It was the Melbourne Cup public holiday weekend in Victoria which coincided with our birthdays, and although we don’t celebrate (either event), we do like to get way and where better to spend four glorious days than in Yackandandah, nestled within the Victorian high country, a short distance from another favourite place of ours, Beechworth. We’d had the caravan park in Yackandandah booked for months and are so grateful we did; it was packed (for our first three nights) and despite the less than satisfactory amenities the location adjacent to the creek and short stroll to town made it more than perfect. The Yackandandah Star Hotel radio jingle had been reverberating as an ear worm in the lead up to our adventure into the mountains and we were elated to discover the vibe hadn’t changed since we last visited in 2018 and that the food on offer was even better than we remembered; dinning in for the four nights of our stay, indulging in the beef brisket and barramundi, most likely the best we have tasted (although I did say this about the barramundi we ate at the Threeways Roadhouse, NT). Just out of the main town centre we discovered a groovy little coffee shop, located in an old train carriage called The Guard which serves toasties and hot drinks in mugs, this place doesn’t believe in takeaway cups and we loved that; having to drink in from a mug chosen from an odd assortment, rather than get a takeaway paper cup made us slow down and enjoy the moment of being in this beautiful town. We love everything about Yackandandah! 

​The rail bridge over Curdies River was constructed in 1892 to facilitate the Timboon-Camperdown Line and provided access to the coastal town of Port Campbell and helped local creamery and butter produces access markets to sell their products. The bridge was constructed of local Heytesbury forest timber and displays both utilitarian bridge and wharf building techniques. The rail line was closed in 1986 and the bridge was restored to form part of the Timboon-Camperdown Rail Tail. The bridge is one of the few surviving railway structures of this type in Victoria. 

I went into the Information Centre at Elmore looking to purchase local honey and left, without honey, but with knowledge I never knew I needed. The welcoming Information Centre volunteer invited the three of us to view the interactive museum display which taught us the suburb of Sunshine in Melbourne was named after the HV McKay "Sunshine" Combine Harvester where the factory was located.

Legend has it or so it was told to us by Gumby's Step Dad that the train station in Maryborough, Victoria should have been construction in Maryborough, Queensland. Upon completion the station boasted the longest platform in Victoria and remains one of the most impressive examples of Queen Ann architecture with stucco trimmings and Dutch-Anglo influences; For a town with a population of under 8,000 the station is quite unique. 

We visited Maryborough on a day trip from Bendigo a distance of approximately 70kms in a  south west direction to see the birth place of Gumby's Step Dad. The town is adorned with a fantastic array of mid to late nineteen century gold boom architecture and is a fascinating place to stroll around on a Sunday afternoon.

According to Britannia "the town was founded in 1854 during a gold rush. It was renamed after the Irish birthplace of the local police commissioner and was proclaimed a municipality in 1857." 

​Arriving at the Threeways Roadhouse we promptly unhitched Florence and took off south down the Stuart Highway in the direction we had just come from. And I literally mean we “took off” down the highway, unshackled from Florence, Cherry was able to really feel the breeze through her radiator grill as we took advantage of the 130km speed limit! Just north of Tennant Creek we had passed the Overland Telegraph Line Station and I was bursting to check it out. I’m completing fascinating by stone dwellings and didn’t want to miss an opportunity to visit a restored stone dwelling in Central Australia. Access to the Station’s interior requires a key obtained from the visitor’s centre, which being late in the day we didn’t have time to collect but we made the most of our experience, exploring the surrounding buildings and old graves. The visit definitely had a profound impact on me, and I was left pondering the connection between stone dwellings and hot-dry arid climates. 

Extract from Gumby’s unfinished 2022 Honours Thesis…
As I stepped from the air-conditioned sanctuary of the car, I was struck by the intensity of the heat, I felt as though I’d just cracked the door of a hot oven, instantly blasted, my cheeks flushed, eyes watered, and lungs burnt as I gulped for air. It was late afternoon in Jurnkkurakurr (Tennant Creek), Central Australia, January 2019, Australia was experiencing an “unusual extended period of heatwaves” (BoM, 2019, 14 March, p. 4), the Larapinta Trail in Tjoritja (West MacDonnell National Park) near Mparntwe (Alice Springs) was ablaze (DTSC, 2019), and the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres had issued a bleak outlook, “I believe we are losing the race. Climate change is running faster than we are” (UN, 2019, para. 3).

The Tennant Creek Overland Telegraph Line Station situated approximately 520 kilometres north of Alice Springs, constructed of stone in 1874 (PWCNT, 2002), was restored and opened to the public in 2012. Michael Holstein a traditional stonemason was engaged to dismantle and rebuild the external Station walls, stone by stone, he stated the stone was laid incorrectly, the grain faced the wrong direction permitting it to shale in the wind (Brain, 2012). Completed in 1872 the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) was heralded as an engineering triumph that included the installation of 36,000 poles traversing the continent, approximately 3,000 kilometres, south to north, from Kurdnatta (Port Augusta) to Garramilla (Darwin), and included the construction of eleven repeater Stations, to house equipment and personnel (Pugh, 2022).
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When I visited the Station in January 2019, Tennant Creek had just experienced a record-breaking 23 consecutive days over 40°C (BoM, 2019, p.30). There were no other cars in the carpark as I retreated from the intensity of the sun under the verandah and noticed the cooling effect created by the stone walls. I was reminded of traditional stone architecture prominent in the Middle East. The Köppen-Geiger climate system classified Tennant Creek as BWh, an arid hot-dry desert, the same classification given to the Middle East, countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, and Egypt (Beck et al., 2018).  I wondered if the Tennant Creek OTL Station had been constructed from locally quarried stone in response to the climate, and what it was like to live in such a building?