First off, Port Fairy. Port Fairy has over 50 National Trust listed buildings and is quite a visual feast.
Here is Shotgun and Fat Albert enjoying the sea breeze at the beachfront of Port Fairy.
On the way out of Port Fairy, I spied the Catholic Church and just had to double-back and take some photos. One of the photo textbooks emphasizes that you should never be afraid to go back and take more photos, even go back at different times of day to catch different lights and shade. This is somehting I'm still learning.
Portland. Shortly after Port Fairy, you hit Portland. Its funny how misleading a dot on a map can be. Portland is actually quite large, well serviced and certainly worth a return visit in the future. Is is as the name says, a port with a fair bit of land.
On the way to Portland is this mystery fence. Anyone need a new pair of shoes?
Its hard to make out here, but the port is in the distance.
To get to Mount Gambier, you need to cross into South Australia. It was here where I found that someone at the Portland MacDonalds wanted Shotgun more than I did. So now I have no travelling companion.
Then onto the Mount Gambier Blue Lake. The colour changes twice a year. The causes of the colour and the changes is still a source of conjecture but generally thought to be something to do with different rainfall and a harmless algae. Mount Gambier owes its existence to this abundant water source.
The memorial to Adam Lindsay Gordon provide food for thought. Many of our greatest thinkers and leaders suffered from depression yet achieved great things. It was Sir Winston Churchill who came up with the name "the black dog" for his own depression. Australian men who work on the land today are highly represented in the numbers do depression and suicide and this is an area that Australia needs to do a lot more work on. Not just the depression, but the constant pressures, many of which do not need to exist, that these men face every day. I mean, do we need to ban guns and make hunting difficult when our agriculture is suffereing from feral pigs, cats, dogs, rabbits and goats? Why not re-introduce bounties on these animals and allow those with the desire and skill to clean up these pests? Whilst we pour money into dubious schemes such as a poorly managed health payroll system that costs over 1.4 billion dollars, why not divert just a tiny bit into subsidizing succession planning so that farmers can properly plan the transition of property between generations? Little things that can make a big difference to the families who work long hours so to bring us food and fibre. They are my thoughts, anyhow.
