Australia’s Oldest Holiday

David Whitley David Whitley
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In a victory for the history buffs, David Whitley indulges in a spot of armchair time travelling to track down the most ancient wonders of modern Australia.

The British have a standard joke designed to get right under the skin of all Australians, one that gets wheeled out in times of need and dire cricketing capitulations. It goes a little like this: “What’s the difference between Australia and a tub of yoghurt?"

 

The answer, of course, is that if you leave yoghurt alone long enough, it will eventually develop a culture. It’s a none-too-subtle dig at Australia’s lack of history, and, as with many none-too-subtle digs, it’s not entirely fair. The country is brimming with historic sites, some a lot older than you’d think . . .

Oldest city

Sydney may be still regarded as a young whippersnapper, but it actually predates the likes of Washington DC, Singapore, Toronto and Johannesburg. Founded in 1788 by Governor Arthur Philip’s First Fleet of convicts, the original settlement was in the area on the harbour now known as The Rocks. Many of the historic sites in what is now the tourist heart of the city are covered and explained by The Rocks Walking Tour. (02) 9247 6678, www.rockswalkingtours.com.au

Oldest tourist attraction

The Jenolan Caves in NSW’s Blue Mountains region have been attracting tourists in large numbers since the 1880s, although things were a little hairier back then. While nowadays people walk around safely in jeans and T-shirts, in the Victorian era visitors would dress up in their finest clothes and risk life and limb clambering through the caves with ropes and candles. Recent testing has revealed Jenolan’s cave system to be far more significant than previously thought, however. Using scientific techniques, the caves have been shown to be around 340 million years old, making them the oldest open caves in the world.

Oldest hotel

It seems every establishment opened before the turn of the 21st Century would like to claim this for use as a marketing gimmick, but the two with the most likely claims are both in Tasmania. First up is The Hope and Anchor (03 6236 9982, www.hopeandanchor.com.au) in Macquarie St, Hobart. It claims to have been running since 1807, and thus to be the oldest pub continually running on the same site. Others had sprung up in Sydney beforehand, but are no longer there. However, the Hope and Anchor was originally called The Whale Fishery, which leads to a rival claim from The Bush Inn (03 6261 2256) in New Norfolk. It has been continually licensed since 1825, although it was built in 1815. To keep everybody happy, why not have a thoroughly historic drink in both while the publicans solve the dispute via the time-honoured medium of arm-wrestling?

 

Playing the Ratho course at Bothwell is a challenge to say the least, mainly because of the herds of sheep roaming the fairways.

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Oldest golf course

On a private property in Tasmania’s Central Highlands lies the oldest course in the southern hemisphere. Playing the Ratho course at Bothwell is a challenge to say the least, mainly because of its square greens and herds of sheep roaming the fairways. These mobile mowers are used to keep the links nicely trimmed, and golfers have been playing around them since the 1830s. The site is also home to the Australasian Golf Museum (03 6259 4033).

Oldest National Park

Only Yellowstone in the US has been designated as a National Park for longer than the Royal National Park, just south of Sydney. It was founded in 1879 with the far-sighted ideal of providing a much-needed environmental “lung" for the burgeoning NSW capital. Though regularly scarred by bushfires over the years, it’s still a beautifully tranquil spot, as anyone who has taken the ferry across to Bundeena will happily testify. Variety is the spice of life here, with rugged coastal cliff-top walks mixing in with deep valleys, strange rock formations such as Eagle Rock, and trails through the heathlands for hikers and mountain bikers.

Oldest building

As it’s impossible to accurately date Indigenous structures, this category has to be limited to the post-European discovery era. The Old Government House in Parramatta, NSW, is certainly the oldest public building in the country, going back to 1799 – but the most ancient of all pre-dates Captain Cook. On West Wallabi Island in WA’s Houtman-Abrolhos islands are the remains of two huts and a fort. These were built by the survivors of the Batavia shipwreck, which met its unfortunate end in 1629 on the way to modern-day Jakarta. Batavia Coast Air Charter (08 9921 5168, www.abrolhosbat.com.au) runs tours of the islands from Geraldton on the mainland, and flies over the huts.

Oldest art gallery

Despite much of the collection recently moving to Melbourne’s Federation Square, the original home of the National Gallery of Victoria (03 8620 2222, www.ngv.vic.gov.au) has been standing since 1861. The building on St Kilda Road is now home to the gallery’s international works of art and exhibitions. However, it would be fair to say that Australia’s oldest and most impressive art galleries are not in a building at all. Injalak Hill and Nourlangie Rock in Kakadu are home to ancient Aboriginal rock art that is thought to be many tens of thousands of years old. There are several sites, linked by a walking track, and you can roughly date some of the pictures yourself due to the appearances of sailing ships, white men and guns.

