A Tail of Lilli and a Trip across a range.

First up (and because I promised) a quick story about Lilli the Labrador.

As I said the other day Lilli is now becoming really quite well trained.She is a funny thing really eager to please but quite anxious about things she doesn’t know. I think I told the story about her being frightened by the kitten over the back fence (which reminds me of other Lilli tails).  

Any way back to the story.

She is still young and bouncy (which is very nice) but having 29 kg (64lb) of Lab bouncing around can be quite disconcerting not to say dangerous. So one of the things we do with her is get her to sit before we feed her or put her lead or do any of a lot of things.

“Sit” was the first command she learnt so she is really good at obeying it. The rules are that if one of us says “sit” or gives a hand signal Lilli has to sit and stay until we say “free”.

E our eldest discovered how good Lilli is the other week. E had been planning to take Lilli for a walk so she gave the "sit" command so she could put Lilli on her lead. As E got the lead the phone rang so naturally she answered the call. It was one of her friends from University, so without thinking E went into her bedroom to talk.

E chatted for about half an hour. Then she checked what was on TV. About an hour after she answered the phone she heard Lilli whine from the back room. Thinking that wasn’t like Lilli E went to check what was wrong. Only to find Lilli still loyally sitting in exactly the same spot she had been left!
E decided the whine was an “excuse me, I think you have forgotten something”.

Lilli at the park

Like a small miracle it actually dried up enough this morning so I could mow the lawn.
So Deb and I set off late again today. We headed up to the Yarra Valley and paused in Warburton at a favourite café for a coffee.
 
I sat and played with my camera (nothing new there) and took this piccie through the front window.

It is a cottage on the main street of Warby (as locals call it)

As we left I paused to take a piccie of the main street to catch a bit of the fast disappearing blue sky.

As I have posted recently we have been having a wet miserable and cold winter.

From Warby we followed a road we haven’t used before.
It climbs the flank of Mount Donna Buang before swinging up through the Acheron Gap into the central Highlands of Victoria.

I say road, but muddy track is more like it.

We paused as we climbed into the Mountain Ash forest that is a feature of so much of the Yarra Ranges.


Just over the Acheron Gap is a pocket of rainforest.

I had to pause to catch this mini waterfall that tumbles from a spring just above the road.


The water up there is crystal clear and probably as clean as you will find anywhere.

As you can see this spring literally tumbles into the table drain alongside the track.


As we came down the other side I paused one last time to get some shots of the Acheron River which is made up of the water collected from hundreds of springs like the one I snapped.
The Acheron is also clear and clean and is a popular trout stream in season.

By the way the blue vehicle is our “other car” a Renault SUV. I have resisted owning a gas guzzler for ever but eventually early in the year I admitted that we were abusing our poor FIAT too much on mountain and outback roads. So we got this second hand Renault all-wheel drive, It goes anywhere we want to take it and it is diesel so it is still pretty light on fuel (about 38 mpg) which is the same as our little FIAT.

Tea or Coffee Anyone?

First of all an apology. I have not responded to all your wonderful comments on my last few posts. As you know I have just started a new job which is very different from my previous one. So I have been working hard and long hours to get on top of the new role as quickly as possible.

Apart from anything else every conversation in the new workplace seems to be filled with acronyms I just don’t know! The Victorian Public Service seems to have a language all of its own! The good part is I seem to have fallen on my feet in terms of having a great team to work with.

Down to the business of today - as you can guess by the time we got to the weekend I was ready for a change of pace. Deb and I hopped in the car and drove to one of our favourite places.

I have posted about Mount Donna Buang before, but here we go again. As you know it is winter down this way and this past week we have had miserable and cold weather.

It isn’t too bad down in Melbourne but in the mountains around there has been snow.
In fact the Oz Alps are reporting a bumper ski season.

Mount Donna Buang usually has snow cover at the peak for much of winter and although there isn’t skiing there it is quite popular because it is so close to Melbourne. Any way as I said Deb and I shot up there today. By the way, a lot of these piccies benefit from clicking on to expand them.

