The Amazing and the Mysterious

I feel as if my dreaded Uncle Harry is peering over my shoulder as I write this.
I’m going back a couple of weeks in time to share some of the things we saw while we were on our Holiday at Easter.

On the way to Warrnambool we stopped briefly at Camperdown. I have posted about Camperdown before.

As I said previously, it has an amazing (and totally out of place) clock tower.

Beside the town are two huge volcanic crater lakes,
Lake GnotukAnd Lake Bullen-MerriTo give you an idea of the size, there is a boat club in the far side (in the middle of the frame).

As you come into Camperdown from Melbourne you pass Mt Leura on the Eastern Outskirts.

In its own way, I find the mountain as fascinating as the lakes.

Like the lakes, Mt Leura was a large Maar volcano that blew itself apart about 30,000 years ago. Not content to leave it at that it began rebuilding itself in a series of eruptions which built multiple secondary cones inside the crater.
The above piccie was taken from the top of the highest cone (which is Mt Leura proper). Each of the humps in the piccie is a small secondary cone. The ridgeline in the middle distance is the rim of the original crater. As you can see if you look closely, the crater is so big there are a number of houses and farms contained within.
This second photo is of Mount Sugarloaf which is the second largest cone in the crater (again the ridgeline in the middle distance is the crater wall). The lines cut across the cone are a road that spirals up to the top of the volcano.

As Uncle Harry would say that is enough about Camperdown for one night.

From Camperdown we went on to Warrnambool where we stayed the night.
The next morning we went out on the first of a series of day trips along the coast to the west.

After an abortive attempt at photographing the dawn we drove to Port Fairy.

I’ve included this piccie because of the amazing colours. These black boulders are the remains of a basalt lava flow. The sky and the sea were almost equally vivid blue and the orange colour that “paints” the boulders is naturally occurring lichen that grows along a great deal of this coastline.

The Bay at Port Fairy. Despite the beautiful weather and the holidays the beach was almost deserted.The Port Fairy Lighthouse taken across the bay.Behind the sand dunes east of the town are a series of lagoons which waterfowl love.
The black dots on the other side are: Australian black swans.
Unfortunately none were cooperative enough for me to get a close up.

Now because no one has yet guessed what my mystery object is (and because I have sadistic tendencies), another photo: this time from the top.Maybe I am too much like Uncle Harry for your good!

Call Us Boring

Call us boring, but Deb and I seem to have developed a minor obsession with the Western Districts of Victoria, particularly with the Great Ocean Road.

Our excuse this time was that we liked it so much we should show our girls. So with two of our three sprogs in tow (number two daughter was away with her boyfriend), we set off after I finished the breakfast shift at work on Saturday.

The first hour of the outbound trip is quite boring, the free-way from Melbourne to Geelong, the only interesting thing on this stretch is the Westgate Bridge over the Yarra River. The Yarra isn’t a huge river but it is flat country here and the bridge has to be high to allow ships to get through into the Docklands.

Past the end of the freeway we turn off the main roads and are soon driving along typical Aussie country roads.Not at all typical of Oz are the dry-stone walls that line many of the roads in this region.Land in most areas in the early days was not valuable enough to justify the labour involved in clearing stone from the paddocks and building stone walls. I suspect a few things were at play here to make the effort worthwhile: this area has very rich volcanic soils that would give a return; Victoria grew very quickly with the 1850s gold rushes which meant labour became available; and a lot of the workforce coming off the goldfields probably came from rural areas in Europe and had the skills to build walls like these.

We took a slightly different route this time stopping for lunch in Camperdown instead of bypassing it. In the middle of the main street is an amazing clock-tower totally out of place in the Aussie Bush. Camperdown is a small place of about 3500 people, this clock tower looks like it has been ripped out of some English town and plonked down as an after thought.I find this piece of architecture a little disturbing. In its own little way this monument seems as grandiose as Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria.

Much more to my taste is the bluestone post office.
Driving west from Camperdown, and just out of town I happened to glance to the left and said “That’s got to be a crater-lake!”
I had mentioned vaguely to Deb a few days before that I knew there were some crater-lakes somewhere in Western Victoria, and we should try to find out where they were to visit them sometime. And there one was staring back at me.

I had seen the northern most of two massive craters just outside Camperdown.
The first is Lake Gnotuk.
The second is Lake Bullen-Merri
This image taken from Google Maps shows the sheer scale of the lakes.The surprising thing to me is there were no tourist oriented signs trumpeting the lakes existence that we saw in Camperdown. Surely a marketing oversight?

From the lakes we pushed on west, pausing briefly to take a shot to demonstrate how green the western district is at the moment. This colour is very alien to most of Australia most of the time.
Next: Wildlife at Warrnambool