Day 3 – Traralgon to Koornalla Reserve

---

The stay at the Black Bull motel is very comfortable, with clean and well appointed rooms. We start the day with a very nice continental breakfast. The Greek yoghurt and berries alone garner an 8.5/10 Beef Wellingtons score. The proprietor wishes us well as we heft packs and amble onwards.

Near as I can tell there’s no good way to head south from Traralgon without doing a bunch of road walking, so that’s what today is. We weave our way through the city centre, stopping at the bakery to pick up some road food. We swing through the conservation area again just to wave hi to the dusky purple swampmore hens.

Then it’s walking through the long grass and rubbish alongside a busy asphalt road for a little while, feeling the stares of motorists wondering who’d be crazy enough to hike down here. One of the massive power stations we’ve been seeing draw closer for the last two days belches vapour into the sky; a stark blight against an otherwise pleasant pastoral landscape.

We turn down lesser roads onto dirt, which makes for much less fraught walking.

After morning tea a huge mob of yellow tailed black cockatoos wheel chattering through the majestic sky. Of the two species of cockatoo they’re easily my favourite.

At Traralgon South we stop for a convenient convenience. There’s a memorial sculpture by the CFA shed to those who died or served in the Black Saturday fires of 2009. It stands in honourable counterpoint to the war memorial that every small town has; individually sad but in aggregate horrific and wasteful.

At Koornalla we stop in the wonderful picnic shelter for lunch and a “quick” geocache. My bacon and cheese roll from Banjos is no better than if it had come from Woolworths. 3/10 Beef Wellingtons. There is yet another memorial here to the victims of the Black Saturday fires. Also a plinth for the explorer Strzelecki, whose trail we are now briefly on. The wind blows cold and hard, and we both feel like weather is coming in despite the reassurances of the BOM. Victorian weather is inscrutably inscrutable.

We reach Koornalla Reserve and end the day’s walking barely after lunchtime. It’s a broad grassy campsite by Traralgon Creek. I’d worried that it would be a bit dire, but it’s actually quite nice if you can step nimbly around the duck poo. There’s a chill in the air so we get a merry little fire going in one of the fire places and rest feet tired from a day of hard-surface walking.

We’re soon joined by an amiable retired airforceman with a regulation moustache, who is scouting a location for a meeting of Strzelecki fanciers. He regales us at length with stories of having followed Strzelecki’s trails through Gippsland and further afield, as well as other stories of the explorers. I’m too rapt to retain more than a sliver of the knowledge he imparts, but perhaps some of it found a home amongst the dross in my brain. A pair of kookaburras hunt happily around the periphery of the field.

As the sun begins to sink, we excuse ourselves to cook dinner, after which we sit and soak up the warmth from the fire. The hot coals cast a bone-warming heat that ties us casually to humans who sat and chatted about basically the same things around a fire four hundred thousand years ago.