Tabberabbera Road
Gunaikurnai Country
7-8 March 2025
We’re down deep in the drainage. Slanted, crumbly cliffs of sedimentary shales stand above a bend in the creek downstream. Bushy undergrowth surrounds the campsite, twelve-foot tall scrubby vegetation hiding the floodplain and the impacts of logging. There is little perspective down here in the details, you need to get up above and look down to get any sense of how the landscape is structured and to get a bigger picture of how it all fits together. Yes, we’re sitting down here in the “i’s” and “t’s” that the Type A’s always have to dot and cross.
I would really like to ride on into town today. The food supplies are thin. We’ve been out in the bush for seven days now. But it would be madness to ride into town on a Saturday on a long weekend. It will be super busy and the accommodation will all be booked out. So we need to drag our feet today and tomorrow and not get into town until the end of the long weekend on Monday.
Ugh. So we sit out today. It’s a pleasant enough spot, but oh my god, I would just love for this tour to get some flow. I am starting to hate all of this stop-start stuff. Having to waste time taking the bus and re-jigging the ride from Bairnsdale instead of riding south from Omeo has really messed up the timing and routing. But there’s nothing I can really do about that, so just hang here.
I think about that difference in perspectives and how it is so critical to see both the big picture and the details. I think about how the ability to see both is what makes a great project manager. You have to work with the left-brain engineers, accountants and IT people who get bogged down in the details and blow out your project timeline. Then you’ve got the economic and community development and policy people who can only see the big picture, and they blow out your project budget because they don’t account for all the little bits that add up in dollars.
A good project manager is a skilled facilitator that excels at liaison who can tie those opposite approaches together and keep a project moving. You have to be strategic and know your stakeholders well. You’ve got to be a good listener and able to translate needs (and wants where possible) into objectives and deliverables.
I’ll get to practice all of that soon when I start the new contract. It’s a big project with a ton of primary stakeholders. I don’t know how an introvert fell into project management, but it’s a good fit for me. I’m not a Type A person, nor I am totally Type B, and I think that is a good attribute, as well. Oh, but let’s make the most of this time off before we have to get back into it.
It’s hot on Saturday, we’re back down at 200 metres here. It’s been very hot back in Albury the whole time I’ve been away, so I’m very grateful to be out here instead of back there. I wash my shirts and hair and they all dry quickly.
Early on Sunday morning, the first 4WD I’ve seen since those guys at Marthavale on Wednesday come barreling down the road. They stop at the entrance to the campsite, pause, and then cross over the bridge and park on the other side.
I can hear three guys walking about from the tent. It quickly becomes apparent they are out prospecting for gold. This was an old gold mining area, and the creek does have a lot of rubble pushed up along the sides from a big flood likely in the last 3-6 months. They walk up the smaller tributary that leads into the creek, talking about the possibilities. It sounds like one guy has a pick axe and is digging into the creek bed. There’s some hammering going on and a rock is being stricken with something metal. A bit later, they set off some explosives and the smell of split ions, damp earth and fractured rock fill the air. (It takes me back to the rockfall experience at Mirror Lake!). Not long after, they head out.
Later, when I go down to the creek, I’ll see all the holes they’ve dug into the creek and the quartz rocks they’ve broken apart. Good bogans that they are, they’ve left the spent explosive charges behind in the holes.
I think about how blokes love to blow things up and wonder if this is the main reason they are into gold prospecting. There’s the off chance you can strike it rich, but even if not, you get to blow shit up. It’s as fun as playing with fire, apparently. I’ve never been a girly girl. I get mistaken for a guy a lot on the bike. But this is one of the ways I know I am decidedly female – I do not understand the desire to explode things or set things on fire AT ALL.
We need to decide if we’re going to try to get closer to the forest edge today or stay here. They are forecasting a decent amount of rain this afternoon and evening. The clouds are in agreement with a forecast of incoming rain. So do I move on or do I stay here?
I look at the maps a bit more and I just can’t put together something I’m happy with that will get us to another water source and then somewhere okay to camp. There’s a dearth of little purple tents on the map over this way. I can put the tent just about anywhere, but 10mm of rain makes me want to be somewhere with decent drainage and no big trees overhead.
In the end, I decide to just stay where I am. It’s the laziest bike tour ever. Maybe that IS the theme this time. Sigh…..
High cloud arrives in the afternoon, but there is no rain. The high cloud moves on and stars come out. Damn, that rain is late. We might have to ride in it on Monday. I’m not a fair weather rider by any means, but riding gluggy dirt roads in the mountains are a bit different to chipseal, particularly if there is any clay in the base.
The rain does come. At about 5am.