The following morning we checked out two markets both housed indoors in large warehouses, one of which was a former woolstore and very solidly built. While interesting for the range and number of items for sale we didn’t find anything of real interest. After returning to the caravan park, we walked a few minutes up the road to the WWII Memorial Lookout Tower where we boarded a vintage tram for an informative tour of the harbour and surrounds. This included a brief stop at the tram depot which houses a small tram and vehicle museum as well as a model train display together with a model of Portland’s harbour as it was in the 1950s before the present breakwaters were built.
Returning to the WWII Memorial Lookout Tower we spent an hour or so checking out the various exhibits many of which related to local residents involved in the war effort. We were surprised to see the Catalina flying boats mentioned in a few displays including a large model of a Catalina suspended from the ceiling. This interest was apparently due to two of the museum committee members having served as Catalina crew during the war.
Our final visit was to the Maritime Discovery Centre with its displays on local maritime history as well as an exhibition on the building of the breakwaters for the port completed in 1960. The port itself is very active importing raw materials for the local aluminium smelter as well as exporting the end product, pine logs to Korea for laminates, wood chips to Japan, grain and livestock. It also supports a lucrative fishing industry based on tuna, lobster, abalone and squid, the majority of which goes straight to the Victorian market with a small percentage exported.
We drove north-west of Portland to Dartmoor, a small town whose main tourist attraction are chainsaw carvings. An avenue of Atlantic cedars was planted in 1918 as a memorial to those district residents who served in the First World War. Many of the trees had since died so a local chainsaw artist, Kevin Gilders, was encouraged by the community to create nine tree carvings in the Avenue of Honour depicting service men and women from the three armed forces. Our photos show the results. There were also some other carvings by the same artist located in the town park which included a nursery rhyme tree which was quite detailed.
Leaving Dartmoor we drove south-west to the small township of Nelson located at the mouth of the Glenelg River, just 5kms from the South Australian border and 70kms west of Portland. Nelson is a popular holiday destination for both river and ocean fishing, bird watching, canoeing and bush walking but apart from a pub, general store and businesses running boat & canoe hire and river cruises there’s not much else there apart from holiday homes. It was a pleasant diversion nevertheless and we were amazed at the thousands of hectares of pine plantations in the Portland-Dartmoor-Nelson triangle. We also saw quite a few emus grazing in the plantations and a few flocks of rosellas.
The rain of the past two days finally cleared overnight into a lovely sunny day so we took the opportunity to visit the Botanic Gardens and the historic Curator’s cottage. Portland had recently had its annual Dahlia Festival and a large section of the grounds were planted with over 130 varieties of dahlias. They came in all sizes, shapes and colours and provided a very colourful display. There were some lovely roses also still on display despite being at the end of the flowering season. The Curator’s cottage was built in 1859 from local bluestone as were most of the town’s buildings dating from that period. The cottage was extended in 1885 but still only consisted of 4 rooms, 2 up and 2 down. The cottage became a museum in 1965 and now houses a wide variety of both household items and workers’ tools. The two most interesting items were the wooden birthing chair with its U-shaped seat and the vacuum cleaner which required two people to operate it – one to push while the other operated the bellows!
After leaving the Gardens we visited History House formerly the Portland Town Hall constructed in 1864. It became a museum and genealogical research centre in the late 1970s and now houses a wide range of displays on the establishment of Portland in the 1800s. One such display related to one of its most well-known residents – Sister Mary MacKillop who lived and worked in the town before establishing the Order of the Sisters of St Joseph in Penola, SA approx 200km from Portland.
That afternoon we drove out to Cape Bridgewater to view the Petrified Forest and Blowholes. While the Petrified Forest certainly resembles a dense forest buried by sand thousands of years ago and turned into stone pipes and rings, there is apparently a more scientific explanation but it’s still quite unique. Unfortunately the ocean swell wasn’t sufficient to operate the blowholes nearby but it was interesting to note the black basalt rock was similar to that surrounding the Kiama blowholes.
We continued on to Cape Nelson which is dominated by a 32 metres tall white & red lighthouse and associated lighthouse keepers cottages dating from 1883. As this part of the coast is known as the Shipwreck Coast it wasn’t hard to understand the reason for its construction. South of Cape Nelson is Point Danger which is home to Australia’s only mainland colony of Australasian Gannets – approx 6000 pairs of birds nest there in season
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