32. On The Ground In Australia

Sunday, 9 DEC 2012

It has been two weeks now since our 55-day cruise ended and we disembarked in Sydney. Without the free time of shipboard life I haven't had the self-discipline to write blog posts -- and I've spent much of the time driving! So this post will be a summary to bring the record up to date. Today, and for the rest of this week, we are staying at the Nepean Country Club on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. The latitude here is about the same as that of San Francisco (except south rather than north, of course), S 38° 24', and the temperature this morning was around 11 C. This is quite a relief from the heat we experienced driving here.

We left Coolangatta, a beach town on the Gold Coast south of Brisbane, on Friday and drove an inland route through towns that Americans never hear about, including Toowoomba, Goondiwindi, Narrabri, Dubbo, Parkes, Jerilderie, Tocumwal, and Shepparton. Crossing the Murray River, the border between New South Wales and Victoria, we passed through a large irrigation district laced with canals. This district is the home of a major rice growing, processing, and shipping industry centered in Deniliquin. Believe it or not! One of the great ironies of this great Terra Australis, 90% semi-arid, arid, or downright desert, is that this area should be one of the major rice exporters to Asia! All of the rainfall west of the watershed divide in the Great Dividing Range, which stretches the entire length of the continent north-south, makes its way down the Darling River and the Murray River, which join near the triple border junction of NSW, Victoria, and Western Australia, and reaches the sea just east of Adelaide. This whole vast region is known as the Murray-Darling Watershed. (Of course I'm neglecting a few other watersheds, including the northern watershed that drains the tropics, the western watershed that drains Perth, and a dead-end interior watershed that ends in the mostly dry Lake Eyre.). Consequently, and due to an extensive set of engineering projects, Deniliquin and surrounds have water aplenty to grow rice.

Our drive through the interior was bathed in heat of 35-39 C (102 F). Finally, as we approached Melbourne, we drove through a weather front and the temperature dropped to 23 C in about 30 minutes.

The parts that we drove through are not the "outback". It's referred to in the region as the heartland, or the heart of the country ("country" meaning not the city). It is agricultural, much like semi-arid parts of the US that get 8-15 inches of rain per year. Some of it is irrigated, the rest is dry land farming or pasture. Although the elevation throughout the region is only around 200-300 meters, it reminds me of much higher elevation lands like western Kansas, eastern Colorado, Nebraska, most of the US High Plains. The towns vary from 1400 population to 30,000 and they all have big grain silos and active railways, farm machinery dealers, local museums and other attractions. Many of them have an American embassy (i.e. Macdonald's!), and they project an attitude of "this is way better than living in Sydney". I love it.

 

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