2010/09 Australia trip - Weddin Mountains |
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We headed off to the northeast with the sun in our eyes. Having the sun to our north was something else to get used to. We were on the Newell Highway; all the highways have numbers too but hardly anyone uses them. With the diversion to Shepparton we were no longer going to pass through Wagga Wagga; the town’s name became a joke in England in the fifties, as the birthplace of Bill Kerr, one of the characters in the Hancock’s Half Hour radio show. However, as compensation, we passed through Grong Grong; poetic lot these Australians.
We had blue sky and tiny white clouds above a flat quilt of pale yellow canola and green wheat fields, much like the Canadian prairies. There was the occasional beef cattle range, dotted with yellow wattles and great swaths of purple flowers.
We followed the Newell Highway to Narrandera and West Wyalong with Sandie driving, her turn to get accustomed to driving on the left and driving with a manual clutch. The highway had a barrage of signs exhorting drivers to rest and revive and make use of the abundant rest areas. We concluded that NSW drivers must be a sleepy bunch.
We turned east onto the Mid Western Highway, looking for a road to lead us into the Weddin Mountains, which had been tantalizingly on the horizon for most of the afternoon.
We camped in the national park amidst a rampart of rock, and we hiked up to Ben Hall’s cave; he was a bushranger or bandit who used the mountains as a hideout.
We couldn’t get into the cave; it was fenced off as too dangerous, so we had enough daylight for another walk, up 
Bertha’s Gully. I’ve since tried to find out who Bertha was and why the gully was named, but all I found was that it used to be named Black Gin Gully. Must be some stories there.
It was a warm, pleasant evening for a walk and we saw plentiful wallabies and birds, but eventually we ran out of daylight and had to give up and watch the sunset instead. We’d planned on leaving the next morning but had no choice anyway as the park was going to be closed the next evening due to an aerial cull, which we assumed meant that marksmen in helicopters were going to be shooting feral pigs or foxes or goats.