Wrapped up in country
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25th January 2009
Latitude 38'23, Longitude 143'53
Start Mileage: 8212km
Finish Mileage: 8934km
Fuel reading: 7.01/100kms
Trip Notes: Ancient Australia at Lake Condah
It is only 132km from Melbourne to Dean’s Marsh, but the land is dense with story, the Koorie people would say. After the yawning emptiness of the outback and untouched wilderness of Tasmania, the Great Ocean Road throbs with human activity. Tourist buses trawl the quaint English seaside towns of Torquay and Anglesea, welcoming signs announce healing centres, and modernist architecture appears on the seaside cliffs. There was altogether too much of it. It is beautiful, but I felt vaguely nostalgic for the places when we were the only car on the road.
Local aboriginal artist Vicki Couzens is infinitely more gracious. When we met, she told us excitedly about her birthplace at Tower Bridge. She doesn’t seem to mind the tourists. The remains of stone houses and eel traps at Lake Condah are over eight thousand years old, and the National Museum has possum skin cloaks from the area that date back to 1857. A bigger history is running through her blood.
Some of the local boys take us out to show us the lake, the wetland regeneration and eel trap system. Vicki has started making the cloaks again. She is telling the story of her people in the old way. One girl’s cloak is engraved with the river where she was born, the mission of her grandparents, and a boxing troupe that she loved as a child.
We spent the evening watching Vicki’s husband play guitar in Dean’s Marsh, but I was distracted. All the talk of country had made me anxious to get out bush again. We were due to be Alice Springs in six days, but we still had two projects to visit in Victoria and Bega. 4000km of Snowy Mountain country and bush roads lay ahead of us, and I can’t deny that I wanted to be out on the open road.
Not that I had to explain anything to Vicki’s mob. They know all about wanting to get all wrapped up in country. But I could only laugh when we strike up a conversation about getting out of the tourist areas, and an old man asked, “Tell me son, why don’t tourists like other tourists?”