When we reached the peak it was cold and misty.This tower was built for spotting fires in bushfire season. A bit redundant today!
I had a look in one of the shelters - there was a warming fire that someone had lit in the BBQ.People have been busy building snow men and snow sculptures. I thought this teapot was clever.
It was complete with cups.
I went traipsing around looking for objects to turn my camera on. I loved this boulder standing clear of the snow.After a while we were cold and miserable (I wonder why?).

So we jumped back in the car and drove the 4,000 odd feet back to the valley floor. Perhaps the teapot had given us ideas. Because we stopped at one our favourite eateries.

Wild Thyme Café is in the village of Warburton. It has great meals and good coffee.

But the thing they absolutely do best is cakes and pastries. The owner bakes the most amazing cakes you can imagine.

I had the baked continental cheesecake. It looked so yum I couldn’t help myself and took a spoonful before I remembered to take a piccie!

Deb had the lemon meringue pie. I am not normally big on sweets but the ones at Wild Thyme are as good as anything I have tasted anywhere in the world!

One last piccie. We sat in the front room of the café. I noticed a whole collage of reflections on the window. Nearly everything in this piccie is a reflection or a reflection of a reflection. The two legs in the foreground are actually just outside, as is the bicycle rickshaw. I have no idea where it originally came from, but the rickshaw is always parked out the front when they are open. Wild Thyme is that kind of place.
The blue car is actually further up the street and going the other way. The sunny park is about 100 metres down the road to the right.
The man sitting with his face to the picture is Alan, the owner of the café. He is not outside this window but at a table to the right on the footpath. It’s illegal to smoke in restaurants in Victoria so they have a table outside for those who have to smoke while they eat.

An Easy Stroll Through The Mountains

Deb, E, Lu and I went for a stroll this afternoon.
Interestingly enough we went for a very easy ramble along the flanks of Mount Donna Buang and its neighbours.

Before you wonder how you ramble on a mountainside I will explain.

Back in 1914 an aqueduct was completed that took fresh mountain water from high in the Yarra Valley down to Melbourne’s water supply. Known as the O’Shannassy Aqueduct it remained in service until 1997 when it was decommissioned. Since then the trail that runs alongside the old aqueduct has been opened to the public. And like the aqueduct it serviced it snakes almost dead level through the most amazingly steep terrain.

Now before you start imagining something like this

Wikipedia image

Let me show you what the aqueduct is actually like: a concrete lined channel set into a terrace cut along the mountainside.We started our walk at a section of the trail far above the little town of Warburton.
The trail quickly runs into the bush that cloaks the mountainsides here.
These old rails guard some sluice gates that allowed workers to drain this section of the channel.
Looking back the way we came you can see how forest that hasn’t been disturbed for 100 years recovers. Typical of this mountain country is very big eucalyptus trees with an under-story of tree ferns.Lu obligingly leant on this tree, she provides a handy scale. All the falling leaf litter from the forest is quickly filling up the channel and in some areas it is covered in a carpet of forget-me-nots.And buttercups.The tree ferns growing along the edge are among the tallest I have ever seen, some of them 20 to 30 feet tall.Finally a shot of one of the less friendly locals.

A bull ant. This guy was standing up to me, daring me to come closer.At about an inch and a half long and packing a nasty sting, they are quite aggressive.
I snapped a shot and left him to his own devices.

Tumbling Down and a Maths (Math) Lesson.

A quick post tonight.
I have been staring at the computer screen for hours, working on the website I am designing for Veiled in Shadows. If I spend too much longer I am sure my eyes will go square.

Yesterday, Deb and I went for an early Valentine ’s Day lunch out at Warburton.
(In keeping with Aussie abbreviation rules, the locals call it “Warby”.)

After a thoroughly delightful meal we went for a wander along the main street. While Deb tried on a few clothes I took a few photos.
I am posting these few to show how near the mountains are to Warby. This first really gives a sense of how they loom almost over the main street.

