Riding the Hume

Our grand tour of the Murray River region is over. Heading home to enjoy Sydney (and its 40,000 daily COVID cases). Our vacation is done and dusted. You can relive all of the highlights here:

• Murray River Houseboat
• Murray River picnic paradise
• Darling River Airbnb
• NSW country life
• Koalas in the wild
• Bathurst & Cowra
• Christmas in the Blue Mountains

Memorable photo opportunities on our final two days include lunch on the ghostly shores of Lake Mulwala yesterday and two classic tourist pitstops on the Hume Highway at Gundagai and Holbrook earlier today.

Lake Mulwala was formed by damming the Murray and flooding the adjacent countryside. The flooded trees have subsequently died creating a beautiful yet eerie landscape along the lake shore for miles. As we ate lunch we watched several trailer boats weave their way through these ghostly limbs out into the open lake. I’m not sure I’d be keen on water skiing here any time soon.

In Holbrook we stopped long enough to clamber along the gunwale, and walk a full circuit, of HMAS Otway, a decommissioned submarine in the centre of town. Why you ask is there an Oberon class submarine sitting here, hundreds of kilometres from the sea? The town was renamed Holbrook in 1915 after Lieutenant Norman Douglas Holbrook, a British submariner and Victoria Cross recipient. The town acquired the submarine to honour him in 1996.

As for Gundagai’s Dog on a Tuckerbox, his story is classic Australian folklore. In the early days the area was serviced by huge wagons hauled by teams of sturdy bullocks. With rutted tracks, river crossings, floods and extreme weather, bullock teams frequently became stranded or bogged. Whenever this happened, the teamster’s dog would guard its master's tuckerbox and possessions while he sought help. The town’s iconic statue, by a road stop cafe, was unveiled in 1932. However, we’d stopped on the way into town for an early lunch at McDonald’s.