Bridget - First Sightings

Today we saw our first emu and kangaroos of the trip. I say we but actually it was just me, Jeremy was diligently keeping his eyes on the road and missed them entirely.

We are now in Kingston. We wanted to get further today because we thought the weather would hold out, but beyond Kingston the next stage is Coorong National Park which is about 150km long and we didn't think we'd be able to do that safely by the end of the day do we stopped here. Tomorrow we venture into it where we were warned of "crazy deer" that jump out in front of you and "thick kangaroos" that don't know where they're going and emus that would probably leave us in second place if we collided! I'm trying to make it sound more intrepid than it probably is, in reality we're going searching for the orange bellied parrot. They live in the Coorong but only 50 are left, so they are very endangered and highly unlikely to be seen, especially at 110 km per hour.

Along the way to Kingston we stopped at Robe. A lovely little town with another small town museum! Hooray! I learned today that Robe was the location that thousands of Chinese men landed during the gold rush and they had to walk 400km into Victoria to ballarat where the gold mines were. They did this because if they were to land on Victorian soil and therefore closer to the gold fields they had to pay 10 pounds each in poll tax.

History here is so close, I think because there is so little history in Australia that everything is so well remembered. In England for example there are 100s of years, indeed 1000s of years documented, but here, sadly for aboriginal history, only max 200 years of settler history is documented and every name is remembered. Mr such and such arrived here in 1846 and built this house etc etc. I find it sad from a native point of view but also fascinating from my own background point of view.

Anyway, on a lighter note to finish, Kingston is the home of the giant lobster! Photo below.