river gives up its mist like grey wraiths twisting slowly across the water andclimbing the walls of the canyon, delicate tendrils that wave and ripple and are quickly gone.
NOW
It’s still there, the Highland Caravan Park, still with the piper on the sign and the shop still in the same building and still with the meagre supplies, a few tins and a bread rack and a chiller cabinet. Some cooking oil, this time. We speak to reception and ask them how long the camp’s been there.
–Ages, they say.
Look around, remember, drive into Armidale, park up, breakfast, Tony goes off to find an internet caff and I wander, buy some books, enter the fluorescent hell of the underground shopping centre and find a camping shop and buy a ten-gallon water jug in case the water runs dry in the van in the middle of the desert. Pretty enough frontier-style town, this. I’d heard a lot about the merits of Tim Tam biscuits so I buy some and eat them and am disappointed. Sit on a bench beneath a tree, smoke, read a local paper. Tim Tams are just like Penguins but with jam and stuff inside. One capuccino-flavoured which is so sweet as to be inedible. Need fruit. Can’t keep fresh fruit in the van as it has to be given up at each state boundary because of the fruit fly so should stock up on it now, really. Can’t be arsed. Eat another Tim Tam. Peach or something. Tastes of purple.
On to Uralla. The grave of Thunderbolt.
–Remember stopping here?, Tony asks, and I shake my head.
–Not really. Vaguely.
Just recollected heroics in my head. Bushranger Thunderbolt: robbed mail coaches and homes in the Liverpool Ranges District. Shot dead by Constable Walker in 1870, who first shot Thunderbolt’s horse to draw the man out of hiding. Apparently, or so the sign says, Thunderbolt, for an armed robber, was a nice enough feller. These outlaws were once an Oz embarrassment; cruel, criminal, the convict strain asserting itself. Now, they’re pioneering heroes, defiant, true rebels, exemplars of the Aussie spirit, untameable and beautifully wild. I’ll see this most forcefully when I reach Ned Kelly country, but it’s here, too, in Uralla; the well-tended grave, the iron statue at the road-side, Thunderbolt on his rearing steed.
Apparently there’s a New England region in Oz as well as in the states because I’m in it and I’ve got a booklet that tells me so. It’s ‘renowned for its impressive historical buildings, aboriginal rock art and Regional Museums’. Main town is Armidale. ‘Traditional landowners’ were the Anaiwan people, who left their rock art in the Mt Yarrowyck Nature Reserve. White settlement began around 1830. Ben Lomond has a railway station, opened in 1884 and named after the area’s highest mountain. Aboriginal name is Or-one geer, which means ‘plenty white gum’. Wine is produced here; fourty-four growers and labels. Loads of national parks. Armidale is known as the ‘Third City of the Arts’, I’m told; regular events include the Women’s Comedy Festival and the Pack Saddle Art Exhibition. There’s a university, with 18,000 students. Armidale’s population is 25,000, the ‘city’ has ‘two pedestrian malls, surrounding these malls are many fine cafés with alfresco dining and wonderful shopping arcades, from large department store’s to small gift shops and more’. By God, I can feel their pull. And it seems that an ineptitude with apostrophes is not confined toBritish greengrocers. The town was named Armidale by John Oxley, first European to explore the area in 1818, named after MacDonald’s castle on the Isle of Skye. Uralla, where I am right now, is from the Anaiwan dialect and means, maybe, ‘ceremonial meeting place’. The booklet tells me that there are many antique emporia in the town ‘for those who prefer fossicking in shops’, and I’m impressed at the word. Always pleasing to see the resurrection of archaic terms. It’s used again, though, in the section on Guyra: ‘Imagine trying your
NOW
It’s still there, the Highland Caravan Park, still with the piper on the sign and the shop still in the same building and still with the meagre supplies, a few tins and a bread rack and a chiller cabinet. Some cooking oil, this time. We speak to reception and ask them how long the camp’s been there.
–Ages, they say.
Look around, remember, drive into Armidale, park up, breakfast, Tony goes off to find an internet caff and I wander, buy some books, enter the fluorescent hell of the underground shopping centre and find a camping shop and buy a ten-gallon water jug in case the water runs dry in the van in the middle of the desert. Pretty enough frontier-style town, this. I’d heard a lot about the merits of Tim Tam biscuits so I buy some and eat them and am disappointed. Sit on a bench beneath a tree, smoke, read a local paper. Tim Tams are just like Penguins but with jam and stuff inside. One capuccino-flavoured which is so sweet as to be inedible. Need fruit. Can’t keep fresh fruit in the van as it has to be given up at each state boundary because of the fruit fly so should stock up on it now, really. Can’t be arsed. Eat another Tim Tam. Peach or something. Tastes of purple.
On to Uralla. The grave of Thunderbolt.
–Remember stopping here?, Tony asks, and I shake my head.
–Not really. Vaguely.
Just recollected heroics in my head. Bushranger Thunderbolt: robbed mail coaches and homes in the Liverpool Ranges District. Shot dead by Constable Walker in 1870, who first shot Thunderbolt’s horse to draw the man out of hiding. Apparently, or so the sign says, Thunderbolt, for an armed robber, was a nice enough feller. These outlaws were once an Oz embarrassment; cruel, criminal, the convict strain asserting itself. Now, they’re pioneering heroes, defiant, true rebels, exemplars of the Aussie spirit, untameable and beautifully wild. I’ll see this most forcefully when I reach Ned Kelly country, but it’s here, too, in Uralla; the well-tended grave, the iron statue at the road-side, Thunderbolt on his rearing steed.
Apparently there’s a New England region in Oz as well as in the states because I’m in it and I’ve got a booklet that tells me so. It’s ‘renowned for its impressive historical buildings, aboriginal rock art and Regional Museums’. Main town is Armidale. ‘Traditional landowners’ were the Anaiwan people, who left their rock art in the Mt Yarrowyck Nature Reserve. White settlement began around 1830. Ben Lomond has a railway station, opened in 1884 and named after the area’s highest mountain. Aboriginal name is Or-one geer, which means ‘plenty white gum’. Wine is produced here; fourty-four growers and labels. Loads of national parks. Armidale is known as the ‘Third City of the Arts’, I’m told; regular events include the Women’s Comedy Festival and the Pack Saddle Art Exhibition. There’s a university, with 18,000 students. Armidale’s population is 25,000, the ‘city’ has ‘two pedestrian malls, surrounding these malls are many fine cafés with alfresco dining and wonderful shopping arcades, from large department store’s to small gift shops and more’. By God, I can feel their pull. And it seems that an ineptitude with apostrophes is not confined toBritish greengrocers. The town was named Armidale by John Oxley, first European to explore the area in 1818, named after MacDonald’s castle on the Isle of Skye. Uralla, where I am right now, is from the Anaiwan dialect and means, maybe, ‘ceremonial meeting place’. The booklet tells me that there are many antique emporia in the town ‘for those who prefer fossicking in shops’, and I’m impressed at the word. Always pleasing to see the resurrection of archaic terms. It’s used again, though, in the section on Guyra: ‘Imagine trying your
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