Anigozanthos

Today we did my last sightseeing for my holiday - a day trip out to see Hanging Rock.

In the spirit of Joan Lindsay's story, we prepared a picnic lunch to take with us, dropping into a supermarket on the way to get a few extras.

Getting to Hanging Rock is a simple drive up the Calder Freeway. We got off at Mt Macedon and drove a scenic route over the mountain. The houses around the Mt Macedon township all look very large and expensive. Deciduous trees are planted along the road, and with autumn moving in, quite a few trees were looking quite pretty.

Hanging Rock is well-known mostly due to the 1975 film adaptation by director Peter Weir of a novel written by author Joan Lindsay in 1967. In the novel four schoolgirls and a teacher disappear while visiting the rock on St Valentine's Day 1900. No explanation or resolution is made.

In real-life, the rock is a volcanic formation, with lots of fractured rocks scattered about. The cracks between the rocks form lots of narrow open passages you can walk through or climb up and down. The Hanging Rock itself is simply a tall boulder that has fallen over; the path to the summit goes underneath it.

Before climbing it, we stopped to have our lunch at one of the car park picnic tables. While there, a local mother kangaroo with a joey in the pouch wandered through the car park before settling down in front of the café. Part-way through lunch a bus-load of schoolchildren turned up to play on the nearby oval, and the kangaroo went down to meet them! She must do that sort of thing regularly.

Also near the car park / café / oval is a racecourse. Horse races are generally held twice a year: on New Year's Day (1 January) and St Valentine's Day (14 February).

The summit itself is 718 metres above sea-level, and 105 metres above the surrounds. The view from the top is very good and I took a 360 degree panoramic photo. I didn't stay long up there, the weather today was overcast, cool and there was a strong cold wind blowing.

We took an unconventional route down, clambering down a steep crevice. We also took with us several pieces of rubbish other people had dropped. My sister commented that if everybody took two more pieces of rubbish out that they brought in, we'd have a clean landscape in no time!

When we got back to the bottom of the rock, we decided to follow a "path to the creek". It started off going around the rock, but then started going around the racecourse. We noticed a row of three old bathtubs arranged next to the railing , so we explored over that way for photos. In doing so, we disturbed a huge mob of kangaroos, probably 20 or 30, on the move in the afternoon.

Continuing of the path took us right around the racecourse. By the time we got nearly all the way around (still no sign of the "creek" by this stage), we got close to the racecourse lawnmowers - four cattle. Two of them were "mother and son", I can't remember about the other two.

Moving on we finally found the creek. Given the current drought conditions it wasn't very surprising to find no water flowing. We did notice, however, that the toilets on-site get their water from nearby small dams.

On leaving Hanging Rock we went back the way we came to Mt Macedon so I could take some photos.

So that's it! The end of my holiday. I fly back to Perth tomorrow.