The House(s) of Fran_mart

If perpetrated in your vicinity this is far worse than Puberty Blues ! Our day began in Ouyen with a walk round the very large sports centre to inspect the facilities.  (I say very large because I reckon you could fit several English villages into the oval alone.) The area was particularly interesting with the history of the area's sporting teams being shown in a couple of ways.  The simplest was this sign showing how 6 clubs became 2 and then 1.  If one is looking for somewhere to dump a bit of sympathy think of Ouyen in the period from 1971 to 1996 when they had two teams, one wearing the same coloured guernsey as St Kilda AFC and the other, Melbourne AFC!  To make matters worse when those two clubs amalgamated before the 1997 season they chose to stick with Melbourne colours!  (Looking at the team's webpage it would appear that the Ouyen team are going a lot better than their big-city namesakes.)  A less straightforward approach to the history i...

The title of this posts comes from correspondence with a friend who told a yarn from her childhood. While she was on a visit to the general area of Moulamein a carer got bogged due to rain and (probably) black soil, which resulted in the friend - a city person at age 7 - having to walk home with the carer across paddocks populated by fearsome beasts (ie bovines). That offered a blogpost title too good to ignore.  See below for more recent (and possibly more fearsome) beasts near Moulamein. It was a lot quicker closing the camper without having to deconstruct the annex.  So we were on the road quite quickly and heading out towards Conargo and Deniliquin.  The country towards Conargo was a bit lacking in contours.  In fact, as Frances said, it was MBF: Mind Boggingly Flat. A few kilometres down the road we came across some of the famed "slow moving farm equipment".  I didn't get quite as close to this example as the zoomed image suggests, but I am not argu...

All true Australians will recognise this title as a reference to a manifesto given orally by Ned Kelly to his associate, Joe Byrnes, in the course of a bank job at Jerilderie.  We visited there yesterday and this is the story of that trip. We set off about 9am so the fog had lifted.   No  problems  getting to Bookham where a driver reviver was nu operation.  We didn't need more coffee, just to get rid of the stuff we'd already had.    On on down the Highway. Just after Gundagai an ambulance came past us going in a serious manner.  We hoped that whatever it was attending was on the Albury road.  Wrong.   It was difficult to work out how the car and van had ended up in this situation and at least one person in the car was in a neck brace being loaded into an Ambulance. Refueled in Wagga and stopped in Collingulie to photograph the Memorial Hall.   Here we turned off the Sturt Hi...