.......who has made it his business to collect - well, what else but Lego ! A retired railway engineer, who has accumulated a vast amount of Lego bits and pieces and stores these for exhibition in his museum (about twice the size of his house !) as space allows, he has accumulated other memorabilia, including the crest of the old Gahn train which, alas, no longer wends its rickety path into the Outback and to Alice Springs, shimmering and dancing through the mirages as it skirts the Simpson Desert (I'm quoting loosely from Michael Palin's "Great Railway Journeys").
It's actually the Australian Coat of Arms, probably illegally levered off the locomotive !
For "memorabilia" read "junk" but interesting junk at that - take, for example, this royal coach model which, it's owner assured us, HRH Liz pressed upon him when she and The Dook came to take tea with him in Nuriootpa one fine day, which model (solid gold, yet) is escorted nightly to the Bank by armed guards......
It wasn't a simple matter to look over the Lego collection because our guide had to be enticed to switch on the lights but we managed to make our way through the gloom as he made his own way at his own pace through his set spiel. Nevertheless, for anyone who has played with Lego, this is a must in the Southern Hemisphere, although you might do better by going to Denmark I would say. Here is an overview of a few small portions of the collection, most of which apparently remains boxed except when assembled for rotational display. I guess it passes the time.......
Pirate ships by the dozens on the top shelf......
.......and half a dozen trains dashing around those tracks.
That Bank apparently can be blown up - but he wouldn't do it for us darn it ! The Red Baron he wouldn't fly, either !
This is, we are told, one of the earliest Lego toys, made out of wood.
Here is a a little set piece - "Over and Under the Sea"
Well, sorry about all that. Not everyone, I suppose, gets excited about a BIG collection of Lego toys. We spent about two hours looking them over, but then we had to get going for Barmera, more specifically to Lake Bonney and even more specifically to Pelican Point and to Pelican Point Nudist Resort. Lake Bonney is really a backwater of the Murray River which has the habit of forming this type of horseshoe lake, just as does the Mississippi. Pelican Point doubles as a very small winery and fruit orchard and, incidentally, is for sale by Rex and Yvonne to anyone who can afford a laid-back life in a pleasant climate. It's set up, and has space for, a couple of dozen powered camping sites but we were alone there in the midst of a few acres of wine grape vines and peach trees, both unharvested because of the glutted Australian markets. If you want to, by the way, you can camp freely almost anywhere beside the lake itself or the Murray River generally, always being wary of any sudden changes in the water levels - this country is dangerously flat should there be sudden rains.
Loaded with huge peaches, we continued along the Sturt Highway for the Murray Valley Highway but first we wanted to stop off at Mildura whose name means "red soil". Here's the entrance to that town - the other half of the outsized tire we had seen a few hundred km away, on the Mount Panorama motor racetrack at Bathurst NSW.
The town, a veritable tourist centre, advertising year-long sunshine and warm weather, is well-known for the paddle steamers which ply the Murray River here, and we stopped off at the caravan park at the other side of the river overnight just for this reason - actually, we had a double motive here because not only did we have to get up early in order to catch one of the paddle boat cruises, but we also wanted to take a look at one or two of the houseboat-hire companies on this, the New South Wales side of the river. These houseboats range all the way from economical two-berth all the way to luxury twelve-berth monsters, these latter equipped with multi-TV living rooms, individual bathrooms for the many bedrooms, dishwashers, washer and driers, bars and barbeques (one of each per deck so you don't have to climb stairs to get your beer or your steak and finally, piece de resistance, a ten-body hot tub/spa on the top deck - all this for little more than the average motel will cost you per person. For mmore information, see www.acaciaboats.com.au or www.willandrahouseboats.com.au . And if you want to get Murray River charts, printed or CD-rom, see www.rivermurraycharts.com.au .
Later that day we took a short cruise on the "Rothbury", not actually a steamer but nevertheless a sidewheel paddle vessel, steered by a direct-drive handwheel and massive rudder. All of us kids got to steer the ship on an erratic track - the ship travels at the obligatory 4 knots to avoid destroying the fragile banks and levees so oversteer of such a massive and flat-bottomed ship requires a certain amount of know-how as she skitters on the water.
