The Lure of the Lighthouse

In our travels around the Sapphire Coast yesterday, Nicole and I skimmed past a turn off to 'Green Cape'. This point is situated several kilometres south of Eden at the tip of the next bay and, as it's been the site of several shipwrecks over the past 150 years (leading to the aptly-named 'Disaster Bay' to the south), it bears some significant connection to the local history we had already explored. Amongst theses wrecks was the tragic destruction of the Ly-ee-moon, the second worst maritime disaster known to Australia.

The view from Disaster Bay Lookout is deceptively picturesque but these inky blue waters hold the wrecks of at least 9 ships from the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th centuries. At least one of these wrecks is of an unidentified vessel from the 1850s, the remains of which may be attributed to either of two ships lost at sea in this area around this time.

Getting to Green Cape lighthouse was a mission and a half. The road was unsealed and so it took nearly an hour for Nicole and I to drive across just 20 kilometres. The journey was definitely worth it though as I have long held a deep and unexplained fascination with lighthouses. Maybe it's attached to my fear of heights, or maybe it's attached to a beloved Doctor Who serial from the 1970s in which the Doctor travels to a 1900s lighthouse and faces off against an alien jellyfish (pictured below):

You should check it out. It's great.

The Green Cape lighthouse was built in the late 19th century and is supported by several Victorian-era houses. Despite the isolation of the lighthouse keeper and his two assistants, the houses were kept separated by fences so that a class system of sorts could be kept intact. You can now stay in these houses as they have been kept on as accommodation. Note the huge solar panel at the end of the path in the picture above, which demonstrates the changing face of lighthouse-technology.

It's quite easy to imagine the damage that these rocks could do to a ship if it ran aground near here. The Ly-ee-moon was found smashed to pieces in 1886, and 71 bodies were recovered from the water nearby. The second photograph above is taken by Nicole.

While walking back inland along the headland I stopped to take a photograph of something random. Nicole quickly grabbed me and whispered urgently, "Stop! Don't move. You scare everything off". I slowly turned around to see that she had spotted an echidna snuffling around in the dirt just a few metres from us. Its only defense its spines, the echidna tucked its little legs in and wedged itself up against some nearby sticks so that all we could see was a black ball of fur and yellow spikes. Once it thought we had gone it started moving again.

As you can see from Nicole's photograph above, the echidna lifted itself up out of its little hollow once we stopped moving. Random echidna fact: the Short-Beaked Echidna (the Australian species of echidna pictured here) has one of the shortest spinal chords of any mammal, and its entire body is covered by a large muscle just beneath the skin known as the 'panniculus carnosus'. This muscle allows the echidna to change the shape of its body to minimise vulnerability when it perceives danger to be nearby.

Our travel inland on the cape was to find the Ly-ee-moon Cemetery, which is only about half a kilometre or more from the lighthouse. The bodies that were pulled from the wreck were all buried on the cape as it wasn't possible in the late 19th century to transport them back to their families from such a remote location.

The graves of the 71 recovered travellers are unmarked but a plaque of their names was erected about 30 years ago by local historians who had pulled together available records. Sadly, some names have been lost in time, with at least three of the bodies listed as being of unknown identity (one is just described on the plaque as 'a Greek man, invited onto the ship by the cook'). Equally sad is the sign back at the lighthouse that implores visitors to pay their respects to this cemetery as "the families of the victims of this tragedy would never have been able to come visit their loved ones back in the late 19th century".

Of Tumut, Tiny Frogs, Trout, and a Terrifying Lack of Bookstores

This pic was taken by my wife, Nicole. She took a few of the pictures below (the better ones)

Ever since I was a little boy I have been drawn to the idea of exploring the map. This was no doubt influenced by my idle plotting of imagined adventures across my father's globe, the random flipping of pages in a big leather-bound atlas, and our family's annual journeys to Queensland to visit my grandparents. 

By the time I was 22 I was cut adrift from everything that had been stable in my life - I hadn't lived with my parents for a couple of years, my first university degree was done and dusted and quietly filed away in a random drawer, and I quit work at Target three weeks before Christmas in order to avoid serving the rabid blood-eyed masses as they poured forth into Westfield shopping centre like the 11th Biblical Plague of Egypt. 

I unfolded my dog-eared map of Australia and looked at where I had been. Canberra; cold and educational. Queensland; I had travelled from the Tweedy border-part right up to the Daintree. Melbourne; a cool city with cool trams. Where could I go next? My finger trailed south, along the NSW coast, and landed at the coastal settlement closest to the border: Eden. 

