Shelter from the rain

Halls Gap is one of those magical places you expect when travelling in Australia. It’s not so much the town itself, as its situation. It lies in a gap between two northern arms of the Grampians in western Victoria, at the head of a lush valley. You get the true picture from Mt Difficult Lookout, which gives the view of the Fyans Creek valley and Lake Bellfield that you see in every publication about the Grampians.

I have been going to the Grampians since first seeing it as a teenager on the way from Melbourne to Adelaide in the 1960s. You first see the blue mass on the horizon as you approach Ararat, and it displays its true majesty past Ararat, as you snake your way through bush and farmland.

Coming back from Adelaide, once you have passed Horsham, the mountains look quite different. Instead of the steep cliff aspect of the eastern side, you see the backs of the mountains as they slope up from the plain.

However, it is in wandering through the Grampians that you see their true beauty. Making Halls Gap your base, you can easily drive anywhere in the almost 100 km-long range, walk for hours and return to your lodgings. You can also do many day-walks from Halls Gap on excellent tracks, repeatedly coming onto outcrops with views that stay with you forever.

When our family first ‘discovered’ Halls Gap, it was small, quiet and a bit quaint. Now it is unrecognisable with the growth of the commercial area and an expanding permanent population. The facilities at the camping ground have been modernised, although it is still a beautiful place to pitch a tent or park a caravan, and there is more accommodation available, ranging from backpackers hostels, through cottages to luxury motels.

One exciting, fairly recent addition has been the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre, housed in a striking building and featuring displays and presentations which chronicle and honour the Aboriginal people who inhabited the area not that long ago. These people are also honoured by the renaming of the Grampians to ‘Gariwerd’.

It was in relation to camping in Halls Gap that I had one of my most memorable experiences. I was there in around 1973 in a small tent. Over years of annual visits with family, we had grown friendly with the owners of the Mountain Grand guest house — an imposing and aging place, with a large lounge room that sported a huge bay window and a grand piano. There were high ceilings, bathrooms down the hall, etc.

After two days camping and daily treks into the mountains, the sky was darkening and it looked like rain was imminent. Never mind. That evening I tightened the guy ropes, made sure nothing was touching the tent walls, snuggled into my sleeping bag and drifted off. About midnight, there was a ‘knocking’ at the tent door. I roused myself, unzipped the door and looked into the kind face of one of the owners of the Mountain Grand.

“Mum says you should come and stay with us. There’s going to be a doozy of a storm soon and you could get washed out.” I argued that my tent could withstand anything and that I was really quite comfortable, but he insisted. Not wanting to offend him, I reluctantly got dressed and followed him to the guest house. There I was given a mug of hot chocolate and then a bed. I snuggled in and went back to sleep.

Two hours later I was woken by swiftly repeating thunder and a howling wind, followed by deafening rain on the tin roof. Soon after, drops of water started falling on my bed. Then the drops became trickles. I moved the bed away from the worst of the leaking roof, but still did not get much sleep.

The next morning, after a wonderful breakfast, I headed back to locate what I expected would be the remnants of my tent. I had no trouble finding it, still standing proudly where I had left it, steaming in the morning sunshine. I tentatively unzipped the door and inspected the contents. Everything was bone dry, as I would have been if I had stayed put!

My parents built a mud-brick house in Halls Gap in the 1970s. I spent many days and weeks there, using it as my base for further exploring. I walked the length of the Victoria Valley, camped and explored around Lake Wartook, climbed Mt William and the Serra Range, drove through the valley and then over the Mirranatwa Gap to Dunkeld at the southern tip of the range. From ‘The Pinnacle’ at the end of the Wonderland Track I could look straight down on the roof of my parent’s house. I got to know the place extremely well and loved it more with each visit.

The vegetation is diverse and full of contrasts, with areas of tall forest and windswept heights where the trees are gnarled and stunted. There are pockets of vivid wildflowers to surprise you around bends in the path and you are very likely to have encounters with kangaroos, wallabies, emus, echidnas, cockatoos and kookaburras. In the valley the kangaroos can be approached closely and observed as they feed at dusk.

There were many surprises as I explored. I nearly tripped over my own feet one day, walking up the Sundial Road from Lake Bellfield, when out of the dense bush above me, stepped a full-grown male deer with a huge set of antlers. I had no idea that these animals existed there in the wild. I was almost ready, after that, to come face to face with the black panther reputedly living in those mountains. Another time, coming out of dense bush onto a sloping rocky plateau, I suddenly gazed upon a magical scene. It was as if someone had let their imagination go in painting the place — there was a wild collection of dwarfed native shrubs, bonsai banksias and eucalypts, all interspersed with carpets of wild flowers. Water trickled out of fissures in the rock, spread out and then disappeared into other fissures. There was also the night that a flock of emus charged over and around my small tent, camped next to Lake Wartook.

In January 2006, one third of the Grampians was overtaken by wild bushfires. I felt as devastated as the mountains looked in the press photos. Somehow, Halls Gap escaped almost totally. However, in only two years, the Grampians are recovering and those looking after the park have been working hard to replace signs, rebuild paths and steps and resurrect walkways and metal stairways.

It is again a place to visit, camp, walk and drive through, that is like nothing else in this vast country.

[first published online at PlanBookTravel.com, September 2008; later at AustralianTraveler Online, July 2010]