LT65: SA My Home NSW Hume

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ISSUE 65 - SPRING 2020

ISSUE 65 SPRING 2020

NZ$15 / AU$15

AUSTRALIA

TASMANIA - SOUTH AUSTRALIA - SUNSHINE COAST - DAYDREAM ISLAND - NEW SOUTH WALES

L E I S U R E | C O R P O R AT E | L I F E S T Y L E |

PACIFIC ISLANDS TAHITI - VANUATU - SOLOMON ISLANDS - PAPUA NEW GUINEA

NEW ZEALAND KAIKOURA - GISBORNE - MID-CANTERBURY

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CRUISING

Destination Australia, South Australia

South Australia ‌ My Home

By Roderick Eime

Pennington Bay, Kangaroo Island ŠIsaac Forman, Serio

14 www.letstravelmag.com Australia, South Australia

"South Australia I was born, heave away, haul away …”

It was one of the few songs I enjoyed singing at primary school. I could identify with it. I recognised the history. It felt like my song and I could remember the words.

Even though South Australia was established by free settlers and colonial entrepreneurs as opposed to convicts, it was still a tough gig.

It took a while to work out the best places to grow stuff - like wheat, barley and wine grapes - and it wasn’t until a chap named Goyder was able to work out that most of the state was too dry and unpredictable for much at all. If fact, South Australia is actually the driest state on the driest continent. But hey, it’s home.

“With a bottle of whiskey in my hand We're bound for South Australia” After a long cruise from Prussia in the 1840s, my dad’s family settled in the Barossa Valley at a place called Concordia and started farming.

Okay, you won’t see our name on any of the famous labels like Penfolds, Jacob’s Creek, Wolf Blass, Henschke or St Hallett, although mum did type Max Schubert’s first Grange labels when she worked in the typing pool at the Magill winery in the ‘50s.

Today, the warm summer sun continues to bathe the verdant dales of the Barossa Valley much as the Englishman, George Fife Angus and the first Silesian Lutheran emigrants would have found it back then. The sandy loams and red clay terroir that characterise the broad Barossa region were quickly identified as an ideal soil for growing vines and varieties were promptly brought from Europe.

For many years the Barossa Valley winemakers were in a state of stagnation, producing mainly fortified wines. Then, from the midto late-20th century, skilled vintners like Penfold’s Schubert began developing exquisite table wines to

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cater to the evolving tastes of the global wine market. The Barossa Valley is now one of Australia's quintessential wine regions and a jewel in South Australia’s tourism crown.

A visit to the Barossa today is a true gourmet experience, with visitors strolling the historic streets of Tanunda, Nuriootpa and Angaston for such delights as Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop where lunch is a must - if you can get a table. Try one of the long-time favourites like Vintners, 1918 Bistro & Grill or Salter’s Kitchen, while wine bar options include Wanera and Vino Lokal, the home of Artisans of the Barossa.

We all know South Australia has made a big deal of wine tourism.

Actually, a really big deal. In fact, it is no exaggeration to call SA the ‘wine state’. With 44% of the nation’s vineyards, it is responsible for around half of the nation’s annual wine output. And it seems every time we pull a cork, there’s a new one popping up to join the established ones like McLaren Vale, Coonawarra and the Riverland.

The Adelaide Hills, once known for apples and strawberries is now resplendent in Pinot Gris and Riesling vineyards while the sparse expanses of the Eyre Peninsula now boast rich shiraz, cabernet sauvignon and merlot that have gained the attention of even James Halliday.

Murray River Cruising ©South Australia Tourism Commission

St Hugo, Barossa ©John Montesi

Maggie Beer's Farm Shop, Barossa ©Sven Kovac

By virtue of its isolation and efficient quarantining, the black death of the wine industry, Phylloxera, failed to take root in South Australia, making the vineyards of the Barossa and surrounds possibly the oldest living vines in the world.

When Matthew Flinders sighted the landmass he would call Kangaroo Island (KI) in 1802, we can be pretty sure he wasn’t scouting for somewhere to plant grapes. It was roughneck sealers and whalers who first exploited the waters around Backstairs Passage (the often rough, 13km body of water separating KI from the mainland), pushing the colonies of delightful sea lions to the

Admiral's Arch, Kangaroo Island ©South Australia Tourism Commission

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Piccadilly, Adelaide Hills ©South Australia Tourism Commission

©Penfold's Magill Estate brink of extinction - a predicament they are still struggling to recover from 200 years later.

