A Wee Walk

As we bounced down the mountain road in what appeared to be little more than a gigantic tin can, one had to wonder how Wee Jasper was named. Anything to take our minds off the feeling that we were sitting inside one of those paint shakers you find at Bunnings, inside a paint tin large enough to pain the Sydney Harbour bridge.

Unlike many of the places in Australia that draw on their Indigenous heritage for names, Wee Jasper is distinctly European. So where did it come from?

The issue with having such musings while travelling around country Australia is that mobile phone reception isn’t omnipresent as we’ve come to expect in the cities and on our highways. For a couple of city boys who are used to almost every disagreement of fact being mediated by Google, not having mobile phone reception meant limitless space to explore fantastical theories.  Was there someone on the Hume and Hovell expedition named Jasper, who had a UTI in this area and complained very loudly to the rest of the expedition? Or was the youngest, smallest member of a local family called Jasper, and perhaps got lost down one of the holes (or if you want to be fancy, let’s call them caves) that apparently dot the landscape?

I have to admit, we did treat the discovery of caves less than two hours from Canberra with some suspicion. How could we not have heard of them if they were anything more grand than holes in the ground? Wee Jasper is known as a Scout retreat and little else, so it seemed odd that fantastical caves had received little airtime in our conversations of weekends away from Canberra. But on we went with our expedition, noting of course quite a few more creature comforts than Hume and Hovell had on their expedition to establish a land link between Sydney and Melbourne.

It turns out the cave we visited was magical, and highly recommended. Every visit to a cave is an exercise in memory, with the tour guide running through your standard spiel that a stalagmite might one day reach the ceiling, and a stalactite needing to hold on tight to the ceiling. For this tour we were asked to memorise eight formations, which I repeat here in case any of you want to reference casually and be the standout on your next cave tour: stalactite, stalagmite, column, straw, shawl, rim pools, helictites, and flowstones.

A guide really does define your experience of a cave, determining where you stop, and the sequence of lights to highlight particular formations, and the formations that go unnoticed because your guide doesn’t mention them. In our case, the guide highlighted a dying  breed. The chauvinistic entitled Australian ‘larrikin’. Very interesting geological information was delivered through very Australian expressions. We were treated to descriptions of where the nearest sinkholes are in case parents want to drop their kids off. Layering on stalactites was described as ‘ribbed’, you know, like the rubber things you use, he explained to our female friend. A memorable experience. We’ve heard that one of the best ways to learn new things is to associate a story with what you’re learning. We may never forget the association of helictites with personal grooming as long as we live.

Retreating from what seemed like a frontier town and time, we discovered a well reviewed campsite on the riverfront.

In a town with only four buildings – a general store, closed, a church, closed, a school, and a rubbish tip – we ran into and passed almost no one. Yet here, at the campground, it felt like peak hour. Caravans, matildas, motorhomes and tents littered the campground. The only way to get a waterfront view was to literally parallel park between two other residents. And scouring for wood for a campfire felt a desperate affair as we tried unsuccessfully to walk a different path than dozens of others had already done that day. It is a strange sense of comfort and security that arises from being in the middle of nowhere and uncovering a mass of people.

After freezing through the night free camping without power, and so without a heater, we eagerly waited for the gas hot water to heat up. Unfortunately it was uninterested in being a part of this trip and stayed resolutely cold (ahem user error ahem). We cannot express the joy of finding incredibly hot, high pressure showers at the campground. Any morning grumpiness from lack of sleep quickly washed away and a sense of adventure returned. And so we found ourselves on part of the Hume and Hovell trail, following a hand drawn map in the absence of being able to get a phone signal.

While we say ‘on the trail’, a large part of our time was spent wandering through bushland trying to determine how to translate three dashes on a map into distance. It turns out that to follow the trail from Wee Jasper, you have to sidle past the rubbish tip, and follow the fence for longer than you think, to then climb over another fence and then find the trail. Don’t turn left immediately or even after 200 metres after passing the rubbish tip. Well, at least don’t do that if you want to find the trail, and not spend 30 minutes wondering if you told anyone where you were going this weekend to make the search party’s work easier.

The trail itself had beautiful scenery. It felt a little like clambering up Mt Ainslie in Canberra without needing to appear fit, composed, and not at all out of breath every three minutes when you inevitably pass someone coming the other way and utter the obligatory ‘Hi’. As there was no one else on it, there was no rush, no pretences, just time to appreciate the wonderful Australian countryside and native birds. Oh, and the occasional honking as we tried to remember how to play a Eucalyptus leaf in a failed attempt to distract from the vertigo…

Oh, and that name? Wee Jasper? It turns out Google couldn’t have resolved that one. The origin of the name appears unknown, with folklore suggesting that an early Scottish settler, McBean, found a small (wee) piece of jasper (a gemstone) in his pocket. We’re guessing he must have got mightily excited by finding that in his pocket, but unsure why he forget he’d put it there in the first place. I guess we’ll make a choice to stick with our folklore of tiny people with UTI’s.