This is the second last travel article for my Book Expo travels this year, next week I’ll do Yass and then make the move back to books until my next travels.

On my way to Sydney I stopped in Chiltern but on my way back I decided to stop somewhere else and Barnawatha was it. It’s a pretty little town, the Barnawatha Soldiers’ Memorial Hall I found rather picturesque and one of the things I loved about it is all the rules and regulations for hiring it are pinned to the front door so if you’ve hired it and are packing up for the day you can’t lose the papers telling you what to do as they’re pinned ready for reading.

There’s a bit of history here as I found out just now by googling the town name. Gustav and William Baumgarten owned some land here before the town was settled in 1860, William was given some jail time as he supplied horses to Ned Kelly.

I took this photo at the post office. It’s something we don’t see much of in big cities and I was quite taken with the idea that you could combine a Fire Ready meeting with a BBQ (or barbecue for those who don’t know our lingo). I liked it for the friendliness of getting people together for socialising, especially as some of these people will be coming from a fair way away and mightn’t see people every day.

I took this photo as it shows which way to Chiltern, the subject of a previous article and also for the reference to Terry Pratchett. If you’re not a Discworld reader you’ll need a few words of background. The city of Ankh-Morpork has a despotic ruler who rules with a fist of iron, his name is Havelock Vetinari and he is played by two very lovely men I know both of whom are extremely talented…funnily enough they don’t play him at the same time, that would be rather disconcerting as they’re both very good and it’d be ‘will the real Lord Vetinari please stand up’ and then watch them both continue to sit there and look stern at the speaker.

I was taken by this photo as I found the whole idea of losing a helicopter more than rather amusing, just ignore the fact that it’s a toy helicopter as that’s not nearly as funny.