Beechworth

Today I drove up to Beechworth, about 50km south of Victoria’s border with New South Wales, to visit the parents of a good friend and enjoy an environment in which there were trees, birds, rolling hills, copious amounts of shiraz, and a horrifying number of dead wombats – I counted five lying bloated with their stumpy little legs in the air on the side of the Hume Highway. Apparently hitting one is like driving your car into a suitcase-sized boulder at 110kph, and so is recommended by neither motorists nor wombats.

Tony and Tonya joined me in going mushroom picking, with a local who knew the difference between the tasty treat mushrooms and the slow lingering death mushrooms. The ice skaters weren’t much use in the actual harvesting of mushrooms, but they enjoyed having their own little performance stages.

 

The countryside of Beechworth actually has quite a bit of free food, with the mushrooms, wild infestations of blackberries, apples and chestnuts that have escaped captivity, and of course as much wombat as you want to risk eating.