Road Trip!

We recently took an eight-day road trip, Canberra to Byron Bay (northern New South Wales coast) to Brisbane to Yandina (Queensland), then back via Toowoomba, Warwick, Tamworth, and Cowra. 3020 kilometers/1830 miles, mostly on highways that to American eyes look like country roads.

Byron Bay

We were at the easternmost tip of Australia. Trivia point - the only north-facing beaches in NSW, apparently important if you are a surfer. It's a funky, vaguely new agey kind of beach town, with lots of young backpackers and aging hippies. Unlike Queensland's Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast, not all built up with highrise condos on the beach.

Brisbane

Cool city. Lovely riverside, which you can very nicely watch by taking the city ferry up and down the river for $5, rather than pay $50 to a tourboat operator. We saw the Andy Warhol exhibit at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art - the reason we chose this time to go up to Queensland. Lots of soup cans and Marilyn Monroes, if you are in to that type of thing.

We also saw Anzac Square, where an eternal flame burns, originally to commemorate Queensland's World War One dead, now covering all conflicts. The Shrine under the flame was open on the day we were there, full of plaques remembering different military units and where they had fought and died, mostly WW1 and WW2 but also Vietnam, South Africa, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Very moving and sad - though truth be told, I'm pretty much moved to near tears by any war memorial.

The Bigs

We saw several of the Big Things that Australians have built to attract tourists.

The Big Banana in Coffs Harbour was a disappointment - it was on the side of a building and didn't seem that big.

The Big Pineapple in Yandina was cool. First, it was really big - 3 stories tall, and you can go inside and see cheesy promotional displays by Gold Circle, a big Australian fruit and fruit juice producer. But there is other fun stuff to do there, like pet koalas and take train rides thru fragrant fields of pineapple. We even learned trivia - specifically, that the pineapple is essentially a man-made fruit that didn't exist in nature. Like corn.

The Big Apple near Stanthorpe was neat, mostly because it had a nice cafeteria/store selling local products, like alcoholic apple cider.

The Big Golden Guitar in Tamworth. Tamworth is the country music capital of Australia. But another town (Narrandera, NSW) already had a Big Guitar, so Tamworth a few years back put up the Big GOLDEN Guitar. Yes, it is big and golden. Oh well. Still, a pretty town.

(There is also a Big Merino sheep in Goulburn near Canberra, but we didn't see it on this trip. And a Big Prawn, I forget where.)

Warwick

Warwick is Australia's "Rose and Rodeo" capital. But the 2007 rodeo was largely cancelled because of equine influenza - horse flu. We saw all sorts of signs throughout our road trip describing the various zones we were in (amber, red, etc); you have to get permission to move horses around throughout much of eastern Australia, until they get rid of this outbreak.

Anyway, we saw the Rodeo Heritage Center in Warwick, which was a bit disappointing - a few little exhibits and mostly a list of the winners of various events going back to the beginning of formal rodeo tournaments in 1945.

But the Warwick visitors center had a really interesting display of photos from Australia's Antarctic scientific research base.

Cowra

The last major stop was the town of Cowra, a couple of hours north of Canberra. This is interesting - not just a pretty country town, Cowra was the sight of the largest land-battle in Australia in World War 2. There was a POW camp there that hosted Japanese and Italian POWs and Indonesian political prisoners (the Dutch claimed these nationalists were working with the Japanese; the Australians soon released them).

One night in August 1944, having heard that some of them would be shipped off to another camp, the Japanese decided to break out - or die trying, more to the point. Armed with baseball bats, kitchen utensils, and the like, they tried busting out in the middle of the night, after setting their sleeping huts on fire.

Two young Australian soldiers got to the machine gun first and mowed down dozens of Japanese before they themselves were overwhelmed and killed. A couple of hundred Japanese actually made it over the fence, but they were all caught or killed over the next few days by Australian troops. In the end, 231 Japanese and 4 Australians were killed in a sad little battle.

Cowra has embraced this history to become a peace center - kind of like Coventry, England. They have a beautiful Japanese garden designed by a renowned Japanese garden designer. They have a memorial at the site of the POW camp, which still has the foundations of a few camp buildings. And the only Japanese war cemetery is there, in the corner of Cowra's main cemetery, housing the remains of all Japanese who died in Australia during the war (civilian and military), including a few pilots shot down over Darwin, and the 231 who died in the break-out. A somber event, nicely commemorated by Cowra.