Oldest museum

Tucked in right next to Hyde Park in Sydney is The Australian Museum (02 9320 6000 or www.amonline.net.au), which was founded back in 1827. Whilst it’s not got as much of the button-pressing whiz-bang interactivity of some of its more recent rivals, it still covers a broad range of topics in fascinating detail. The stars of the show are always the temporary exhibitions, but the permanent collections have had all that time to grow into something special. Among these are displays on Indigenous culture and the Chapman Collection, an astounding treasure trove of precious minerals from around the world.

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Oldest restaurant

While the fighting to become the oldest pub is frenetic, no-one seems to want to come forward and claim the restaurant prize. As both the Hope and Anchor and Bush Inn serve food, then they’ve got a fair shout, but neither was primarily set up for dining. The Grossi Florentino (03 9662 1811, www.grossiflorentino.com ) on Bourke St, Melbourne, therefore has a very good claim. It was set up as a wine café in 1900, becoming the Café Florentino in 1926. It has changed hands and guises many times since then, but it is now firmly established as one of Melbourne’s classiest joints and produces authentic Italian recipes.

Oldest theme park

While it may have been usurped by the Gold Coast’s colossal fun factories, Melbourne’s Luna Park (03 9525 5033, www.lunapark.com.au) has become a true Australian icon since opening in 1912. The huge clown smile entrance scares as many people as it enthrals, and going inside is a little like stepping back in time to a more innocent era, where rides didn’t have to be utterly terrifying to keep people amused. But while the park is the country’s oldest, the Scenic Railway ride has a more widespread claim to fame – it’s the oldest continually operating rollercoaster in the entire world.

Oldest shops

No holiday would be complete without shelling out some cash on a shopping binge, and there are few better places to do that than the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. It’s both the oldest and largest market in the southern hemisphere. Trading started here in 1858, although it wasn’t officially opened until 20 years later. With hundreds of stalls, the range of what you can get here in the bracing Melbourne air is astonishing, while foodie tours are available for $28 for those who want to get more than just a taste of things (03 9320 5835 or go to www.qvm.com.au). Meanwhile, the David Jones store on George St, Sydney, is Australia’s oldest department store. What’s more, with the company dating back to 1838, it is the oldest department store in the world that still trades under its original name.

Oldest winery

The beginning stages of the Australian wine boom stretch back a little further than many would imagine. The first attempt to produce wine in the new colony came shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet, with vines being planted in Parramatta, NSW, back in 1791. The spot is still known as Vineyard Creek, although winemaking operations moved elsewhere long ago. In 1830 George Wyndham pioneered Australian Shiraz when he planted Australia’s first commercial Shiraz vineyard at Dalwood Estate in the NSW Hunter Valley, where a cellar door operates to this day (02 4938 3444, www.wyndhamestate.com). To honour George’s memorable achievements, Dalwood was renamed Wyndham Estate in 1970, a century after Wyndham’s death. But the official title of oldest winery goes to Olive Farm in WA’s Swan Valley, which has operated continuously as a winery and commercial vineyard since being established in 1829 by English botanist Thomas Waters. Today the winery is owned and run by descendents of Ivan Yurisich, a Yugoslavian immigrant who bought Olive Farm in 1933, and features an extremely modern, award-winning building set on eight acres in the heart of the Valley. (08) 9296 4539, www.olivefarmwines.com

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David Whitley

David Whitley

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This scenic Victorian region is the perfect antidote to city life

    Craig Tansley Craig Tansley
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    Video credit: Visit Victoria/Tourism Australia

    The Grampians just might be the ultimate antidote for the metropolis, writes one returning Aussie ready to disconnect from the modern world and reconnect to the Great outdoors.

    There are no kangaroos back in Chicago: they’re all here in the Grampians/Gariwerd. In the heart of the Grampians National Park’s main gateway town, Halls Gap, pods of eastern greys are eating grass beside my parked rental car beneath the stars. Next morning, when I see the backyard of my rented villa on the edge of town for the first time, there are kangaroos feeding beside a slow-moving creek, lined with river red gums.

    Five hundred metres up the road, 50 or so of them are eating by the side of the road in a paddock. I pull over to watch and spot three emus. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos fly overhead towards the tall green mountains just beyond town.

