Last year I wrote a couple of posts about places of literary interest that we passed through on a road trip. Here is another such post, again using The Oxford literary guide to Australia as my main source.
Yarrawonga, Vic
Lake Mulwala at dusk
Yarrawonga was where, on this trip, we hit Victoria first. It is a twin town with Mulwala which is on the New South Wales side of the border. The border, here, is formed by Lake Mulwala which was created by a dam built on the Murray River in 1939. This lake is rather eerie due to the dead tree trunks protruding from its waters. This however is not its literary connection, which is, really, a bit of a far fetch. The town features in the poem, “Night vision, Yarrawonga” by Christine Churches who, from what I can see, never really lived there. Oh well, it gets the town in the book – and these lines are rather evocative of the slow flowing Murray and its eucalyptus lined banks:
At sunset we came to the river
slow water feeding through the trees
Chiltern, Vic
Lake View House, Chiltern (built 1870)
This pretty little town’s literary credential is far less arguable as the significant Australian writer Henry Handel Richardson spent part of her childhood here, and the house, Lake View, in which she lived, still stands. In her autobiography, Richardson says this is where she first smelt wattles in bloom. (For more on Henry Handel Richardson in Victoria, check out ANZLitLovers here).
Beechworth, Vic
Beechworth Courthouse, est. 1858, where Ned Kelly was committed to stand trial for murder
Beechworth’s big claim to fame is that the Australian outlaw, Ned Kelly, was first jailed here! However, it also has “real” literary connections as several novelists lived or visited here, including Henry Kingsley (brother of the English novelist Charles Kingsley), Mary Gaunt, Ada Cambridge, Ronald McKie and David Martin.
I’ve only read one of these, Ada Cambridge. She was a prolific writer but, like many of our early (turn of the century) women writers, receives far less attention than she deserves. She was a strong woman who often tackled issues that were close to women’s hearts but not deemed proper for the clergyman’s wife that she was. I was surprised and delighted when I first read her in the 1980s – and horrified that I had not known of her before.
Here ends the formal literary highlights of this most recent trip! Informal “literary” highlights had more to do with signs and town names. I will leave you with just one that tickled our fancy:
Road sign for Burrumbuttock (Photo: Courtesy Carolyn I)
Burrumbuttock, NSW, is, apparently, affectionately known as “Burrum”. Seems sensible to me!
Peter Pierce (ed)
The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 (rev ed)
501pp.
ISBN: 0195536223
Whispering Gums 
Fun! Thanks for sharing the photos. And Burrumbuttock gave me a giggle. 🙂
It gave us a giggle too – we never really grow up do we?!
There’s a part of my brain that still goes, “Heh, heh,” whenever it sees Eliot or James write about “intercourse,” in the innocent nineteenth century sense, as in, “She was inevitably to be sacrificed, in some form or another, to the humorous intercourse of the inimitable couple” (The Golden Bowl) or (male character addressing female character in Mill on the Floss), “Put your hand on this Bible, and say, ‘I renounce all private speech and intercourse with [a different male character] from this time forth.'”
LOL DKS, then you would laugh at the town called Intercourse in Pennsylvania (in the Amish area actually): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercourse,_Pennsylvania It made us giggle, juveniles that we are!
“Sign posts for the town are frequently targeted by thieves.” Poor Intercourse.
One of the characters in The Golden Bowl is named Fanny Assingham, which threw me the first time I came across it. “Fanny Assingham? Did he just name a character Fanny Assingham?”
LOL … of course in the USA (now, anyhow) fanny has a slightly different meaning. For them our “bum bag” is a “fanny pack”. BUT, Fanny with Ass is pretty funny regardless! (I just checked Wikipedia and there’s an article about “fanny packs”!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_pack )
What a lovely idea to travel with literary references in mind. It reminds me that I need to research our next jaunt abroad.
Your photographs greatly enhance this post – I clicked on the Lake Muwala photo to see it large – what an eerily impressive scene!
Glad you clicked on the image Tom. I’m never sure what size image to include in posts. I often go for “Medium” but as I was including a few here I thought I’d reduce the size. What I would like to do is reframe this Literary Guide into road or tour order, rather than its current alphabetical by state. (With as index of course for those who might travel via different routes, orders!). Where is your next jaunt abroad? We are doing our Top End again in the middle of the year, and then a little trip to Hong Kong later in the year. Europe hopefully next year.