Still captivating ... Dandenong Ranges National Park.Credit: Tourism Victoria
Though the February fires deeply scarred the Victorian bush, Julietta Jameson finds much to lure back visitors.
When I was a kid growing up in Melbourne's outer east, my friend Marlene and her parents would go on Sunday drives in the Dandenong Ranges and Yarra Valley and I'd tag along.
There we'd be, in their boxy old Renault 10 with venetians over the back windscreen and plastic tartan cushions on the back dash. We'd chug up the steep winding roads, calling out "Ren-olt!" whenever we saw another car of the same make, which was more often than you might assume.
On a visit to the Dandenongs last Christmas, I was in a spanking new, borrowed Volkswagen Passat convertible which was simply made for those roads, taking the curves like they weren't any kind of challenge, gliding over the dirt back roads with an extraordinary grace, easing me through the downhill runs, which in my own first car, a Hillman Minx that I paid $600 for, was a death-defying white-knuckle experience.
The Minx made the Renault look positively spritely. (I broke the Minx's first gear on the side of Mount Dandenong the first day I got it and from then on, had to start in second. I'm pleased to say, no such damage was done to the borrowed VW's automatic shift.)
The Dandenongs have been like a family member to me. I might get older and the cars I visit them in might get better but they are this constant force for me: my mum headed an amateur theatre group there. I wrote a novel set there. When I think of them, I think of home.
New South Welshmen who haven't been to the Dandenongs usually assume they are like the Blue Mountains due to the proximity to the city of both ranges. They're quite different.
Where the Blue Mountains are spectacular, sweeping and dramatic, I think the Dandenongs are a more intimate affair. For one thing, the vegetation isn't the same.
The majority of the Dandenongs is temperate rainforest, kind of dark and closed-in, canopied by soaring, straight tall timbers, carpeted in moss and inhabited by giant tree ferns, trickling brooks, lyrebirds, wombats, koalas - and, quite possibly, fairies.
There is something magical about the Dandenongs. On my Christmas sojourn I was visiting Olinda, a tiny township that still maintains its turn-of-the-20th-century charms.
The local hall and football oval are still as quaint as they always were, like something out of a sepia photograph; there is a small whitewashed country church and the Mount Dandenong pub, unfortunately renovated in the 1970s, is nonetheless a lovely place to be on a Sunday afternoon.
Though Olinda and its surrounds have stayed true to how I have always known them, these days there are gourmet cafes and B&Bs galore, which is a good thing.
I stayed at Candlelight Cottages, where guests are afforded real privacy as accommodation is in separate little cottages, not all under the one roof.
I had the front cottage, called Cottage in the Village, a small, cosy and romantic delight with a spa bath in the bedroom, right next to the four-poster brass bed. There were chocolates and biscuits in the kitchen, an open fireplace that I did not need as it was summer, CDs, books, games and a DVD player, none of which got used either, because the Olinda quiet lulled me into an early night and in that extremely comfy bed, I had the best sleep of the year.
Early the next morning, my brother, Sean, came up the mountain for breakfast. The owners had provided a loaf of quality locally baked bread, eggs, bacon, tomatoes and gourmet sausages. There was a coffee machine and oranges for squeezing. We cooked our feast on the barbecue in the private courtyard and read the papers, delivered to the door.
Then we rolled the top off the Volkswagen and, inhaling the fresh forest air and savouring the serenade of native birds, we headed for one of my brother's favourite out-of-the-way spots.
There are plenty of them in the Dandenongs, walking tracks at the end of dirt roads that provide access to glorious bush and incredible views, the land falling away to flatness between the mountains and the sea. And so it was that my brother and I were sitting on rocks amid the tall timbers on the side of Mount Dandenong, admiring the far-reaching view.
Having grown up at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges, it was like we were looking at the continuum of our lives and it had us in a philosophical mood, talking about our family and our childhood.
The western vista stretched through vineyards and strawberry fields where as kids we'd picked fruit for pocket money, before morphing into light industrial, a more recent blight.
That converged with the outer suburbia that was our home for the first 20-odd years of our lives, then joined the red roofs of older, established inner Melbourne where we'd both ventured as young adults.
And then there were the skyscrapers of the city, where both he and I had spent good proportions of our working lives. The view finally tipped into Port Phillip Bay and the infinity that lay beyond.
Two months later, I saw a photo of almost the same view from a burnt-out Kinglake in the adjoining upper Yarra Valley. Only instead of the magnificent forest that was in our foreground, the vegetation was razed to the ground but for blackened trunks.
My brother and his family had settled back into the outer east of Melbourne some years back, because his kids went to the Melbourne Rudolph Steiner School at Warranwood. The St Andrews and Kinglake communities, destroyed in the February bushfires, were strongholds of Steiner families.
I rang my brother when I saw that photo in the paper. He wept when I asked how he was.
On his bushy block far enough away not to worry too much about flames but close enough to be engulfed in smoke, he was dealing with thirsty and injured animals in his backyard and bewildered young adults whose friends had been directly affected. He himself knew many who'd lost much.
We were all affected in some way. I felt the fires in my DNA. You can move away but the places of your childhood are always part of you. That's why I kind of feel it a duty, as a travel writer, to suggest a visit to the Dandenongs and Yarra Valley.
The immediate crisis has dissipated. The tragedy of personal loss continues.
And yet another tragedy looms: loss of business for those whose property escaped the fire but who may suffer again as a result of a reluctance to visit now. A visit to the area, even a Sunday drive during a visit to the city, will support those who are still operating.
And with that there will be positive flow-on to the community overall. Along with Gembrook, the home of the Puffing Billy Railway, and Healesville in the Yarra Valley, where the famous sanctuary for native animals, thank God, still exists, Olinda is a classic and is still standing.
Though the Kinglake National Park was horrifically affected, only 35 kilometres east of Melbourne the Dandenong Ranges National Park and the mountain townships with their craft, antique and bric-a-brac shops still stand.
The famous Dandenong Ranges Devonshire teashops are pumping out the scones with jam and cream as ever.
You can jump out of the car and discover the 350 native plant species that still grow here including stringy bark, spider orchids, flowering bush peas and other wildflowers. There are heavenly private gardens that open to the public.
The animal species you might see include echidnas, wallabies and, of course, lyrebirds, the calls of which always feel very special to me. They're so elusive, you can't help but feel privileged to know they're nearby.
You can picnic in some great places: the National Rhododendron Garden, which is a perennial favourite of my family, or the Mount Dandenong Arboretum, with its vast collection of deciduous trees that whisper soothingly in the mountain breeze.
And while you're there, don't forget the beautiful adjoining Yarra Valley, with particular charms of its own.
Just visit soon. You'll be heartening and helping people who have been through much. And the fairies will thank you, too.
TRIP NOTES
Virgin Blue flies regularly to Melbourne. See virginblue.com.au.
Candlelight Cottages is at 7-9 Monash Avenue, Olinda. From $215 a night a couple. Phone 1300 553 011 or (03) 9751 2464 or go to candlelightcottages.com.au.
Go to visitvictoria.com for tourism information. Local businesses have a site: dandenongrangestourism.com.au, with good recommendations for your itinerary. For national park information, go to parkweb.vic.gov.au.
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