31/07/26 Seymour to Holbrook: The Next Big Thing

 The consequence of one of us having frusemide for breakfast was making sure that the first couple of hours driving included adequate toilet stops.  Not any old toilet stops either, they had to be toilets of a suitable height for someone with a compromised right quad to get on and off.  Sadly, cafe toilets were of a height that the user could well be compelled to call someone to help stand up from the throne.  How do we know this?  Pure speculation, of course.

I pored over the map for suitable dunnies, noting our proximity to Glenrowan.  "We're in Ned Kelly country," I told BD, who displayed a distressing lack of excitement at this news.  I inspected the map more closely.  "There's a Big Ned Kelly in Glenrown!"  Well that settled it: Glenrowan was on our must-stop list and the toilets would just have to measure up.

We spent a happy half hour taking photos of Ned in all his glory, conveniently brushing aside all the inconvenient history of thugs and criminals, to wonder at the lengths small towns would go to when seeking a tourist dollar.  Mini Ned Kellys lurked in shop fronts and cafe gardens and the audio track from the Ned Kelly museum provided a sound track to the main street.

We rolled into Holbrook as winter shadows lengthened, but before we went to the Jolly Swagman motel I had to introduce BD to Holbrook's claim to fame because the logical thing to find in a land-locked country town where a crow would have to fly 260km to get a sniff of the sea, was of course a submarine.

It's a long story which started when Lt Holbrook, piloting a 'primitive' B-class submarine, sank a Turkish battleship in the Dardanelles Channel and became a war hero and Victoria Cross recipient.  Half a world away in Australia the residents of Germanton were getting a little self-concious about their town's name and decided to re-name themeselves something more patriotically suitable and what was better than taking the name of a freshly minted submarinar hero.

Commander Holbrook was quite chuffed by this, visited Holbrook several times after the war, and developed a relationship between the town and the RAN Submarine Squadron. In 1995 the Navy gifted the fin of the decommissioned Otway to the town.  Holbrook, overcome with visions of submarining grandeur, formed a submarine working party and started raising funds to get hold of  the rest of the submarine.  Commander Holbrook having died, his widow took pity on them and donated enough for them to purchase the above waterline superstructure after protracted negotiations with the scrapyard where the submarine rested.

Having had our fill of submarines we took ourselves off to the Jolly Swagman Motel , heard all about the owner's complicated relationship with Telstra, patronised the Chinese restaurant which occupied the other half of reception, and went to bed.

Two of the six rooms at the Jolly Swagman Motel.