And this one of a local Café (not the one we ate at) has Mt Donna Buang behind.
The treed slopes of the mountain belie just how much higher it is than the town.
Warby stands at 159 metres (521 feet) above sea level measured, as is traditional, at the post office just out of frame to the left. Mt Donna Buang is 1250 metres high (4101 feet).

Now that is not particularly high by international standards, but if you do the maths (mathematics is maths in Oz, not math) it is 1091 metres (3579 feet) higher than the main street.
Not bad for something that is (almost) literally in their back yards.

After our stroll, we climbed up the side of the mountain next to Donna Buang (not to the top but I think about half way).
On the way back down the slope I paused to take a piccie of a very energetic stream that tumbles down the mountainside, before falling across this little road.
The motion of the water has been captured by a very long exposure that I had to use to cope with the dim conditions under the trees.

Rain, Fire and a Fatty

We have been having rain, glorious rain for the past week. Thank goodness it held off while we were actually moving.
After ten years of drought it is desperately needed. Melbourne’s water storages are creeping up slowly. An added benefit is that rain now will delay the risk of fire this summer. Unfortunately, government sources are suggesting that the risks of the current fire season are as high as past summer.

Now you have to forgive me I am going to be a little morbid for a moment. Further north the fire season has started early. In NSW as I type there are 50 wildfires burning across the state. My brother is a Rural Fire Service Brigade Captain on the NSW Central Coast. His brigade was called out to 22 scrub fires in just the past month. And it is still only spring.

We drove across the back road through Marysville towards Warburton. This area around Marysville was some of the most badly burnt in the Black Saturday Fires on this 7th February past. I posted about the devastation through this way a while ago.

This time the weather was clear and we could look across the valleys to distant ridges. In some places your eye was drawn to the green patches in the valleys below (green thanks to the recent rain) and things did not seem too bad. But when you looked at the closer ridgelines you really realised how extreme the conditions were.
These few photos show a mountainside totally destroyed. All the trees seem to have perished in the heat. Something almost unheard of in the Aussie bush, our eucalyptus trees are tough as nails. Also many of the trees seem to have been felled as if in a wind generated by a raging fire-storm. These destroyed mountainsides remind me of the destruction caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens back in 1980. Like there I think the forest will be decades in regenerating.

All we can hope is we don’t see such conditions again this coming summer.

Enough of doom and gloom.

Not far from these scenes of destruction there is an untouched patch of bush along Badger’s Creek. In there I managed the rare treat of photographing this fat little fellow.He (and I know he is a he because of his colouration) is a Common Bronzewing, a native pigeon species. Although they are, as the name suggests, quite common they are also shy and will not often sit long enough to have their portrait taken.
They are quite gaudily coloured birds and the wing feathers are a metallic sheen that change colour depending on the angle the light strikes them. The first photo only kind of shows the variation because he is in the shade.
This second piccie is not such a good shot. He insisted on turning his back (I said they are shy!) but it does show just how brilliantly metallic those feathers are.

Sunday

Deb having arrived back from her conference on Saturday, we went out for a Sunday Drive. The Upper Yarra Valley beckoned again, because it is gorgeous and only an hour away from our front door.

After miserable weather all week, we had glorious spring weather on the weekend. Saturday it was sunny and 27°C (81°F) while on Sunday it was still sunny and still a respectable 22°C (72°F). 22° is warm enough for this Aussie to leave his coat in the car (although not leave his sweater behind).

We shot out to the park at the Upper Yarra Reservoir.
We sat at this funny little table in the park to eat.
I've included a picture showing the detail of one of the tree trunks. Unlike the deciduous trees of the northern hemisphere most of ours are evergreen Eucalyptus species. Instead of shedding their leaves in autumn many of our trees shed bark as they grow in the warmer months.
For those of you who live in the US you can see trees similar to this in California. California has millions of Sydney Blue Gums that have run wild. They are beautiful trees but they are a weed in California and they are part of the reason for the extreme wildfires they get there. Eucalyptus oil is highly flammable!

