A fun history lesson!

A couple of weeks ago we traveled south to the town of Ballarat which is one of the most famous gold towns in Australian history. In 1854 there was an uprising of the miners or “diggers” as they were called then. That, by the way, is also what the Australian enlisted soldiers are called. U.S. soldiers are called “Joes” and UK soldiers are called “Toms”. There's your history lesson for the day.

The first night we saw a narration and light show that explained the reasons behind the uprising. Basically the miners were required to purchase licenses to pan for gold and the gold commissioner and police and British troops were unfairly taking advantage of the miners. The miners took up arms to defend their rights not unlike the colonist in the US.

They had sites set up as they were back in the 1800's and all the employees were in period clothing. There were many horses which the girls enjoyed immensely and the only thing more popular than the horses was the various cats that lived around the camp. The girls got to dress up as junior redcoats and they marched and searched a tent for hidden bags of gold. We all panned for gold, but Kim was the only one patient enough to find actual flakes of gold.



We celebrated a late Christmas on this trip too as we stopped by the consulate in Melbourne and picked up our mail that had been delayed due to the holidays. We only receive and send mail once a week and we took advantage of this time to mail out Christmas boxes as well.

A Secret Creek to Beat the Heat

We took a trip out to Beechworth to a place Phillip discovered on one of his motorcycle outings. There is a gorge that runs through Beechworth and there's a creek through the gorge that runs over a granite base. Over the years the water has carved pools into the rock and many are deep enough to either swim or soak in.

As you might guess the rocks are slippery and our little dog had a hard time getting her footing. We all had a wonderful time and it definitely cooled us down on a hot day. It was one of those off the beaten path kind of places and we were happy to find it.

Beechworth was one of the famous gold mining towns in the mid 1800's and has been preserved almost like it was back then. It’s a hot tourist spot, but the creek isn’t something the regular tourist would find. Hope to find more places like it.


You might ask what this picture of the bird is. It's a Kookabura. You can't really tell but he has a lizard in his mouth he just scooped up. The picture to the left is in one of the pools that had a small tunnel through from one to the other.

A Bushwalk at Mt Buffalo

The family visited Mt Buffalo Nat'l Park in NE Victoria shortly after Christmas. This was the place where we had gone in August to take the girls toboganning(sledding), but now things had warmed up. Phillip had the opportunity to visit the park in early Dec. with the Army to do what the Aussies call Adventure Training where he ab-seiled or rappeled down a rock cliff and then did a little rock climbing to get out. About 20 meters from where he went down the cliff was the platform that hang gliders took off from so that gives you an idea about where we were and how high we were.

When we got to the top of the mountain which is about a half hour drive along a very twisty road we found a man preparing to take a group rappelling. The girls had all kinds of questions for him, the primary of which was, "is it safe?" He just laughed and made a joke about women being more dangerous than rappelling, which the girls didn't get at all.

We started our bushwalk planning on heading towards an overlook and an underground river formed many years ago when some of the mountain shifted or collapsed or something and buried it. It was a nice walk on a well maintained trail. Most parts had steps built into the downslopes. We paused often and enjoyed the scenery and gave the girls a chance to make some sketches in their nature journals. This was actually a field trip for homeschool and they had an assignment to complete.

We made it about a kilometer down the trail when we got worried about the time and Katherine got a little tired and Rebecca started getting a blister on her heel, not to mention the fact that Phillip had just had the wires removed from his foot about a week prior, so we turned around and headed back out. After a water and potty break at the top we watched a child rappel off one of the shorter dropoffs which sparked some interest among our girls. Some said they thought it was cool and they'd like to try and others who said, "you'd never catch me doing that!"

Phillip had one last thing to show the girls before they left. Something he had been shown when they visited the park in early Dec. He had brought bird seed along and none of the girls could figure out why. He stood outside the car under the trees with his arms outstretched and all of a sudden a bright red parrot flew down and landed on his arm to eat the seed. The girls got out of the car and fed the parrot too. Phillip said that when they were up there before that there had been about 4 of these parrots, called Roselas.

We're definately going back and trying that again and hopefully getting a little longer walk in next time. We bought the season pass and it's only a little over an hour to get there from our house, so we have no excuse not to ...right?