As the day looked quite overcast and felt cold the Swan
Hill rural drive seemed an ideal way to look at the surrounding area without
subjecting ourselves to the chilly weather.
The drive was about 40km long and took us past the town watertanks, a
new development, the reasonably new TAFE college and then into the country,
predominately in the Woorinen district.
Here we saw many grapes and fruit trees in various stages of growth. The mature fruit trees were beginning to
blossom while alongside new plantings had occurred. Swan Hill contains the
largest concentration of fresh summer stone fruit in Australia, the crops being
worth $60 million.
Large packing sheds centralize
the packaging for the fruit and we also drove past one of these.
Until recent times channels of water were used for
irrigation and were originally dug by hand during the 1920’s by settlers.
Nowadays they have been replaced by pipelines to prevent evaporation and
leakages, although one or two still remain and we were able to see and drive
over one of them.
Later in the afternoon we toughed it out and went for a
5km stroll alongside the banks of the Murray River. We believed it wasn’t going to rain, however
the heavens opened up and we were able to run to some shelter before becoming
too saturated.
One of the activities for Pioneer week advertised widely
was a movie night presented by the local newspaper in conjunction with the
local movie buff (a bit like David and Margaret for those who watch the ABC
progam). We only knew that it was going to feature something on Swan Hill as
well as an Australian movie. The first movie was about the Queen’s visit to
Swan Hill in 1970, with the commentary a cross between a race meeting and a
schoolmaster counting children, as he mentioned the exact number of students
who were brought into the showground to see the Royal couple. The second movie
was in colour and featured a parade of some kind through the main street of
Swan Hill. We could hear people in the
audience recognizing either themselves or others.
The movie for the night was “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. If you happened to read this blog entry from 3rd August you may have seen that we visited Martindale Hall in Mintaro South Australia. This lovely building was used in the abovementioned film, however at the time we didn’t know we would be in Swan Hill watching the film in the near future – quite a co-incidence. I found the memory of the home very fresh in my mind, so the movie took on an added dimension for me. Being made in 1975 some of the Australian actors have aged well, others not so well.
The school theatre
where the movie night was held was very comfortable and warm, with the added
feature of supper with some delicious country cooked cakes.