Lorne
So, what's this all about? See here
Is there a complete list? See here
Lorne is another of those places (along with Blairgowrie, Sorrento, Merricks and Raymond Island) we holidayed at when I was a child.
It's a seaside town on Victoria's south west coast. We drove to Lorne along the Great Ocean Road, which surely must be one of the world's great drives (there's another route, cross-country, which provides seemingly endless views of sheep and wheat country). The road is a two lane (one each way) highway, with a nominal speed limit of 100kph which must be one enormous road traffic joke. In later years I drove that road and I swear there are stretches where the safe top speed can't be higher than some fraction of that if you're supposed to be keeping four wheels rather than two beneath you at all times.
Anyway, the road was built after the The Great War by returned servicemen. The build, which was largely done by hand, took 14 years. It was one of any number of such post war job creation schemes. Their achievement today still hugs the south-west coast from Torquay to Warrnambool along the way passing most of Victoria's best natural attractions and some of its best beaches.
I can't get a fix in my mind on when we were there beyond certainty that the holidays happened after dad died (which happened when I was 10) but probably not long after. Nothing comes to mind to help me date the holiday beyond some news magazine article about Prince Charles being the world's most eligible bachelor (but that's probably a title he was born with and certainly one he would hold onto for the very best part of another decade). So that's not much help.
I recall my grandmother reading said magazine article and also recall my grandmother thinking Charlie was rather good-looking which is pretty bizarre which ever way to take it.
Lorne itself always struck me as rather like Cowes on Phillip Island; similar ambiance, architecture and economy. The two towns had a aura of permanence lacking in some of the towns strung along the Mornington Peninsula though they their permanent populations cannot have been large. Phillip Island had (and still has?) the bike race, Lorne has its Pier to Pub swim.
I can't remember a great deal about the house we stayed in, which belonged to friends of my mother's parents, beyond the fact that it was to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from every other aussie plyboard and formica holiday house. It was built into a hill side, but going by the photographs of Lorne I've found on the internet I'm not eliminating many potential houses with that factoid.
It was also somewhat (and relatively) removed from the beach. I think it was deemed too far to walk and so we drove down each day and back up at the end. Down on the main drag we gawped at the gawdy beachy clothing and cheap jewellry, ate relatively copious amounts of junk food, swam, got sunburned and did one or two other things I've never in my life done elsewhere, or did for the first time at Lorne.
Lorne isn't actually on the ocean; its on a bay and built around the river that empties into that bay. We spent our days on the relatively benign beaches of this bay - its where I first (and last) drove (?) one of those pedal boat things which were available for hire. On the shore there was a trampoline park.
I watched envious as the more experienced kids jumped and flipped but by the end of the stay I'd taught myself enough to accomplish an effective if not elegant sommersault. Then years later I tried it at school, when I was old enough to know better and knocked my front teeth. One of them is appreciably 'less white' than the other.
That was Lorne, and probably still is. For most of the year it has a population of under 3000. Economically the town was and still is critically dependent on tourism (visitors and through traffic). Almost 80 of its houses were destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires, and its fair to assume that a proportion of those properties were unoccupied for a large part of the year. Some of the property on the main drag has been rebuilt since I was there too, but for all that I'm sure I'd recognise the place, at least in the broad brush sense.
This post has taken me days to put together because I was determined to find and include a photograph of a house my sister and I loved. God knows why. I haven't got permission to include the photograph here, but you can see it (at travelvictoria dot com dot au)
Is there a complete list? See here
Lorne is another of those places (along with Blairgowrie, Sorrento, Merricks and Raymond Island) we holidayed at when I was a child.
It's a seaside town on Victoria's south west coast. We drove to Lorne along the Great Ocean Road, which surely must be one of the world's great drives (there's another route, cross-country, which provides seemingly endless views of sheep and wheat country). The road is a two lane (one each way) highway, with a nominal speed limit of 100kph which must be one enormous road traffic joke. In later years I drove that road and I swear there are stretches where the safe top speed can't be higher than some fraction of that if you're supposed to be keeping four wheels rather than two beneath you at all times.
Anyway, the road was built after the The Great War by returned servicemen. The build, which was largely done by hand, took 14 years. It was one of any number of such post war job creation schemes. Their achievement today still hugs the south-west coast from Torquay to Warrnambool along the way passing most of Victoria's best natural attractions and some of its best beaches.
I can't get a fix in my mind on when we were there beyond certainty that the holidays happened after dad died (which happened when I was 10) but probably not long after. Nothing comes to mind to help me date the holiday beyond some news magazine article about Prince Charles being the world's most eligible bachelor (but that's probably a title he was born with and certainly one he would hold onto for the very best part of another decade). So that's not much help.
I recall my grandmother reading said magazine article and also recall my grandmother thinking Charlie was rather good-looking which is pretty bizarre which ever way to take it.
Lorne itself always struck me as rather like Cowes on Phillip Island; similar ambiance, architecture and economy. The two towns had a aura of permanence lacking in some of the towns strung along the Mornington Peninsula though they their permanent populations cannot have been large. Phillip Island had (and still has?) the bike race, Lorne has its Pier to Pub swim.
I can't remember a great deal about the house we stayed in, which belonged to friends of my mother's parents, beyond the fact that it was to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from every other aussie plyboard and formica holiday house. It was built into a hill side, but going by the photographs of Lorne I've found on the internet I'm not eliminating many potential houses with that factoid.
It was also somewhat (and relatively) removed from the beach. I think it was deemed too far to walk and so we drove down each day and back up at the end. Down on the main drag we gawped at the gawdy beachy clothing and cheap jewellry, ate relatively copious amounts of junk food, swam, got sunburned and did one or two other things I've never in my life done elsewhere, or did for the first time at Lorne.
Lorne isn't actually on the ocean; its on a bay and built around the river that empties into that bay. We spent our days on the relatively benign beaches of this bay - its where I first (and last) drove (?) one of those pedal boat things which were available for hire. On the shore there was a trampoline park.
I watched envious as the more experienced kids jumped and flipped but by the end of the stay I'd taught myself enough to accomplish an effective if not elegant sommersault. Then years later I tried it at school, when I was old enough to know better and knocked my front teeth. One of them is appreciably 'less white' than the other.
That was Lorne, and probably still is. For most of the year it has a population of under 3000. Economically the town was and still is critically dependent on tourism (visitors and through traffic). Almost 80 of its houses were destroyed in the Ash Wednesday bushfires, and its fair to assume that a proportion of those properties were unoccupied for a large part of the year. Some of the property on the main drag has been rebuilt since I was there too, but for all that I'm sure I'd recognise the place, at least in the broad brush sense.
This post has taken me days to put together because I was determined to find and include a photograph of a house my sister and I loved. God knows why. I haven't got permission to include the photograph here, but you can see it (at travelvictoria dot com dot au)
posted by Enyo @ 11:19 am
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