I had never heard of it. I looked it up and learned that it had once been associated with whaling; a taboo and arcane industry that Australia has long since distanced itself from. Eden may as well have been the end of the Earth. I've always felt attracted to such places, the ends of the Earth - the barnacles beyond the outstretched fingers, the frayed edges of the map. I vowed to go there.

Fast-forward to now and it's 15 years later. Life intervened and I never travelled there in my supposedly adventurous youth. I'm married now, working as a teacher, and I have a nice place of my own. Things are relatively stable in comparison to the headier days of my early 20s. And so, today, I finally got to my end of the Earth. I currently write this blog entry from Eden. 

Here are some photographs of our journey, in which Nicole and I travelled across the Snowy Mountains.

The town of Tumut is at the north-western edge of the Snowy Mountains. Some of the back-areas of the town have really cool street art created by the Tumut Youth Council in collaboration with the Snowy Valleys Council. I really wish my home town, Penrith, would do something like this. This artwork was easily the highlight of the town (in other words, there wasn't much else to see there).

The Southern Corroboree Frog is a species endemic to the Snowy Mountains. The Information Centre in Tumut has a tank with 8 of these unique frogs in it, designed to help raise awareness and funding for their conservation. There are thought to only be about 200 left in the wild, which is quite appalling! 

The Corroboree Frog is:

• Poisonous, and could be lethal to other animals if they ingest it. They are the only vertebrate known to science to produce their own poison (as opposed to generating it via diet).
• Not a hopper! They actually crawl in a weird side-to-side fashion (see the first of the two photos above for what I mean). 
• A tiny little guy. They grow to just 3 cm.

Adaminaby is a small town of about 300 residents, situated at one of the highest and more remote parts of the Snowy Mountains. During summer it seems incredibly quiet, however, in winter it accommodates tourists attracted to the area for horse-riding, skiing, and trout-fishing. The last of these is what Adaminaby is best-known for, hence the Big Trout pictured above. 

The construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme in 1949 led to severe flooding of the township's original location, and so the residents were re-located to the current locale. In 2007, the water levels of Lake Eucumbene dropped enough to reveal the ruins of the original town beneath the surface, leading to significant media interest.

As we travelled across the Snowy Mountains I made use of the internet to look up bookstores we could visit. It turns out that bookstores are quite scant in this part of NSW. In Tumut, we looked for the Between the Lines Bookstore and The Night Owl Book Shop, both of which no longer exist. When we got to the next major town, Cooma, we made our way to Pages of Life, but alas, this also seems to have shut forever as there was nothing in the spot indicated by Google Maps. 

Eventually I found Dorothy Dickens' Books and Music in Cooma, and it was a lovely secondhand bookstore with good range in general fiction, locally-based authors, and sci-fi/fantasy.

Sugar Gliders live in the Snowy Mountains. We didn't see any, of course, but we did see an echidna, some kangaroos, eagles, lots of livestock, wild rabbit, wild brumbies, and an emu.

Brumbies have been a staple of the Snowy Mountains for over 150 years and, thanks to the romance of the Australian Bush Legend, they're probably one of the most respected kinds of feral wildlife found in this country. In fact, the attachment of the brumby to Australian folklore (IE. The Man From Snowy River) means that attempts to cull these horses in this region have run afoul of the State government, and there are currently significant problems relating to overbreeding and the ecosystem.

Our final stop along the way was in Candelo, where we ate at the riverside pub seen above. We also pulled over to look at some ponies grazing on the side of the road, and I wandered off under a bridge to find some strange artwork featuring a centaur and what I imagine to be the troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff story.

About an hour later we pulled in to Eden and found our accommodation. The drive here was quiet but dotted with several interesting townships, and the everchanging scenery reflected dramatic shifts in altitude. The winding view of the high country, with thousands of bone-white gum tree-skeletons clustered together like a giant graveyard of antlers, had a strangely ominous effect on us as we drove through the State National Park.

Each town felt remote and cloistered in its own pocket of history, something that was most evident in the ghost gold-mining town of Kiandra - once Australia's highest settlement but now just a sparse collection of frost-beaten ruins with a bristling but under-used potential for tourism and historical preservation. 

The loneliness of today's drive appealed to me in much the same way as this journey across Nevada's desert, taken exactly two years ago with Nicole. Perhaps this solitude is down to the Snowy Mountains being with snow at this time of year but, really, it was this eeriness that probably spoke to me most as it made the day feel exactly as it should - like a drive to the end of the Earth.