Hell on Earth

A few days ago I posted about Walhalla with the throw away title of “Al goes to Heaven”.
Well tonight I am talking about another spectacularly beautiful place that was once quite simply hell for those who lived, worked and often died there.
Down in Tasmania on the spectacularly beautiful Tasman Peninsula, not far from the world famous ruins of Port Arthur lies another set of Convict Era ruins.
Approaching the ruins today, you walk through peaceful bushland, then quite suddenly you come into open ground and up on a mound to one side you see this.

Following the path around you come up onto the platform that once formed the parade ground of the settlement that was here.
It is eerily beautiful, and I had a great time catching angles:
 
From inside the bakehouse

Across the ground to a barrack house
 
And looking through the remains of the hospital you get a hint of just how spectacular the scenery around here is.
 
But just a short stroll up the hill beneath what was a brick built guard house is a pointer to how terrible this place was.
Because, you see, this location is known as “The Convict Coal Mines”
The prisoners here had been sent from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales to the far ends of the Earth.
For some convicts life in Oz was not in the end too bad. Once they served their sentence they really did have a chance at a new life.
But the prisoners who came here came to a real hell.
Coal mines anywhere in the 19th century were terrible. But to add to that these men were not skilled miners, but in most cases unskilled prisoners from the slums of the UK.
They slaved underground in the most abysmal conditions driven on by the usual punishments of the day, floggings and the like.
But there was an extra punishment for those who the system chose to break.
I am guilty of misdirection with my tales of treasury vaults last night.

Those of you who said a vaulted ceiling were right.
Because under that guardhouse were the punishment cells
This passage gives a hint of how dark this space was. Bear in mind that where the light is pouring in today was once below ground in a prison cellar, the ceiling at the far end has collapsed.

Here is a piccie of one of the cells. It is just long enough for me to lie down. I had to duck to get under this ceiling and the width is just a little more than my shoulders.
 
It only looks light because I had to use a flash to get this shot. Without it I could not see the end even with the light from the hall. The only positive thing about them is even as a ruin they are dry.
As a punishment, men were locked in these spaces for days and sometimes weeks at a time in the pitch dark. And when they were let out it was only to face another round down the mine.
Above is so beautiful today it is quite sobering to see this evidence of just what a hell this place was.

In which Al goes to Heaven?

Yesterday after stirring out doors very late,( hey if I can’t sleep in on a cold winter’s morning when could I?) Deb and I headed off for one of our weekend trips.
This time we headed for Walhalla named for the heavenly residence of the old Norse gods.
Walhalla is a Gold-Rush Era town that sits in a deep, narrow valley between the mountains of Gippsland in eastern Victoria.
Like many of the gold rush towns Walhalla all but melted away after the mines closed in the early 20th Century .
But what remains gives a hint of what was and is quite charming.
The Walhalla Star Hotel still serves it original purpose.

These old shops now cater to tourists - the Grey Horse which looks to have been a stable once is now a café.

A word about the trees, the tree still in autumn colours is what we loosely term an “exotic” in Oz. That is a plant native to foreign shores. Most Oz trees are Eucalyptus and so evergreen. The mountain slopes  in the background look much the same all year.

This is the vault of the old Bank of Victoria in the town.
 
When the mines closed the bank was demolished and relocated to the town of Moe away to the south. The Vault itself was not worth removing.
 Despite being only one of the banks in town the amount of gold that was stored here was staggering.

The bottom figure is based on $600 per ounce. What is gold now $1600 per ounce?

As I said Walhalla  sits in a narrow valley, land was so short that the old fire station

 was actually constructed across the creek.

A long story to a short answer

A few weeks ago most of the five of us (Deb + me, E our eldest and Lu our youngest) went for a weekend drive to part of the Gippsland coast in east Victoria.
Io stayed home with Lilli (no dogs allowed in national parks in Oz)

It was by our standards a fairly short run of only about 2 and a half hours drive each way.
Anyway after having a relaxed lunch and poking around a bit we ended up at the rugged coast line between Cape Paterson and Inverloch.