Barrister's Block, Adelaide Hills ©Ryan Cantwell

Vino Lokal, Barossa ©John Kruger

Seppeltsfield Winery, Barossa ©South Australia Tourism Commission

This year’s bushfires wreaked havoc on the island, torching vast swathes of bushland and national park. The island took a big hit, but is recovering strongly. The shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, malbec, pinot noir and pinot gris grapes produce a distinct flavour that separates the island’s wines from mainland varietals. And if KI needed a ringing endorsement, it was Frenchman Jacques Lurton, a member of the largest winemaking family in the world, who fell in love with KI on his honeymoon in 1997 and chose it as the site for his big wine adventure, Islander Estate Vineyards.

Exploring the wine regions in search of the perfect grape is all the excuse anyone needs to make a complete holiday of the experience. You can even combine the country’s most famous river cruise experience with an opportunity to sample some of the more remote wineries that line the iconic Murray River, the country’s largest river by volume that extends deep into Victoria and New South Wales, forming the border between the two most populous states.

The imperious Murray Princess is the largest sternwheeler in the Southern Hemisphere and ventures as far as Waikerie and Renmark from

its base at historic Mannum, once a hub for the then-thriving paddle steamer industry that opened up the country’s fledgling agricultural endeavours, including wine.

The 4- and 7-night cruises include a visit to the Burk Salter Boutique Winery Cellar Door at Blanchetown, a location etched in my own memory from childhood visits to my grandparents holiday shack back when Blanchetown was a dusty outpost with a river crossing served by a simple vehicular ferry.

My cute nostalgic musings are but a pimple on the butt of SA’s enormous wine offerings.

A committed aficionado could easily spend every moment of their leave entitlements plumbing the depths of SA’s extensive wine territories while enjoying the peripheral delicacies like sumptuous ‘paddock to plate’, free-range and organic gourmet offerings ranging from dairy, meat, olive and delicious fruit of all kinds.

“Heave away, oh hear me

sing

bound

... for

We're South

Australia” www.sealink.com.au www.southaustralia.com

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Destination Australia, New South Wales

Bypassed But Not Forgotten Words and Images by Roderick Eime

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merica has Route 66 and Australia has Route 31.

Also known as the Hume Highway, it’s arguably Australia's most important and historic thoroughfare and has been a work-in-progress for 200 years.

Many Australian road-trippers with the grey evidence of years will recall the Old Hume Highway (OHH) with a mixture of vague nostalgia and pure disgust. When I started solo interstate drives in my little Ford Escort back in the early ‘80s, battling the Hume was not something to look forward to. Narrow, twisty and in shamefully decrepit condition, I still shiver at the memory of several close calls.

In August 2013, the $250m Holbrook bypass signalled the final act of duplication and now we have the dubious pleasure of driving or riding from Sydney to Melbourne without having to bother any of those poor people in Holbrook, Yass, Gundagai or Albury.

Without denying the convenience and safety of the slick new bitumen, it has removed the arousal of discovery one usually seeks on a leisurely road trip. But fear not, there is hope.

1 - RETRACING THE HUME Even though it seems like it’s been there forever, the Hume Highway has only officially existed since it was named in 1928, just two years after the USA’s own Route 66, although the Hume didn’t get its numerical ‘31’ guernsey until the 1950s.

Prior to its modern life as the Hume Highway, a hotch-potch of roads, tracks and trails existed between Sydney and Melbourne, beginning with those carved out by the namesake explorer, Parramatta-born Hamilton Hume and his English sidekick, Bill Hovell. The two didn’t get on that well but still managed to stick it out from Sydney to Port Phillip and back in 1824.

Things picked up rapidly after the odd couple returned with the news of favourable pastures to the

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southwest of Sydney which spurred on road-building big time, driven by then Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who was keen to kick the colony along. The ‘Great South Road’ (GSR) was born and gradually evolved into a more-or-less continuous set of thoroughfares that joined Sydney to Melbourne after the southern capital was proclaimed in 1835.

Goldrushes in the 1850s and the rise of coach travel like that of Cobb & Co., further underscored the need for better roads even though this development was delayed by the more comfortable rail, and later air, options.

Inns, hotels, stables and service depots popped up along the route and many of these fascinating old staging posts can still be seen on the backroads where the early Hume and Great South Roads once wound through the bush. Remote roads also spurned a new industry… bushranging.

Now, with most of the towns and villages bypassed, the great challenge today is to experience as much of the old routes and as little of the bland motorway as possible, visiting the little hamlets and rural centres which once rumbled to the sounds of 18-wheelers all through the night.

2 - RAZORBACK On the way to the NSW Southern Highlands, you can explore the old route through Narellan, Camden and Picton, picking up portions of old Route 31 as well as The Great South Road.

