Journey to Mildura and Sunraysia

You can tell when we have been too busy doing things to blog. This particular weekend we had decided to go some where camping but the weather was not cooperating and there was a weather warning out for most of Victoria in anticipation of heavy rains and flooding. The cool wet weather steered us north rather than toward the coast, up toward the Mallee on the edge of the Outback.

We started northwest through Horsham just as the rains began. Horsham could be any Canadian agricultural service town. Just imagine the pickup trucks replaced with utes, and the farmers in shorts more often than jeans. Trade a few poplars for gum trees and then add the familiar fields of grain and canola with combines/ harvesters, voila. You can even find some good ole country music on the radio. The one big difference in the Aussie version is that after 8 years of drought the land is drier than a popcorn fart.

As you go further north it just gets drier and drier until the only thing that grows is Mallee scrub: small trees and pockets of grass patched with barren red sand. It takes a while mind you, a few hours of driving across the emptiness, much like crossing Saskatchewan ;-). Then you make it up to the Murray River and the oasis of Mildura.

Interestingly, Mildura has a Canadian connection: it was designed by a couple of brothers who were engineers from Ontario. From Wikipedia: A major drought in Victoria from 1877 to 1884 prompted Alfred Deakin, then a minister in the State Government and chairman of a Royal Commission on water supply to visit the irrigation areas of California. There he met George and William Chaffey. In 1886 George Chaffey came to Australia and selected a derelict sheep station at Mildura as the site for his first irrigation settlement signing an agreement with the Victorian government to spend at least £300,000 on permanent improvements at Mildura in the next twenty years. William and George Chaffey developed what became the cities of Etiwanda, Ontario, and Upland in California, United States of America; and the city of Mildura, Victoria, Australia, as well as the town of Renmark, South Australia.

With the irrigation and warm climate, the area flourished and became well known for fruit and food production, especially oranges, grapes and avocados, and the region became known as Sunraysia. It was a good choice, as most of Victoria was wet and cool, the weather in Sunraysia was sunny and warm. We didn't end up camping but stayed in an onsite caravan and a cheap motel; for something different and to give Aiden a chance to shake a nasty cold he had picked up. The people running the motel were very nice and gave us a bag of oranges and avocados from their farm. We started to doubt our good fortune with the place after local police and a house mouse kept everyone but Aiden awake most of the night.


We explored the river, checked out a massive gem shop, did another neat maze with one way gates found a geocache or two and then meandered our way back south to Halls Gap.