It was raining when Chris and I set off for our walk at seven in the morning but we didn’t mind – the rain was light like a refreshing shower that settles momentarily on your skin and disappears in the breeze before it has a chance to collect and stream. (Incidentally, the Australia government ought to pay me for coming over because I always bring the rain, sometimes too much, especially in the form of cyclones – there are two gathering force out at sea right now!) Anyway, Chris wanted to familiarise himself with the locale of our host so we trekked up the steep hill outside Roland’s house, as far as we could go until the road ran out; then we went down to the bottom and followed the road to the right, past beautiful houses with perfectly kept lawns and dogs behind fences to ward off the passers-by, until that road, too, ran out.
The sun came out and a rainbow boded well. We walked straight ahead to Stubbin Street and took a left, past a mansion in the Queenslander style, and past the two Alsatian dogs that lived there and let us know we were not wanted.
“Good boys, good boys,” I said with a certain amount of confidence considering we were safely on the other side of iron bars.
“Why did you say that?” Chris asked.
“To stop them from barking,” I explained.
“That won’t stop them,” he asserted.
The dogs became quiet and lost interest, letting us walk on in peace, and I felt very happy that I was now an experienced dog person who understood dog psychology. I wondered if Chris was in awe of my wisdom in dog matters. Hand-in-hand we continued, past more beautiful houses and gardens, to where the road ended with a red cone and a large cattle grid to bar the way ahead to all but the most hardy and inquisitive of walkers. We were curious and we wore stout trainers – we crossed the grid.
As it happens, the cattle grid was a ‘time gate’ (for lack of a better term), and within a few yards it seemed that we were in a bygone age. The tarmac ended in a round full stop like a helicopter pad and beyond that was grass and pristine bush land, and a dirt road. We entered the road about two-thirds of the way up the hillside. Where the road meandered down into the valley some cows, small in the distance, grazed in grassland not attached to a homestead, but if there were a farmhouse it would surely have come out of the nineteenth century. We needed to get back – we had been out for an hour and the others would have been awaiting our return – so we decided to go both up and down the road in equally short measure in order to satisfy our curiosity to some degree, with the intention of making another exploration in the near future.
“Look at that!” Chris said glancing to his right on the way down.
As you will see from the photographs we discovered an old “Cobb & Co.” siding complete with notice board and adverts for the gold-diggers from the eighteen-fifties. Indeed, a little farther on we found the signs for the gold-fields (we almost got gold-fever – I began to think of buying a gold pan!).
Roland seems to think that Chris and I had stumbled upon a special centre designed for modern day school children so that they can experience what it was like in the olden days. How disappointing – we thought we had walked through a time warp!