Out of Camden, pick either the Old Hume Highway which retraces the route past the historic truckers blockade of 1979, or venture a click to the west to the convict-built Old Razorback Road which was itself bypassed in the 1930s. Now that’s a wild ride!

3 - SOUTHERN HIGH(PIE)LANDS It’s easy to linger here in the region roughly bounded by Robertson,

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Moss Vale, Bowral and Berrima, with its wineries, gourmet produce and scenic roads. Every June is the Pie Festival but that shouldn’t be your excuse to only visit once a year.

The Old South Road is a great bypass that will take you through Moss Vale to Sutton Forest if you’d rather keep going, or swing west at Alpine and roll through to Berrima on the OHH. Best Pie: DeliLicious, Bundanoon Stay: Jellore Cottage Berrima. www.jellorecottage.com.au 4 - Go Go Goulburn If you don’t mind a bit of unsealed, follow Canyonleigh Road out through Brayton and Towrang along the old GSR and dawdle into Goulburn where a bonanza of bypassed attractions await, like the ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of books and old wares at the Argyle Emporium in the old police station.

Check in to the visitor centre near the train station to see what’s open, but note the Railway Heritage Centre and old brewery are closed.

Eat: Paragon Cafe www.paragoncafe.com.au Stay: Quest Apartments www.questapartments.com.au 5 - GUNNING FOR GUNNING At Breadalbane ditch the freeway and head along the OHH through Cullerin to Gunning where an even older route will take you through Ben Hall territory via Mutmutbilly.

Settled in 1821, Gunning was already happening when H&H set off south.

Visit: The Picture House Gallery and Bookshop owned by actor Max Cullen 6 - YASS SIR There are lots of old segments of the highway running parallel to the motorway that can be explored but do so carefully as many segments are now divided by gates and grids.

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The route through Manton along Yass Valley Way will see you safely into Yass (bypassed in 1994) Coffee stop: Tootsie in the 1930s garage www.tootsiegallerycafe.com.au 7 - JUMP FOR JUGIONG After a glance at the rusting relics at Robinson’s of Bookham, make a point of stopping in at Jugiong, one of the smaller towns bypassed in 1995 but refusing to lay down and die.

The Sir George Hotel, Jugiong Wine Cellar and Long Track Pantry are highlights of any Hume journey and are enormously popular with trailertoting nomads and day-trippers alike.

Visit: Jugiong Wine Cellar www.jugiongwinecellar.com 8 - PAT THE DOG AT GUNDAGAI A gorgeous old main street with true country charm, Gundagai was bypassed back in 1977 when the big Sheahan Bridge relieved the poor old wooden viaduct that carried everything for 80 years prior. If you drove across that bridge back in the day, take a bow. The lolly shop at the Tuckerbox is a bit of a misnomer, because you can get fabulous produce from all across the locality.

Visit: Dog on the Tuckerbox Lolly Shop www.thedogonthetuckerbox.com Stay: Flash Jacks Boutique Hotel www.flashjacks.com.au or Hillview Farmstay, Tumblong www.hillviewfarmstay.com.au Eat: Criterion Hotel 9 - DIVE HOLBROOK If you head out of Gundagai, through Tumblong and detour via Mundarlo (Junee turnoff) you’ll get a taste of how folks travelled way back in the day. It’s mostly unsealed. When you cross the Sturt Highway, you’ll find the excellent Borambola Winery.

Holbrook was the last town to be bypassed in 2013 but retains certain

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notoriety for having an Oberon-class submarine (the former HMAS Otway) and museum smack in the middle of town.

Visit: Lady Gail’s Bookshop in the main street.

10 - ALL STOP ALBURY We finish our NSW sector at the twin towns of Albury-Wodonga where there is plenty to see and do.

Stay: Waverley BNB www.waverleybnb.com.au or Mantra Albury Hotel www.mantrahotels.com Visit: Botanic Gardens www.destinationnsw.com.au

“Anyone who has driven the old Hume, meandering from town to town, cruising down their main streets, winding around hills, ducking under and over railway lines will know its glorious secret – it was never a highway except in name.

Rather, it linked inland cities, towns, villages, hamlets and dots on maps – for the early roads went not where they should, but only where they could.”

(Peter FitzSimons 2013)

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UNFORGETTABLE HOUSEBOATS, MURRAY RIVER, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

HEY, NEW ZEALAND WHEN YOU’RE READY, WE’VE SAVED YOU A SEAT.

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2/06/2020 10:25:06 AM