"Rothbury" coming alongside to take on passengers
Leaving Mildura, and, incidentally, the Hurt Highway, taking the Murray Valley Highway from here onward, we headed for Swan Hill. This was named facetiously in 1836 by a certain tired Major Mitchell simply because he was kept awake by some noisy swans but that wasn't our reason for making a stopover there - it happened that there is a listed 2m repeater with IRLP link at Swan Hill, vk3rsh, which should have enabled us to contact Ottawa. Alas, vk3rsh has succumbed to the pernicious cell 'phone virus - it seems that the repeater was individually owned and operated as a free public service but, as so often has happened, the lucrative cell 'phone magnates took over the antenna site, demanding astronomical rental for tower space - well, Swan Hill's hill isn't much more than a pimple but it's all you'll find in the way of elevation hereabouts. So the owner said "bugger them". And vk3rsh is no more. Repeaters, particularly IRLP nodes, resemble dodos don't you think ? Another bit of underhand dealing in Swan Hill - in our travels, we always buy high-temperature pasteurised miilk which, sealed, will keep for extended times unrefrigerated. The (only) large grocery store in Swan Hill was selling milk almost a year outdated (it won't keep that long) and it was fortunate we detected this (very few people check the expiry date). Caveat emptor I guess.
We didn't hear or even see the swans of Swan Hill (perhaps the sleepless Major organized a swan hunt 'way back) but we certainly heard the frogs which abound in this flat alluvial river valley:
If you're an angler, no doubt you might get excited about the Murray Cod which can (or could) be caught in the river. Personally, we would have expected them to be inedible on account of the muddy nature of the water. However, perhaps size is all that counts and these fish apparently attained sizes upwards of 80 lb, not, however quite as large as the specimen displayed on the main street of the town - another of Australia's many Big Things.
Along our route, the Victoria/NSW border, we were popping in and out of the "fruit fly free" zone, intended to protect this heavily agriculture-dependent region from the pernicious drosophilla, the tiny fruit fly which is the scourge of the fruit growers and particularly the vintners in Victoria, Australia's fruit basket. We headed for Echuca where we intended to stay a few days at River Valley Naturist Resort www.rivervalley.com.au . On the way, we were heading toward a high pall of smoke in the sky and eventually passed a bush fire very close to the highway. This wasn't actually a very small fire, nothing like the huge fires we had seen three years ago in the Snowy Mountains area, and was swiftly attended to by the fire services, water bombers and all.
Echuca, another predominantly tourist city, sports its own collection of paddle steamers, including at least one which is particularly interesting, the PS "Adelaide", oldest wooden paddle steamer in the world still operating and, though not a particularly large vessel, has all the classic lines of these stately boats. The river is not particularly deep here, and, as you can see, is heavily silted by the clays through which it flows, so the paddle wheelers were the only practicable form of water transport in the 19th century - nowadays a few are privately owned and are being restored.
There's a section of Echuca which lies alongside the old shipping wharf and this has been turned into a sort of 'Frisco Fisherman's Wharf, Ontario's Upper Canada Village, Vancouver's Gastown place. Here you can stroll around a few chic displays, the obligatory blacksmith shop, the woodcarver, Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe etc.
Notice how even the wheels are curiously constructed of wood with perhaps just a bit of iron tire around them.
What really took our fancy was the winesellers barn, where huge kegs of ports and sherries were maturing and teeny-tiny kegs were available for purchase. So we splurged on a five-litre plastic bottle of dubious Tawny Port, five hundred headaches in every bottle.
We stayed a few days at River Valley Naturist Resort (see www.rivervalley.com.au ) - this is another resort which is for sale, by the way, equipped to handle many visitors at powered and unpowered tent- and caravan-sites, complete with pool, sauna, tennis and volleyball courts. And it's also within Barmah State Park so one may take many walks beside the Goulburn River. A small side note here: Echuca, I understand is "meeting of the waters" in this region's Aboriginal dialect and the waters which meet are of course the Murray and the Goulburn Rivers.
It was time to think very seriously of returning to the NSW North Central Coast because we have an airline reservation for April 22 and besides that, we wanted to press on toward Rutherglen, another of those wine regions which abound along the Murray River. Rutherglen is remarkable for its fortified wines, Port and particularly Tokay, although the name Tokay will soon disappear along with Champagne and such, which names have apparently suddenly become proprietory. But we have that 5 litres of Tawny Port to kepp us going until then.....