Ben Hall Serves a Tasty Dish

Ronald twisted our collective arms to go on another road trip on Monday and we are glad he did. Our destination was vague; we could either go up the coast towards Queensland or back into the interior of New South Wales to see the country on the other side of the Blue Mountains. We opted for the latter shortly after we got into the car and headed out.

The first leg of our journey brought us up into the Blue Mountains along the Bell’s Line of Road, a winding stretch that meandered through giant rain forests and spectacular views. This part of the country is close to three thousand feet above sea level, and we had the sensation of having our ears pop for the first time since our flight here. As we expected, the country got drier as we passed over the crest of the Great Dividing Range, but the temperatures were much cooler than we have felt anywhere in Australia. We stopped in Lithgow to get tourist propaganda from the “super helpful” staff and were directed to a roadside area futher up the road to Bathurst for our picnic lunch. We could not find the correct place and so simply pulled over into a wooded area, spread a tarp, and then began spreading sandwich rolls with mustard and butter. Here we discovered the most foul smelling ants on the planet. Harmless little black beasties, these ants gave off an odor when squished that would stink to high heaven. Unfortunately we only made this discovery after we had dispatched a few of them who had hitchhiked a ride in the car.

Our car pointed towards Parkes and the giant radio telescope made famous by the movie “The Dish.” On the way to the town we passed through many small cattle and sheep ranching towns and got a hint of the area’s gold rush heritage. When we finally made it to Parkes it was getting towards evening, so we looked for accommodations instead of going out to the dish that night. We found a great little tourist cabin run by a friendly old guy who told us to eat at the local RSL Club. (The Retired Servicemen’s League is a rough equivilent to our American Legion.) This proved to be a good choice because, while we waited for the ten minutes before the restaurant began serving, I tried my luck at the Ned Kelly “pokie” machine and won enough money on a one dollar bet to buy dinner. My luck did not hold, though, because we then returned to the cabin where Ronald cleaned me out of matchsticks in a spirited poker game. Benjamin and Ronald settled in for the night in their submarine bunks while Jayne and I split the queen size bed in the other room.

The next morning we went out to the dish, and it was a pretty neat experience. The dish is still in operation, only now it is strictly used for radio astronomy observations. It was pretty cool to see the place where they had filmed the movie and it made me want to see the film again. From there we went south to the town of Forbes (which was the location for all the town scenes in the movie; I guess they figured Parkes itself was not pretty enough). Here at the visitor center we learned about Ben Hall, a bushranger who is as famous locally as Ned Kelly. We watched a pretty corny fifteen minute movie about Ben in the visitor’s center, and the thing reminded Jayne of the half-baked westerns I used to film in high school.

Our next stop was Cowra, a place made famous by a World War II incident involving a Japanese prisoner of war camp located there. It seems that in 1944 about a thousand Japanese soldiers decided to rush the barbed wire and break out of the place, and they launched a suicide banzi attack at two in the morning. A pair of spunky Australian guards managed to get on a machine gun and break up the party before they were killed, but about three hundred of the prisoners managed to actually get outside the perimeter of the camp. All of them were rounded up within days, and the whole story is told in the Cowra visitor’s center by a holographic projection movie that was totally cool. We visited the rose garden outside the visitor’s center, and then took a short drive to the site of the camp and the big breakout. It was a lonely hillside with only the remains of several barracks foundations, but we found a rather talkative local who would have kept us there for hours had we not made a move back to the car.


We decided to have lunch at Woodstock, but there was no evidence that Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix had ever been there. Here we tried a few cricket pitches after devouring more ham sandwiches and drinks. What followed next was the most heroic driving endurance performances ever achieved by Ronald, who managed to get us back over the Blue Mountains to Sydney in a heavy rainstorm. He must have a bladder of steel, and nerves of the same metal, to have piloted that car so long.