    ‘Kee-ow, keee-oww’… their calls fuse with the maniacal cackle of a kookaburra (or 10). Gawd, how I’ve missed the sound of them. Far above, a wedge-tailed eagle watches, and there you go: the ‘great birds of Australia’ trifecta, all half a kay from the town limits.

    Exchanging city chaos for country calm

    kangaroos near Halls Gap, Grampians National Park
    The park is renowned for its significant diversity of native fauna species. (Image: Visit Victoria/Robert Blackburn)

    I’ve come to the Grampians to disconnect, but the bush offers a connection of its own. This isn’t just any bush, mind you. The Grampians National Park is iconic for many reasons, mostly for its striking sandstone mountains – five ridges run north to south, with abrupt, orange slopes which tumble right into Halls Gap – and for the fact there’s 20,000 years of traditional rock art. Across these mountains there are more than 200 recorded sites to see, created by the Djab Wurrung, Jardwadjali and Gunditjmara peoples. It’s just like our outback… but three hours from Melbourne.

    I’ve come here for a chance at renewal after the chaos of my life in America’s third-largest city, Chicago, where I live for now, at the whim of a relative’s cancer journey. Flying into Melbourne’s airport, it only takes an hour’s drive to feel far away from any concept of suburbia. When I arrive in Halls Gap two hours later, the restaurant I’m eating at clears out entirely by 7:45pm; Chicago already feels a lifetime ago.

    The trails and treasures of the Grampians

    sunrise at Grampians National Park /Gariwerd
    Grampians National Park /Gariwerd covers almost 2000 square kilometres. (Image: Ben Savage)

    Though the national park covers almost 2000 square kilometres, its best-known landmarks are remarkably easy to access. From my carpark here, among the cockatoos and kangaroos on the fringe of Halls Gap, it only takes 60 seconds’ driving time before I’m winding my way up a steep road through rainforest, deep into the mountains.

    Then it’s five minutes more to a carpark that serves as a trailhead for a hike to one of the park’s best vantage points, The Pinnacles. I walk for an hour or so, reacquainting myself with the smells and the sounds of the Aussie bush, before I reach it: a sheer cliff’s edge lookout 500 metres up above Halls Gap.

    walking through a cave, Hollow Mountain
    Overlooking the vast Grampians landscape from Hollow Mountain. (Image: Robert Blackburn)

    There are hikes and there are lookouts and waterfalls all across this part of the park near town. Some are a short stroll from a carpark; others involve long, arduous hikes through forest. The longest is the Grampians Peaks Trail, Victoria’s newest and longest iconic walk, which runs 160 kilometres – the entire length of Grampians National Park.

    Local activities operator Absolute Outdoors shows me glimpses of the trail. The company’s owner, Adrian Manikas, says it’s the best walk he’s done in Australia. He says he’s worked in national parks across the world, but this was the one he wanted to bring his children up in.

    “There’s something about the Grampians,” he says, as he leads me up a path to where there’s wooden platforms for tents, beside a hut looking straight out across western Victoria from a kilometre up in the sky (these are part of the guided hiking options for the trail). “There are things out here that you won’t see anywhere else in Australia.” Last summer, 80 per cent of the park was damaged by bushfire, but Manikas shows me its regrowth, and tells me of the manic effort put in by volunteers from town – with firefighters from all over Australia – to help save Halls Gap.

    wildflowers in Grampians National Park
    Spot wildflowers. (Image: Visit Victoria)

    We drive back down to Halls Gap at dusk to abseil down a mountain under the stars, a few minutes’ walk off the main road into town. We have headlamps, but a full moon is enough to light my way down. It takes blind faith to walk backwards down a mountain into a black void, though the upside is I can’t see the extent of my descent.

    Grampians National Park at sunset
    Grampians National Park at sunset. (Image: Wine Australian)

    The stargazing is ruined by the moon, of course, but you should see how its glow lights up the orange of the sandstone, like in a theme park. When I’m done, I stand on a rocky plateau drinking hot chocolate and listening to the Aussie animals who prefer nighttime. I can see the streets of Halls Gap off in the distance on this Friday night. The restaurants may stay open until 8pm tonight.

    What else is on offer in The Grampians?

    a boat travelling along the Wimmera River inDimboola
    Travelling along the Wimmera River in Dimboola. (Image: Chris McConville)

    You’ll find all sorts of adventures out here – from rock climbing to canoeing to hiking – but there’s more to the Grampians than a couple of thousand square kilometres of trees and mountains. Halls Gap may be known to most people, but what of Pomonal, and Dimboola, and Horsham? Here in the shadow of those big sandstone mountains there are towns and communities most of us don’t know to visit.

