Saturday 24 March 2012

No Place Like Home...

We've made it back to the UK!


We have lots more pictures from the last couple of weeks in Melbourne and Australia which we will gradually upload to the blog including:


The Old Gaol in Melbourne
The Mornington Peninsula including the Moonlit Sanctuary and Point Napean
The Eureka Tower in Melbourne
Cairns, tropical north-east Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef
The Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne


Keep checking back for updates!

Sunday 4 March 2012

Healesville Sanctuary

A koala eating a leaf...


Another koala...


Two lazy kangaroos...


Feeding times for the wallabies... spot the odd one out...


Sarah feeds apple to a wallaby... 

A wallaby enjoys a piece of sweet potato... 


Feeding time for the echidnas...

Very scary flying foxes (bats!!)...


An equally scary emu...


A pelican, whose beak can hold more than it's belly can...


A nocturnal pygmy-possum... 

A dingo... 


A yellow-breasted robin...


One-month old lizards...
 

The most poisonous snake in Australia - the taipan...


A parrot...


A low-flying wedge-tailed eagle - Australia's largest raptor...



Saturday 3 March 2012

Domaine Chandon, Yarra Valley and Skyhigh Mount Dandenong

We visited Domaine Chandon in the Yarra Valley. Moët & Chandon is 'the' French winery and co-owner of the luxury goods company Moët-Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Moët & Chandon looked for places round the world to grow the grapes to produce its wine. These included Brazil, Argentina and obviously Australia...


The building at the front of the winery dates back to the 1800's and now houses the Chandon Sunday School. A weekly meeting of wine tasters - with presumably wine as their religion...


Bottles are stored for a minimum of 3 years. These have been in here since 2009. Each bottle is turned by hand 3 times a day...


The vineyard stretches across the Yarra valley...


Looking around was thirsty work for some...


We then drove up Mount Dandenong to the Skyhigh view. You can just about see Melbourne in the distance - 35km away...


And then a random Giant's Chair...


Sovereign Hill and the Gold Museum, Ballarat

On Thursday we visited Sovereign Hill, an open air museum located around the area of the most significant gold discoveries in the 1850's.

The tour took us underground to the gold mines...


Luckily we didn't take this route...


Most of the gold was found in quartz. To remove the gold, quartz had to be removed from the mine, crushed to sand and then the gold would sink to the bottom. Two tonnes of quartz would yield just a teaspoon of gold. This may not seem much but it kept these mines in operation for some 65 years...


There is a street of some 30 shops including hotels, a bank and all of the following...




Sarah felt at home...

We then watched gold being purified through melting in a crucible to 1,200 degrees before being poured into a mould. The piece of gold on the left is worth over £100,000...



Sarah decided there had been enough looking at gold and decided she'd find some of her own. A man in a hat showed her how to pan for gold...


Sarah decided it was taking too long so she used a shovel...


But it paid off as this is what she found...


.. Well actually this is a replica of the Welcome Nugget in the Gold Museum. It was found by a group of Cornish miners in 1858 and is the second largest gold nugget in the world. It was found in the Red Hill mine and weighed 69 kg and contained 99% pure gold. It would now be worth nearly £2m. 



Needless to say the nugget found its way to London (via the Crystal Palace exhibition) and was melted down to produce Sovereigns by the Royal Mint.

As a footnote, my Grandad Gill visited Ballarat to see all of this in 1984, shortly before he died and some 8 months before I was born. I don't think he found any gold either but it was great to follow in his footsteps.