I live in Melbourne, Australia. Like many people around the world, we spent a lot of 2020 under lockdown. For nearly four months, we could only go out for a maximum of an hour a day, for exercise or to shop for essential items, only within 5km of our homes, and only between 8am and 9pm. I think this was the right move for our government to make, but of course that doesn’t make it any easier to do! As you can imagine, as soon as we were released from our local areas, everyone was itching to take a trip. Somewhere. Anywhere. Anywhere outside metro Melbourne.Of course, there’s the typical seaside locations and spa towns that enjoy a regular flow of tourists at the best of times. We figured we’d try to avoid the crowds and pick some random country town. After all, we were just happy to take a road-trip. So we headed out to Benalla for a few days, just over 200km north-east of Melbourne.
It was just the little break that we needed: far enough to be a road-trip, not so far that it’s a tiring journey. There’s quite a few little towns along the way, and we stopped as often as we liked, to wander around and have a look at places that were different to the same 5km radius we’d been staring at for the past four months. We poked in country op-shops, and ate pies from country bakeries. In Benalla, we stayed in a classic B&B that was adorned with countless doilies and pramfuls of creepy dolls and teddy bears.
Painting art on grain silos has become quite popular in country Victoria in recent years, and there are a few examples of this around Benalla. We spent a pleasant morning driving around and stopping to admire the various murals. It’s a lovely idea to add some beauty to such functional structures. There is something a little bit magical about seeing these huge paintings rising out of the dust and the trucks driving in, depositing their grain, driving away — because these silos are all very much still in use.
The other highlight was the Winton wetlands, which we definitely didn’t leave enough time for. We had been steered away from spending time there by our B&B host, who obviously doesn’t think it makes for a particularly interesting visit. However, the morning that we were leaving, we headed that way for a little look and discovered the most fascinating, if somewhat eerie, landscape that would be an amazing place to sketch and paint. It’s obviously a great location for bird-watching too — even just driving through in the car, we spotted quite a few birds and spent quite a few minutes watching a bird of prey hover and hunt.
We also dropped into Murrnong Farm to have a lunch with a friend. Murrnong is a permaculture farm in Violet Town, which is about 20 minutes drive from Benalla. They make some super yummy jams, if you ever happen to see them around — I think they’re sometimes available through the Open Food Network. They are also home to some very attractive goats.
With any further travel off the cards for the foreseeable future, I think we might be embracing a bit more exploration of our home state. Looking at silver linings, at least the pandemic has forced us to get to know our local areas better than ever. Whether that is as small as your 5km radius, or the area of your home-state, hopefully we have learnt to appreciate what is in our immediate vicinity. Victoria definitely has many charms which we usually don’t make the most of.
