gaol cells now repurposed for book storage is kind of cool. 

There's also a tunnel underneath the building somewhere that leads to the old court house; I like to imagine this is probably filled with books too... maybe a wall of books that blocks it off. 

Secondhand bookstores like this are invaluable because they help Australian booklovers get around many of the issues I dot-pointed above. Places like the Argyle Emporium are filled with out of print titles, they have multiple editions of books available due to the depth of time that they draw from, and you can usually pick things up for a fairly reasonable price.

On Grief

Here's a poem I wrote today after staying in the Glasshouse Mountains for the last two nights.

On Grief

Gecko-clicks drag me away
from my novel, a tropical Chinese water drip
pressed flat against glass eardrums
and punctuating the warm winter night
without tone.

Without compass, I search for
structure to the glottal soundtrack of the evening;
syncopated against my pulse,
defiant and small and godforsaken,
and sincere.

Aural memory echoes soft
on the first birthday of my erstwhile sleeping daughter.
The pulsing ultrasound roar
a third percussive layer out of time.
Once even, now erratic.

Her silent face magenta-still.
Beyond my grasp.
The gecko-clicks stop as I move towards them, and
their absence becomes
another burden.

Dipping Our Toes into Victoria

Lockhart - the water tower in the background has recently been painted to depict some of the local birdlife.

Hello reader! Just thought I'd jot down my journeys this weekend for posterity.

Nicole and I came down to Wagga Wagga a couple of days ago so we could visit my brother in Lockhart. It's a short trip, just a few days, and I type this blog entry from the desk in our hotel room. We've been trying to get away somewhere for a little while but our last stretch of time off together was just spent at home due to some impending renovation costs. As it's (roughly) the Christmas season and my brother has just had his birthday it was nice to be able to come down to the Riverina and say hello to him, his wife, and my niece. 

But I tell you what - the first day driving down here was like riding in a space capsule that was orbiting closer and closer to the sun. The 45 degree heat was our third passenger in the car; constantly turning our air conditioner down, pushing my face directly into the hot window, and wringing every inch of sweat out of my forehead. We pumped the hotel's air conditioning all night and managed to get our bedroom down to a cool 30+ degrees.

While we were visiting the Lockhart Bartolos, my brother Jon suggested checking out Beechworth on our day of travelling. We were looking for somewhere new to go so we ducked down over the Murray River for the day and visited the historic Victorian town on his recommendation. 

Looking down the main street of Beechworth

Turns out Beechworth is a bit of a Ned Kelly spot owing to his incarceration in Beechworth Gaol. As you walk through the town's sandstone district and past the tourist shops it becomes evident that there are rusty steel effigies of the proto-hipster bushranger everywhere. The visiting tourists are an odd mix of upwardly mobile senior citizens who are drawn to the boutique stores, foreign visitors hoping to see some history, and foul-mouthed singlet-wearers who idolise Australia's most famous criminal. It was quite a vibrant scene.

A tree on the main street

Centre of town

We overheard someone talking about how great Beechworth Bakery is so we decided to go there for lunch. The place was absolutely packed; just a mess of queues crisscrossing everywhere and eight staff members behind the counter who all coincidentally had apparently just started working there that day. Well, I don't really know that, but it seems to be the most reasonable explanation for their lack of service skills. 

As I lined up I listened to two British tourists behind me as they read the menu. One explained to the other what kind of pies they have:

"What's the Australian pie?" the older one asks.

"Bacon, cheese, and egg. Do you want that one?" says the other.

His friend replies with a horrified, "Good lord, no!"

I tried not to laugh too loud.

When I got to the front I worked my way through the menu until the lady behind the counter and I could reach an agreement that my item of choice was available for purchase (some things on the menu were crossed out due to being out of stock, and some things on the menu weren't crossed out but also were out of stock). I got halfway through asking for a pepper steak pie when a customer came back and complained that her pepper steak pies had chicken in them. The lady behind the counter took them, looked carefully at their crust, and confirmed with the kitchen that some pies had been filled with the wrong recipe. This meant that, when I received my pie, said staff member stuck her finger under the lid of the pie in front of me and lifted it up to check what was inside it. 

So, yeah, that was a fun adventure. 

Beechworth Honey Shop

This pipe sucks bees in so they can create honey inside the store. This is easily my favourite thing about the store and I'd love to see more shops incorporate living animals in this way.

We kept exploring the rest of the town, visited the Beechworth Honey Shop, found a pretty cool secondhand bookstore inside an old church building. Nicole then did some preliminary research using the Information Centre (she loves Information Centres) and decided we could go visit the Yeddonba Aboriginal Cultural Site just a little ways to the north, so off we headed.

Bookstore in foreground

Visiting Yeddonba involved driving into Chiltern National Park via a series of dirt roads that spiralled further and further off the highway. The Yeddonba site is located in the middle of a semi-circular walking track that winds up into a rocky hillside that overlooks the box-ironbark forest. Once we found it via car the walk itself took only about 45 minutes.

Yeddonba is considered sacred to several local Aboriginal peoples, with the Dhudhuroa, Pangerang, Minjambuta and Jaitmathang all living in its vicinity prior to European invasion. There are several Aboriginal-authored signs around the track that explain the cultural significance of the local hillside caves and the rock art that can be seen here. 

The drive in. Not the worst dirt road we've unexpectedly found ourselves on!

View from the petroglyphs down into the national park. A beautiful spot - photo doesn't do it justice.

The rock art is quite impressive. Over time it has faded quite a bit but in the daylight it can still be seen clearly enough. The most interesting aspect is the depiction of a Thylacine, an animal that has been extinct on mainland Australia for at least 1000 years. The dating of these particular petroglyphs is estimated to be between 2000 and 10 000 years of age. 

There's something awe-inspiring about looking at artwork that has sat largely undisturbed on an ancient rock-face for an amount of time that dwarfs most of Western recorded history. In this one image of a Thylacine, without any need for scientifically-verified fossil records, we have proof that this marsupial lived on Australia's mainland. I try to imagine what the Chiltern forest was like before the Europeans arrived but pull up short of a reasonable replication - the history is too remote, too distant. All I have is this fading painting and a kind of Gothic solitude interrupted only by birdsong.

Despite my sense of isolation, or perhaps because of it, I feel immensely grateful that the Aboriginal elders of this area have allowed for visitors to share in experiencing it.

Other Australian Travels
North Coast NSW - Byron Bay, Nimbin
The Sapphire Coast 1, The Sapphire Coast 2 - Green Cape, Boydtown, Eden
The Snowy Mountains - Tumut, Adaminaby, Cooma, Candelo