Cooma and Eucumbene

Beck and Max departed for a couple of days taking in the Wellington caves and the Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo. The latter sees the animals not in cages but in large paddocks surrounded by ditches - and that goes for the large cats!

Yesterday, we took off for a short (?) drive down to the country town of Cooma. It's the main entry point for the Snowy Mountains National Park (where Kosciuszko rises to 2228m - it's Australia's highest peak - or 7250 feet for the imperially imprisoned). We didn't venture that far and preferred to look around the quite attractive old town of Cooma (pop 6600), taking a walking tour following a guide issued by the local tourist office. We saw lots of historic buildings, many still in use. They included the court-house (dated 1887), the prison (still in operation) and its museum of crime, and the old pub, pictures of which are included here.

The town is also well-known as the headquarters of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Authority and, in the decade following the second world war, it was the scene of one of world's great nation-building experiments - the construction of Snowy Mountains scheme designed to provide irrigation storage for the dry inland (including some waters turned inland from their normal coastal trajectories) and to provide - like China's Three Gorges project - hydro power in the process. Thousands of immigrant workers from all over war-ravaged Europe made the area their home during and after the construction phase, and today the town flies the flags of all their home countries around the central park. The town has also leveraged some tourism trade from the famous (to Australians) poem written by A B (Banjo) Paterson, The Man from Snowy River. A statue to that man occupies the same park as the flags.

One of the Autumn attractions of all the New South Wales high country - including our home area around Armidale - is what the Americans call Fall. Of course, the colours are nowhere near on the same scale, but the clumps or rows of colourful deciduous trees are picturesque. We saw lots of yellow trees on the way to Cooma, in the two itself (as pictured here) and on the way to Adaminaby, our next stop. Adaminaby is close to Lake Eucumbene, one of the massive storages of the Snowy Mountains Scheme - indeed, by far the largest at over 20km long. Old Adaminaby has long been drowned by the waters of the lake, though we wend to the site because we were told, incorrectly, that some of the old town had been revealed by the falling water levels occasioned by the recent long drought. However, our informant had not been there recently has the lake has been topped up to overflowing by the massive summer rains in 2010-11. The following pictures show Eucumbene backed by the foothills of the Snowy Mountains and the 'big trout' in the reconstructed town, which betokens the new economic base of the area - fishing in the lake.

Our return from Adaminaby to Canberra took us across country via a road described as 'rough'. That was a gross understatement, but could be handled OK by our Rav 4 -with its 4WD capacity. However, the route was very attractive forgetting the road surface for a moment. We crossed the headwaters of the Murrumbidgee River, one of Australia's largest and most imposing rivers, though not at the point shown here. And then we went through the large and beautiful Namadji National Park, sometimes through clouds of dust raised by passing vehicles. All told it was a lovely 300km (190 miles) for what was supposed to be a short country drive.

AS