Deb and Lu looked at the weather,

which was really threatening to rain and elected to stay near the car.

E and I decided to climb the stairs down to the beach to have a look at the rocks out towards this interesting feature called “The Eagles’ Nest”.


To give an idea of scale I would guess it is around 5 stories high with the cliffs about double that.

Despite the threatening storm and the late afternoon we took advantage of the fact that the tide was falling quickly. You can see as we crossed the area the platform was becoming exposed by the retreating tide.

Interestingly the rock platform at the base  is made up of sedimentary rock that was formed on a flood plain back in the Cretaceous about 115,000,000 years ago.

One beach to the east is the only current dinosaur fossil dig in Victoria known as the “Dinosaur Dreaming” dig. And in 1903 just to the west was the first discovery of a dinosaur fossil in Oz known as  the “Cape Paterson Claw”.
So as well as the usual hunt for starfish and periwinkles I had my eye open for fossils.
As we got closer to the Eagles’ Nest
I began noticing literally dozens of chunks of petrified wood in the stone.
This was the largest piece we found.
I like the way the water was rippling across it in this piccie.

And from another angle with E’s hand to give a scale.

As you can see it was a decent size and beautifully preserved. It was hard to believe it felt like solid rock, not wood, to the touch.

Now we come to part of the point of this whole story.
One of the local denizens was this White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae

I took a few shots of him before he took off.

For those of you who guessed feathers for this image you were 100% right.
 
Here is the un-cropped piccie

I told you I wasn’t going to be tricky!

Holiday and a Kind of Milestone

You will have to forgive me but I am going to be posting piccies from our Holiday break for a while to come.
We left for the Western Coast of Victoria around lunch time and arrived late afternoon. Our first port of call was our accommodation to make sure we got checked in.
Then we headed out to make the most of the evening light.
This piccie is the 10,000th photo I have taken with my “new” camera.It is another angle of “The Arch” and was taken about ten minutes after the one I posted the other day.
The sun was dipping towards the horizon and you can see why photographers love evening light. The colours are just that much richer.

We leapt back in the car taking a quick detour along the coast to halt not far from the Twelve Apostles.
Staying clear of the usual tourist strip I cut across country arriving at the coastal cliffs just in time to catch the last of the sunset between one of the Apostles and the mainland.A final shot of the last moment before the sun sank.

In Which Al tricks his Audience.

Well no one guessed what this image was. Some people got part marks for the power-line in the background. But no one guessed a statue! I suspected when I cropped this part of the Digger's leg (wrapped in puttees) that people might guess a palm or coconut palm. It does look something like a palm taken out of context. This statue of a Digger (Oz lingo for an Aussie Soldier) is atop the war memorial in a tiny little town called Bonny Doon.
I guess he is suitable for an Australia Day post for two reasons: First copies of this statue (or a version very alike) are on memorials scattered through almost every small town across Oz (and many suburbs in bigger cities). He is an iconic Oz image. Second I actually posted a piccie featuring this Digger two years ago on Australia day. Which reminds me I showed a memorial of a different kind in that post. A memorial to three policemen murdered by “armed criminals” in 1878. I said I might post about those criminals later, but never did. Well strangely one of those three “armed criminals” has been back in the press again after over 130 years. I guess I should finally get around to keeping my promise and posting about them!

By Public Demand

More Piccies of the Twelve Apostles.
Not strictly one of the Apostles, this is one of the popular viewing points. The people on the top give you an idea of the scale of these cliffs.
In the old days the Twelve Apostles were called “the Sow and Piglets”
Then some marketing genius suggested a rename.

After the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge these are probably the third most photographed scenery in Oz (Uluru – Ayers Rock is probably no. 4)

The Apostles lie on the Great Ocean Road only three or four hours drive from Melbourne (depending which way you go) and as you can see very beautiful.

