Australia : Gippsland

Gippsland
As you flip through your scrapbook collage from your trip to Australia, the cutout newsprint headline “Victorian Wilderness� catches your eye. It’s the beginning of a few pages on Gippsland, the southernmost area of the mainland. The first page is filled with photographs of Wilsons Promontory, one of Australia’s most famous parks: gum trees filled with crimson rosellas and cockatoos, a wallaby loose on the heathland, a lighthouse framed against the Southern Ocean, and you, worn out but triumphant after a two-day hike. Turning the page, you see overlapping images that challenge your memory. A photograph of misty rainforest encroaches upon salty coastal marshlands, tern trees and sea snails; along the top, there’s a panoramic shot of the yellow sand and cool green surf of Ninety Mile Beach.
A passage from Man from Snowy River by Banjo Patterson introduces a smattering of pictures from Snowy River National Park; here you look truly exhausted, at the top of a lookout over a rugged, pine-lined gorge. The last page, covering the Gippsland Lakes (a.k.a. Victorian Riviera, at the far east), almost repeats the start. Again, rainforest images overlap with ocean and peninsular scrubland, highlighted by one lucky shot of a solitary penguin by the estuaries of desolate Cape Conran.
The Gippsland region covers the coast and hinterland east of Melbourne and south of the Victorian Alps, all the way to New South Wales. The area from Melbourne to the Gippsland Lakes is called South Gippsland; the rest, East Gippsland. Leaving Melbourne, the Southeast Hwy passes into the South Gippsland Hwy. The Princes Hwy takes an inland route just below the High Country, and meets the South Gippsland Hwy at Sale. From there the Princes Hwy takes over, moving along the coast of East Gippsland until it crosses into NSW. A car is recommended for exploring the region. Almost all important roads are sealed, and many dirt tracks are 2WD-accessible. Greyhound, Oz Experience, and V/Line buses cover some of the territory.