Week 7 January 4th to January 10th

Sting ray in water at Phillip Island


Captain Ashleigh


Nursery for baby Seals

Seal Island off Phillip Island

Kookaburra - Phillip island

Koalas - Phillip Island

Matthew and friend- Churchill Island

Grandpa's "Dish of the Day"

A Maze' Things. Phillip Island

Matthew sitting on Ice Chair - Sovereign Hill

One of houses - Sovereign Hill


View from Tower Sovereign Hill

Climbing up Mine Tower Sovereign Hill

Local bus at Sovereign Hill

Gold mine Sovereign Hill

Ashleigh and Matthew with soldier at
Sovereign Hill

Panning for Gold.

Sovereign Hill

This is the week we have really been looking forward to - our holiday away with Ashleigh and Matthew. We left Glen Waverley on Monday morning and drove 140 km to Ballarat, a gold mining town NorthWest of Melbourne. We were staying at Sovereign Hill, which is an award winning open air museum, set in the mid nineteenth century. All the people working there are dressed in Victorian costume. We were actually staying in a modern hotel within the compound of the museum. There is a very dusty area of old tents and shacks where you can imagine what it was like in 1851 when the first prospectors arrived there. Apparently gold was first discovered there in August 1851 and just one month later over 1000 prospectors had arrived. Within two years 20,000 miners were working there. The town soon developed.

Ashleigh and Matthew were able to pan for gold, but were not successful!!

We went on a conducted tour down the mine, took a ride in a coach pulled by two horses, watched sweets being made, wooden cartwheels being made, tin and brass plates being turned and gold being smelted into a 2 kilo gold bar, and practiced handwriting with an old fashioned ink pen, dipping it into an inkwell in the wooden school desk in the schoolroom. We visited all the furnished houses, and all the various shops along the high street, drinking in the Victorian atmosphere. We even saw a number of sculptures made of ice.

On the first evening we were booked into the "Blood on the Southern Cross" sound and light spectacular, which was a re enactment of the famous Eureka Stockade story when in December 1854 the diggers rebelled against the increased digging licences imposed by the government.

This was a really superb entertainment with a mixture of different settings moving through the site, culminating in fires and terrific sound effects. I am sure the children will remember the story for a very long time.

After two full days there we moved on to Phillip Island which is a fun packed holiday resort South East of Melbourne. We were booked into an apartment facing the sea, which really impressed the children. They had been on a short stay there last year, so knew their way around and knew exactly where they wanted to go what they wanted to do.

On Thursday we spent much of the day on Churchill Island which is linked to Phillip Island by a bridge. There has been a farmstead there for nearly 200 years and today there are still animals to see. As well as the old farm house to visit, there were demonstrations of milking a cow, shearing sheep, working sheep dogs and black smithing. The children were quite enthralled.

The main attractionof Phillip Island is the nightly "Penguin Parade", where each evening at about 9pm the world's smallest penguins (about 30cm tall) arrive home from the sea and waddle up the beach to their burrows in the sand dunes. As they are wild animals and must be protected, this nightly outdoor event is strictly regulated and no photography is allowed. Up to 4000 people attend each evening. We booked in for Thursday evening and got there at 7pm in order to get a good seat. We took a picnic and wrapped up warm under a blanket. It was so worth the wait and Matthew and Ashleigh kept spotting more and more rafts of penguins coming on to the beach. Most people didn't bother to stay, once the first few had arrived, but we stayed on and were rewarded by seeing so many of them coming up the dunes and into their burrows.
On Friday we took a cruise out to seal island and had another great treat, watching thousands of seals basking in the sunshine, preening themselves, swimming in the sea and even a "nursery" of babies learning to swim in a shallow pool on the rocks. The children were also invited on to the boat's bridge where they could steer the boat.

Our nature trip continued on Saturday when we visited the koala sanctuary and walking along a board walk at tree branch height we spotted a number of koalas, mostly sleeping, though one decided to perform for us and move to another branch. It was actually Matthew and Ashleigh who kept spotting them. Apparently kookaburras do not share trees, so you only ever see one at a time. Matthew then spotted a lone kookaburra and then a second one. Matthew and Ashleigh both have cameras and took literally hundreds of shots far more than Grandpa!!

A Maze'n Things is another attraction which the children love, where there are lots of fun things to do including Mini/Maxi crazy golf. And of course we had to spend time on the beach.

The children were an absolute joy to take away and the time passed all too quickly.

We had a good journey home stopping off at the chocolate factory and Zoë was pleased to have her family back. Mike was in Sydney with Mary for a few days.