Long Track Pantry & Gundagai

We left Canberra to go to Macedon where we planned to spend the weekend with friends . We split the journey over two days and planned a couple of breaks

We stopped at Long Track Pantry for lunch. The cafe/restaurant is in Jugiong that is just off the motorway. The town is pretty remarkable in that it is, in essence, quite unremarkable, but attracts people travelling along the motorway to come off and spend their money in the town. The fuel station has pretty cheap fuel, there is a free campsite with good facilities plus there is the pantry, an ice cream shop plus a recently refurbished hotel. The pantry has an additional business of producing chutneys and jams that they use and sell in their cafe/restaurant, plus have a shop nearby. When so many rural towns are struggling, this town appeared to have a pretty good way of attracting money in.

Later that day we stopped and looked around Gundagai, another rural town off the motorway. Gundagai still has “Merry Christmas” flags down the high street and Christmas decorations over the shop fronts. Surprisingly this is not the only Australian town to have ignored the bad luck associated with taking decorations down before the twelfth night.

Just before Gundagai there is the world famous “dog on a tucker box” statue

Gundagai is famous as a river crossing that was needed when settlers moved west. The town grew up there because of the crossing. Initially the town was built on the river’s flood plain and the settlers ignored the aborigines warning that the river floods. When the river flooded by almost 40 feet, almost one third of the inhabitants perished along with an unknown number of travellers. Local aborigines saved nearly 100 people from tree tops and building roofs before the waters subsided.

The town has a number of heritage buildings and two old bridges that span the flood plane. There is also a beautiful model of a church built out of local marble over almost 40 years by a local mason. The smallest piece is 3x3x3 mm. There are zillions of pieces.Read more