2006/08 Australia trip - Tower Hill |
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The rest of the day we had to drive: to Mount Gambier, close to the border with Victoria, around Port Fairy, and on towards 
Warrnambool. They’re all great places to explore but not this time. There was no quarantine at the Victorian border except for potatoes.
As we were driving we’d seen some currawongs (crow-like birds with a yellow evil eye) and crimson rosellas 
(parrots) and sulphur-crested cockatoos, signs that we were getting into Victoria’s moister ecosystem. We were also seeing road signs warning of collisions with koalas and wombats. (Wombats don’t fly. They are about the size of a pig and the consistency of a rock – hitting one may terminate your car.)
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Tower Hill koalas (16.06) |
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As we approached Warrnambool I saw a sign for Tower Hill, and remembered that John had led us there once, and that it was a good place to see emus and koalas. Tower Hill is an extinct volcano and the animals are mainly on the volcanic plug in the centre of the crater’s lake. We found plenty of emus and koalas and kangaroos. When agitated, emus make a strange drumming noise from deep inside their bodies. One of them was trying to shepherd a couple of wayward chicks and he was drumming furiously. The chicks were the size of chickens, short-necked, and striped like zebras, quite unlike their parents. It was nearly dark when we saw them but I managed to get this fuzzy picture.
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There was one tree with five koalas in residence, including a young one and a mother with a baby in its pouch. Koalas usually 
spend their days fast asleep in the fork of a tall gum tree, but these had just woken up and they were hungry and active. The mother even came down her tree, hopped quickly across to another, and then climbed up to the top of that where she hung out on a branch until she could grab leaves from another tree. They move very ponderously through the branches, but then take a flying leap to another tree limb.
They kept us entertained until we realized that it was dark and we had better find somewhere to sleep for the night. We ended up with a nice spot at the town campground in Kuroit, just a few miles away.