    And who knew that the Grampians is home to Victoria’s most underrated wine region? My disconnection this morning comes not in a forest, but in the tasting rooms and winery restaurants of the district. Like Pomonal Estate, barely 10 minutes’ drive east of Halls Gap, where UK-born chef Dean Sibthorp prepares a locally caught barramundi with lentil, pumpkin and finger lime in a restaurant beside the vines at the base of the Grampians. Husband-and-wife team Pep and Adam Atchison tell me stories as they pour their prize wines (shiraz is the hero in these parts).

    dining at Pomonal Estate
    Dine in a restaurant beside vines at Pomonal Estate. (Image: Tourism Australia)

    Three minutes’ drive back down the road, long-time mates Hadyn Black and Darcy Naunton run an eclectic cellar door out of a corrugated iron shed, near downtown Pomonal. The Christmas before last, half the houses in Pomonal burnt down in a bushfire, but these locals are a resilient lot.

    The fires also didn’t stop the construction of the first art centre in Australia dedicated to environmental art in a nature-based precinct a little further down the road (that’s Wama – the National Centre for Environmental Arts), which opened in July. And some of the world’s oldest and rarest grape vines have survived 160 years at Best’s Wines, outside the heritage town of Great Western. There’s plantings here from the year 1868, and there’s wines stored in century-old barrels within 150-year-old tunnels beneath the tasting room. On the other side of town, Seppelt Wines’ roots go back to 1865. They’re both only a 30-minute drive from Halls Gap.

    Salingers of Great Western
    Great Western is a charming heritage town. (Image: Griffin Simm)

    There’s more to explore yet; I drive through tiny historic towns that barely make the map. Still part of the Grampians, they’re as pretty as the mountains behind them: full of late 19th-century/early 20th-century post offices, government offices and bank buildings, converted now to all manner of bric-a-brac stores and cafes.

    The Imaginarium is one, in quirky Dimboola, where I sleep in the manager’s residence of an old National Australia Bank after a gourmet dinner at the local golf club, run by noted chef and teacher, Cat Clarke – a pioneer of modern Indigenous Australian cooking. Just south, I spend an entire afternoon at a winery, Norton Estate Wines, set on rolling calico-coloured hills that make me think of Tuscany, chit-chatting with owners Chris and Sam Spence.

    Being here takes me back two decades, when I lived here for a time. It had all seemed as foreign as if I’d driven to another planet back then (from Sydney/Warrane), but there seemed something inherently and immediately good about this place, like I’d lived here before.

    And it’s the Australian small-town familiarity of the Grampians that offers me connection back to my own country. Even in the better-known Halls Gap, Liz from Kerrie’s Creations knows I like my lattes with soy milk and one sugar. And while I never do get the name of the lady at the local Ampol station, I sure know a lot about her life.

    Kookaburras on a tree
    Kookaburras are one of some 230 bird species. (Image: Darren Donlen)

    You can be a local here in a day; how good is that? In Chicago, I don’t even know who my neighbour is. Though each day at dusk – when the kangaroos gather outside my villa, and the kookaburras and the black cockatoos shout out loud before settling in to sleep – I prefer the quieter connection I get out there in the bush, beneath these orange mountains.

    A traveller’s checklist

    Staying there

    Sleep beside the wildlife on the edge of Halls Gap at Serenity.

    Playing there

    abseiling down Hollow Mountain
    Hollow Mountain is a popular abseiling site.

    Go abseiling under the stars or join a guided hike with Absolute Outdoors. Visit Wama, Australia’s first environmental art centre. Check out Dimboola’s eccentric Imaginarium.

    Eating there

    steak, naan bread and beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap serves a great steak on naan bread.

    Eat world-class cuisine at Pomonal Estate. Dine and stay at much-revered icon Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld. The ‘steak on naan’ at Halls Gap brewhouse Paper Scissors Rock, can’t be beat.

    Dunkeld Arboretum in Grampians National Park
    The serene Dunkeld Arboretum.

    For Halls Gap’s best breakfasts head to Livefast Cafe. Sip local wines at Great Western’s historic wineries, Best’s Wines, Seppelt Wines and Norton Estate Wines.

    two glasses of beer at Paper Scissors Rock in Halls Gap
    Sink a cold one at Paper Scissors Rock.