As a by the bye the fires in Portugal a while ago were also burning in Blue Gum forest. My brother who is a UK resident and holidays in Portugal says Blue Gums are so widespread there that a lot of the locals don't even realise they are not native to Portugal.

Near the picnic area is an old waterwheel.
The wheel is an original one from the 1870's. The frame and flume are mock-ups from when the wheel was moved here. Originally the wheel was used to run a lighting generator and stamper battery for a gold mine near here. When the mine closed down the wheel and lighting plant were bought by an enterprising local publican to light his hotel.
Finally in the 1950s the pub was due to be flooded when the dam was built so the wheel was salvaged to act as a sort of memorial to earlier times.

After lunch we meandered back along the valley towards Warburton. On the way we stopped to see another relic of gold mining in the area. The "Big Peninsula Tunnel", I posted about this tunnel's little sibling a while ago.
The "big" tunnel was cut for the same reason, to allow a section of the Yarra's bed to be mined for alluvial gold.

To get to the tunnel you climb down the side of a ridge and come to the river where the Parks Authority has installed an unusual means of getting across: Then you come to the tunnel which is a lot larger than its downstream mate:
Just for a change I got out from behind the camera to have a closer look:
Back in the car we headed towards Melbourne, stopping a couple of times to take advantage of the afternoon light to snap a couple (of hundred) photos.Warburton lies about 20 km (12 miles) behind the low ridge in the middle distance.
And just because I love this piece of countryside so much a final photo.
Mount Donna Buang is the third mountain (at the back) on the left-hand side. To give some sense of scale the black dots near the right hand side are cows.

As an interesting (and probably useless) piece of trivia the blue tinge the mountains show here is a result of a fine out-gassing of Eucalyptus oil from the leaves in the warm weather. Not surprising they're so flammable!

There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills

Or at least there was in the 1850’s and ‘60s.
Last weekend on our way back from the Yarra Reservoir, we stopped off to have a short walk. Just a short way from the road is a tight bend in the river that swings around a spur of rock.

At least the river used to go around. In the 1860s a group of miners got together and blasted this tunnel through what was known as “The Little Peninsula” to divert the river. This is the outfall.
As you can see with the river low (partly due to the drought and largely because of the reservoir upstream) it easily fits through the tunnel. Even before the building of the dam upstream I suspect the river would have easily rushed through here.

From the 1850s to the 1860’s there were a series of gold rushes in the then fledgling Colony of Victoria. These had a profound impact on Australia and Victoria. The Australian population tripled in a decade while that of Victoria grew by seven fold.
Badly managed growth, revolutionary ideas brought by those fleeing the 1848 European revolts and a colonial government bent on extracting as much as it could lead to discontent. From this discontent stemmed the most significant armed uprising in Australian History: The 1854 Eureka Rebellion.
At a meeting on Bakery Hill at Ballarat the miners raised the Southern Cross Flag and an oath of allegiance was sworn: "We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties."The miners then built the Eureka Stockade to defend the road from Melbourne.

The rebellion was quickly crushed by the Police and the Army, an action that caused 42 casualties. The public outcry at the inept handling of the affair led to the adoption of virtually all of the miner’s demands over the next few months.

Interestingly, the Southern Cross flag that flew over the stockade is taken as a symbol of liberty by most sectors of the Australian community today. While the Southern Cross still features on Australia’s flag.
Anyway I am straying from my point, which was the “Little Peninsula Tunnel”. During the gold rushes a number of discoveries were made in the Yarra Valley near Warburton and Hoddles Creek. Much of the gold found in the area was alluvial, so here the miners hit on diverting the Yarra from this bend so they could explore its bed for gold.

How much gold they found here is unknown.
This piccie shows the upstream inlet crossed by a bridge that leads to a nearby picnic area. The tunnel is about 30 metres long and from here with the river so low you can see through to the other end.So there it is, the light at the other end of the tunnel!