This morning saw us rise early, packed and ready to start the day. Time was spent with Tricia’s sister and hubby over breakfast, and after our goodbye’s we boarded the Motor home ready for a day of easy driving on the freeway
heading towards Melbourne. Today sees us travelling 725km to Bonny Doon in Victoria stopping at Holbrook submarine park and some convict constructed stone bridges.
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| Convict Built Towrang Bridge |
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| Convict built Powder Magazine |
We have watched the movie ‘The Castle’ with our friends Gene and Sem in Darwin so often we now use quotes from the movie!! One we have not used is ‘we are going to Bonnie Doon’. As soon as we realized it was a real place, Steven punched in the destination of ‘Bonnie Doon’ Victoria into the GPS and that was to be our destination for today. So we set off to Bonnie Doon. Today will take us through Holbrook and the twin towns of Albury Wodonga straddling the Murray river which forms the NSW/ Victoria state boarder and into Victoria.
The Hume highway has been a moveable feast for over 170 years, and a few tracks remain from the very first route. The initial “Great South Road”? as with most public works of the era, the engineers tapped into a very plentiful and cheap labour force, convicts.
Some of their hard work has actually stood the test of time and this bridge and remains of the can be found about 250 metres from the current Hume Hwy near Goulburn. 250 chain gang convicts worked on the road here for 6 years.
Holbrook’s best known feature is a submarine in a park next to Hume Highway in New South Wales. Holbrook’s first resident was a shepherd from Germany. It used to be where a grog shop was located known as ‘The Germans’ and later called Germanton and was one of the many towns in Australia settled by people from Germany that had name changes during the first world war.
Why does Holbrook, a farming community 400 kms from the nearest seaport have a life-size submarine?
In the main street of the township, lies the relic of the de-commissioned OTWAY. Find out why here we crossed a very narrow bridge into a dirt track and paddock and then ‘you have reached your destination’ dumb machine!! So we had to keep on going until there was enough space to turn the motorhome around. Back onto the sealed road, a quick look at the map and a couple of kilometers later we were at Bonnie Doon.
We did a search for the nearby geocaches which guided us to a nearby State Nature Park Mount Wombat Flora and Fauna Reserve. The cache ‘A fish called Polly’ was located near beautiful running water cascading down rocks before turning into a quiet creek. After some searching the Geocache that brought us here was found. As we were setting up for the night a nearby resident told us that campers were no longer welcome here and said we had to move on. Odd since the local shire encourages visitors to visit and camp here on their website
Moving on we headed back through the winding hills to once again take the freeway to find a road side stop for the night. It was quite late before we found a suitable spot and settled in for the night.