Snowy towns part 2 and on to Mallacoota

We have been able to revisit Mallacoota courtesy of kind friends with a house there.  En route we filled in a few gaps in our ”every town in NSW” project.  This is a 6 part series - links to the other parts are at the end of this post.

The first town (it has a memorial so must be a town) was Bredbo.  This is at first glance a series of places flogging stuff to passing ski-traffic but we found quite a well developed street pattern to the West of the main drag.  The war memorial is an honour roll inside the Memorial Hall which as usual for such places was locked.

 The design of the Catholic Church was interesting, especially the free-standing bell, which seems to be a standard feature of these churches in the area.

Next stop was Nimmitabel (referred to by some friends with a bush block there as ‘Nimmie’).  The memorial there is rather nicely designed.

 It also refers to the Men from Snowy River March (see Delegate below) and a side plaque says that Correy – subject of a special memorial in Cooma – actually joined the march at Nimmitabel.

The memorial also has a pine tree from the original Lone Pine at Gallipolli.

 While we stopped to take a picture of this old building a couple of folk wandered across the road in front of oncoming traffic.  The bloke advised his lady “Come on, or you’ll get run under.”  Which caused me to wonder why we usually say run over?

 Our plan was to get to Bombala next.  However we came across the small settlement of Bibbenluke, which might have been a town.  The only memorial we found was to releasing trout so it didn’t qualify.

 The decoration of the school was pretty good however!

 On getting to Bombala (possibly Bommie”?) we checked out the outside of the courthouse ...

 ...  and a Catholic Church.  After a few recent places where the churches had been open it was disappointing that this one wasn’t.

I had a brief conversation with the bloke at the Visitors Centre to see what he knew about the “Men from Snowy River” marches.  The answer was very little, but he did seem to see some possibilities in a re-enactment.  He was currently trying (with no resources) to get something happening to commemorate the centenary of the area’s consideration for the site of the National Capital.  One building had a painted sign saying “Melbourne 520km, Sydney 530km”.  It seems strange to celebrate somewhere being a long way from anywhere!

There were many stops on the historic walk of which saw a few.  The old theatre was interesting in that the facade is iron, rather than brick.

 Obviously they weren't worried about folk hitting the veranda of the Imperial pub.

The reference to 'Bikers welcome' probably refers to the Bike festival they hold each year.  From the photographs in a shopfront this is a big deal, covering all sorts of bikes, not just a NSW equivalent of Sturgis.

The 'brand' of the Bombala area is "Platypus country".  By the seats in the streets shall ye know them!

We spent some time talking with the lady running the garden/gift shop, whose husband makes things from iron.  Apparently some properties have mountains of horse shoes which he buys and reuses.  As well as this apple he makes pears but is booked up for them until September 2013.  Nice folk who deserve success!  (I went to link their email address and Google reminded me about spammers.  So, if folk want to join the queue for a horseshoe or other interesting metal sculpture contact lomas4(at)bigpond.com - replacing (at) with the conventional symbol).  

 There are quite a lot of old buildings in the main street (the historic walk visits 35 sites) but here is a sample represented by the NAB building, which is still a Bank.  As far as I could see there wasn't an ATM anywhere in the town (Westpac have a branch but service if by fleshware also) presumably it is cheaper to pay a couple of folk to serve punters than to maintain a machine at least 80km from the next  nearest 'hole in the wall'.

 The War Memorial is opposite the Bombala Hotel.

Then on to Delegate.  Apart from being the start of the March it is the closest town to the Black-Allan line, which is the section of border that is purely a directional line, rather than following the river.

It is possibly also a contender for smallest RSL clubhouse in the country.  Economic efficiency is also a focus in this town: note lawn mowers.

 This is the formal memorial to mark the start of the Marches.

 There were a lot of murals around the town including these on the dunney.

 For some reason I didn’t check my image of the mural outside the Town Museum depicting the March and it was garbage. However, the display inside the Museum was excellent.

 I decided to take a short cut via Craigie to get back to the Monaro Highway.  This would have been fine if I had checked the map which showed we had to go to Mila after Craigie.  As I didn’t, we had a small detour which negated the distance saving.  At least at the next choice they had a sign saying ‘Cann River” to indicate one should turn off the nice bitumen on to a dirt road!

Imlay Rd was pleasant with much flowering wattle and leptospermum. It also had lots of bikers – mainly rice-burners rather than Harleys – enjoying the bends.  

On, on into Victoria and Mallacoota.  The house was as we remembered it and was thoroughly checked out by the small dog from building level 

 and a pelican from above.

We had a great serve of Barramundi and chips from Lee’s Take away in town but retired early due to feeling knackered for some reason.  The night was interrupted by something appearing to be scrabbling around in the flue of the fire.  I couldn’t work out how to deal with it at 2am and by the morning it had quietened down. 

By the end of today this edition of the Mallacoota bird list was 26 species.

Here are links to other parts of this saga:

Day 2 Walks to the south of Mallacoota (flower pictures)

Day 3 Walks to the North of Mallacoota (plant and Goanna pictures)

Day 4 Trip home and many NSW Towns.

The Possum saga

Unidentified flowers.