RECIPT FROM THE WALKING TRACK

It was quite a nice day yesterday, calm in the morning, light 
cloud, cold but not nose-freezingly cold, and the ground was 
relatively dry compared to early last week. The forecast promised a 
return to wet and windy days for the rest of the week. So that, the 
fact that I haven't gone for a drive to anywhere interesting in 
(what feels like?) months becuase I've been busy getting obsessed 
with all sorts of silly things, plus a dream from the night before 
that mainly involved naked women but definately had some sort of 
bushland setting as well, threw the balance and I decided to drop 
everything to go visit that dam at the town of Forrest that I 
failed to get to earlier in the year.

This time I grabbed out one of the innumerable old maps that I 
inherrited from my grandfather to work out a route and discovered 
that he'd actually already pencilled one in as part of a journey to 
the site of "EASTER 1992". That avoided some of the traffic and 
this time I made it to the desination without diverting myself down 
any narrow tracks into the unknown. My intention was just to stay 
for half an hour but I ended up wandering around for much longer, 
snapping photos of all sorts of things until I was shocked to find 
that I'd used up a whole 24-exposure reel of film by the end.

Feeling a bit worn out while negotiating a twisty walking track 
that I hoped would take me back to the car park (it did, in spite 
of extremely misleading signage - one day I'll figure out how 
distances work on those signs), I wandered off to the side and 
submitted to a wet bum in order to sit and jot down the following. 
Written in tiny writing on the back of a short recipt from the post 
office where I'd stopped in to post an order when I passed through 
town at the start of the trip (I'd left my notepad in the car). I'd 
been reading lots of historical information boards in the town.


I finally made it to Forrest and the dam that I wanted to see. It 
turns out to be quite a fun area to walk around, and I discovered 
that you can walk all the way back into town. The town too is great 
fun to explore on foot. Extremely quiet (on a Tuesday) and many 
interesting buildings, both old rotting ones from the timber mills 
beginning in the 1890s, to the modern hippy dwellings and holiday 
rentals. Once connected mainly by steam railways, which overall 
spanned a hundred kilometers of track through the steep forest 
hills and valleys before the southern coastline, the old rows of 
shops and timber mills lined up opposite the station are all long 
closed and crumbling away. Now they look only upon a tennis court, 
as no sight of the line itself remains.

But the town has turned now to face the road - weekend travellers 
to the beaches of Apollo Bay. But this traveller's search for a 
feed on a Tuesday went unrewarded. The general store, in its third 
incarnation since the 1800s, closes at 2PM Mon-Fri. I got there at 
2:09. The walk back is therefore a hungry one, but peaceful as I 
sit beneath a fern and write this beside the narrow walking track 
back to the dam.


It turns out the reservoir created by the dam actually feeds into 
another reservoir that I visited a few months back on the way back 
from another one of my trips, and they eventually supply the water 
for the city of Geelong. No risk of anyone there going thirsty at 
the moment, it was nearly full.

I'm tempted to continue the theme and seek out more water 
catchements, they're interesting places to explore. For years I've 
been planning to tour the Snowy Hydro scheme, maybe I'll work my 
way up to it. I'll have to find some good references first though,
entries for the state of Victoria in the "List of dams and 
reservoirs in Australia" on Wikipedia don't provide any detail at 
all.

 - The Free Thinker