My first impression of Eden was that it is slightly down-at-heel. The museum explained that the Greenseas tuna cannery closed in the 1980s and there has been less work since then. This museum commemorates Old Tom, the leader of the whales who co-operated with the Indigenous fishers and then the Eden whalers to hunt and kill other whales. The museum is a local initiative, mooted in 1931 as a place to house Old Tom's skeleton after he died.
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A friend just said to me, "Happy Berthing!" It's a great verb. I went berthing along the Monaro Highway, which runs south from Canberra and hits the Eastern seaboard just before the Victorian border, and then further along the coast to Orbost. White Rock River picnic area, on the Imlay Road that forms the main link between the Monaro Highway and the NSW town of Eden, and the Nimmitabel Campground (powered sites and hot showers can be paid for) were great free stopping places that I'd happily use again when I want to travel slowly. Orbost proved a gem of a slow-moving Victorian country town. White Rock River picnic area is in a national park, beside a very quiet road. Here are two buildings in Orbost:
Ash Island is in the Hunter Wetlands National Park (Kooragang Wetlands), which is between the Newcastle CBD and the Hexham Bridge. With just parking and toilets, it is convenient and very lovely.
Read A History of Ash Island here. Read about Sisters Harriot and Helena Scott here. "[They] were probably the premier natural history illustrators working in New South Wales in the last half of the 19th century. They ... spent most of their adolescence and early adulthood on Ash Island in the Hunter Valley. They started and developed a remarkable project to illustrate all known Australian butterflies and moths. ... There's a group working on Ash Island, which has ... been using the observational data that the sisters collected to actually rehabilitate that landscape back to something like it was in the 1860s, so using the sisters' specimen lists and the observations they made of plants on the island in order to find and replant that landscape." (YouTube) See fifth photo. Mount Penang, just ten minutes from home, for the Girrakool Blues Festival. Camping beside the festival was free. (March 1-3.) Early bird tickets for next year are available now. |
AuthorIn mid 2018 I started recording each night I sleep in Bertha: sometimes just for myself, sometimes to share with friends and other travellers. Archives
September 2023
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