I hate them because they are so busy (by Oz standards).

But I love them because they are so beautiful.

These next three photos show part of why I like them so much.Every five minutes they change colour

Two of them mid afternoon on a sunny day. (I took this Sunday past in a gap in the storms).

This one was taken about five minutes after the one I posted the other day (just before sunset last Saturday).

And this one was taken about 15 minutes later.

Stone, sunlight, wind and cloud all combining to create visual poetry.

By the way I don't think the Apostles are the most stunning part of the coast.

More of the coast next time.

Bingo!

Kathleen, Marcy, Pearl, Sarah, and Michelle hit the nail on the head with their guesses of a tin roof, or corrugated metal etc for this image. The image is cropped from a section of the roof of this very old, and very small garage.As you can see from this sign it is now closed for business A few weeks ago on one of our weekend rambles Deb and I wandered up to Lake Eildon. Rather than taking the sensible way home we continued clockwise around the lake following unsealed mountain roads up over Frenchman's gap and down into the near ghost-town of Woods Point (where the garage resides).

This tiny isolated town was first settled in the 1860s in one of Victoria's many 19th Century gold-rushes.
By 1864 the town had grown until it had 36 Hotels!

Most of the gold played out by the 1890s. Although the last mine did not close until 1963.
Being so isolated and with no other industry the population collapsed to about 40 in the 2006; census around the same number as its previous number of pubs! As it is an Aussie town there is still a pub there today.

With new technology and the high gold price new mines have just started up nearby. so it will be interesting to see if the town grows again.

Scattered all through the bush around the town are the relics of the old days. The remains of a 1940s Blitzwagon (referred to as a Canadian Military Pattern or CMP truck in Canada and the UK)

The main street is lined with tiny miner's cottagesIncluding this one, the smallest miner's cottage I have ever seen! It seems barely big enough to fit in a bed and a chair! I've seen bigger cubby-houses!

The post office.It was late when we arrived so we did not stay long. The road (dirt track really) climbed through switch-backs into the mountains towards Marysville. It was around 160km (100 miles) home about a third over dirt. I am used to dirt roads so I expected it would take about two hours, the road was so bad it took us nearly four hours! Over half the time in that first third.

Just before dark I paused to shoot this rill, which cascaded down the mountainside and under the road.

One of the better sections of the road.Actually, this bit is like a highway compared to most of the rest!

Now finally, in case I don't post again before I should say to all of you; thank you for a great year and have a very Merry Christmas!

Three Things

First, those of you who guessed “feathers” hit the nail on the head.
Yesterdays, image was cropped from this piccie of a Laughing Kookaburra, (Dacelo novaeguineae). I caught photographed this fellow last time I visited my Mum.
These raven sized birds are common on the east coast of Oz. Kookaburras are the largest kingfishers in the world. Unlike most kingfisher species they hunt small animals on the land, including mice and similar-sized small mammals, large insects, lizards, small birds and nestlings, and most famously, snakes.
That reminds me of a funny thing I saw once. (Maybe a tale for another time).

Second, one of my piccies is featuring on Marcy’s MaineWords blog at the moment. Apparently the piccie has inspired her latest WIP! What a lovely thought that one of my piccies has inspired someone else’s writing.

Finally because I want to, two of my recentish piccies.

A mountain stream near Marysville.And Deb and I went to the National Gallery of Victoria last Saturday. I was inspired to practice my own version of art there.

The Lake that Came Home

Almost exactly 18 months ago I posted about one of my weekend trips.

I was talking about the impact of more than a decade of drought on Lake Eildon in the Central Highlands of Victoria.

Well if there is one thing certain about the Aussie climate it is that a period of drought will end in periods of flooding rain.

I went back to Eildon yesterday and the contrast couldn’t be greater.

Gough’s bay in 2010Almost the same angle in 2011The southern shore in 2010And in 2011.And a close up to emphasize the difference.
The lake is over 25 metres (82 feet) deeper!