Day 30 – Derby    

We awoke to the sound of noisy kids this morning.  Another family is staying at the pub, but they don’t know how to control their kids, they stomped around noisily all night and day.  But we did still get a pretty good sleep and it was nice to be indoors.  The pub has a really cool pig, it drinks beer, actually they have two of them.  You can get bottles of beer for them at the bar.  When Jo went out to visit them yesterday they didn’t even budge, but as soon as you have a bottle in your hand they come running.  The noisy kids got a bottle for them in the morning, so when we went out the pigs were out with froth all around their mouth.  They stunk a bit though, so Jo decided it was better to play with the dog, a nice black and white border collie who liked to play fetch.

 Down the road was the ‘Holy Cow Cheese Factory’.  They are the only factory in Australia making cheese with the traditional methods, using milk from the cows near by.  We watched some cheese being made and decided to get some special cheese for our sandwiches.  After tasting every cheese available, we decided to get some flavoured cheeses, spring onion, and a sun dried tomato one. Mmmm.

 We had some lunch near the falls with our special cheese making the sandwiches even better.  We were thinking of having a BBQ, but the BBQ’s in the shelter did not work.  We drove off again, this time to see an old abandoned mine, the Crown Prince Mine which was probably an old tin mine.  There was nothing but an x on a tree to mark the location, we only knew about it because our  4wd book that has lots of local knowledge hidden inside.  So we walked down the side of a hill about 30 metres to find the entrance.  Jo thought it would be good to walk inside, but soon chickened out.  So in I went with the torch to see what was inside.   I passed a few glow worms, and could see there was light visible about 30 metres into the tunnel.  The light turned out to be a shaft that went up to the surface just near the road.  The tunnel seemed to have partly collapsed further on, so I didn’t want to go any further.

Driving further again, towards Derby, we came to Briseis water Race, an old race that had been dug to supply water to tin mines in Derby.  It’s name came from the Melbourne cup winner in 1876.  It was huge, 40 kilometres long, and 4 meters deep in some areas.  It was a nice walk along the edge looking at how they had dug it all that way.  With all the effort and manual labour it would have taken to make I hope they got good use out of it, because now it’s just a 40 kilometre long overgrown hole in the middle of the bush.

 Derby was a nice town, full of old fashion buildings nicely done up and set in green hills.  We drove around nearby to have a look at more old mining relics.  We reached the dam where the water used to come out from the Briseis Race it was now a pretty boring looking dam.  Deciding we wanted to see more holes in the ground, we went off to the Derby tunnel.  It was along a track in the bush without any signs or anything to indicate it would be there.

This was a tunnel rather than a mine and was much larger in width and height than Briseis mine, and had been built so they could transport ore and avoid crossing someone else’s claim site.  It looked very sturdy and I wanted to go in and have a look, but had forgotten the torch.  The total length is about 250 metres long.

 Cascade dam was a bit further on.  It was built in 1929 to provide more water for the local mines.  At one stage the wall blew apart sending a 30 meter high wave of mud and water into the town of Derby demolishing everything in its path and killing 14 people.  Now it’s used as part of the irrigation scheme in the area.  Anyway it was pretty cool because it has a big dam wall and to get there you have to cross a wobbly wire bridge which was fun. 

We drove on through the bush and found a nice spot to camp, tucked away near the start of an abandoned overgrown road.  It was a pretty spot not far from a river that felt like quite isolated.  When Jo went down to the river to collect some water she spotted a spotted quoll having a drink, but it ran off into the bushes when it heard her slip on a rock.  I believe they are rarer than the Tassie devil, and are kind of similar in that they are both quolls of similar size and they both eat meat.  So that was pretty exciting.