We arrved home yesterday afternoon after a drive that included stops at a number of unplanned places along the way.
After we passed through the little town of Katamatite (which the navigation system in our car gave a weird and unexpected pronunciation) we passed the old silos that were once by the railway line. These were new to us and painted in 2023 – another contribution to Victoria’s Silo Art Trail. I believe that there are now a total of 38 painted silos scattered across the state,
We stopped in Shepparton for a coffee and sat by the main park in town. For some years it has had a collection of painted cows.
The painted cows are part of an iconic, ever-changing public art exhibition known as Moooving Art. Rather than a static, permanent display, it is a fleet of over 90 life-sized fiberglass cows scattered across parks, gardens, street corners, and public spaces throughout Shepparton and the broader Greater Shepparton region.
The project started in 1999 with a very practical promotional goal. The Goulburn Valley produces roughly a quarter of Victoria’s total milk output, making Shepparton the literal heart of Australia’s premier dairy region.
To celebrate this, the local council and tourism board decided to use life-sized fiberglass cows as a blank canvas to showcase the region’s identity. They initially bought a small herd to dress up for local festivals, but the response from both locals and tourists was so massive that the initiative became permanent and grew into a massive marketing success.
The Greater Shepparton Council regularly rotates the cows between different parks (like Monash Park or the Victoria Park Lake precinct), commercial streets, and neighboring towns like Tatura and Mooroopna.
Along the highway towards home, we found a sign pointing to the town of Murchison. I don’t think that have ever visited this place before so we thought a detour would be worthwhile.
There is a nice park aross the road from the bakery (that had excellent meat pies) in which the war memorial is located. Once again, it is a reminder of the relatively significant contribution that small towns like this made to the war efforts of both WW1 and WW2.
After lunch, we drove around a couple of blocks to see if we could find the Main Street. In fact, the street in whch the bakery was located was the main street – we had already found it. The town only has a population of around 900 so the main street is not very large.
There was also another interesting feature that we found near the town cemetery. During WW2, many Prisoners of War and enemy aliens were sent to prison camps in the Goulburn Valley.
An estimated 4,000 Italian, German and Japanese POWs were detained at Murchison. A number of them died and were buried in the local Murchison cemetery but major floods in 1956 did serious damage to the graves. An Italian man, Luigi Gigliotti of Kyabram, decided to rectify the situation, persuaded local Italian families to pay for the construction of an Italian mausoleum. He raised £25,000. The mausoleum was completed in 1961 and Gigliotti managed to convince the authorities that all Italian POWs and internees who had died in Australian prison camps should be interred in the mausoleum.
The Italian National Ossario holds the remains of 130 Italian soldiers and civilians who died while interned in Australia. It is built of Castlemaine stone, has an altar of white Italian marble, and Roman roof tiles. The path to the building is lined with Mediterranean cypresses. Each year, on the nearest Sunday to Armistice Day, mass is celebrated before a large gathering.
Our final stop, near Nagambie, was to the historic winery at Chateau Tahbilk to pick up a few bottles of some unique wine that they make and that I like. Tahbilk was founded in 1860 by a syndicate led by a wealthy Melbourne merchant. The name comes from the local native Taungurung word tabilk-tabilk, meaning “place of many waterholes.”
n the late 19th century, the devastating Phylloxera root blight tore through Victoria, completely wiping out nearby wine regions like Geelong and Bendigo.
Tahbilk was incredibly lucky. Thanks to its isolated position among the loops of the Goulburn River and its sandy, iron-rich soils, a few small blocks of vines completely escaped the bug. Because of this, Tahbilk proudly boasts a block of 1860 Shiraz vines that are still producing fruit today
During the depression of thge 1930s, Tahbilk had to abandon its luxury estate identity. It was sold and for the next few decades, the grand old estate was treated essentially as a bulk wine processing facility. The historic cellars were filled with massive bulk storage tanks, and the focus shifted entirely to churning out generic white wine and distilling spirit to blend into fortified “ports” and “sherries” for mass export. The “Chateau” prefix was dropped from the labels altogether.
Starting in the 1960s, new owners systematically pulled the winery out of the bulk wine market. They restored the old underground cellars, brought back premium single-variety bottling, and made a name for the estate’s exceptional, age-worthy Marsanne (a white French variety that Tahbilk now holds the largest single planting of in the world).
The rmainder of our drive home was uneventul apart from delays along the section near home where a new freeway and tunnel are being constructed.
Another great travelogue.