2014 Beginning Best Education Tours
I read about the Bogong moths and related it to the Thai people eating grilled insects.
I thought a day addition to a tour for Thai tour groups would be a possibility.
The day would need to be led by an Aboriginal person. They, I anticipated, would know all about Bogong moths. That was not true.
Eventually I did find a woman at Latrobe University who had collected the moths for a Japanese film crew and cooked them. If the Japanese think this is something the local Aborigines do they are sadly mistaken. KFC or one of the other mobs is probably on the menu.
The moths are found in the Victorian National Parks, so it was to them I went for information about collecting moths. After about a year I gave up.
The moths led me to think in terms of tourist attractions related to the Aboriginal people because they have been in this area for forty thousand years.
In that time you must have left some mark on the land. Go overseas and in Thailand you see Khmer ruins from thousands of years ago, in the UK you have castles all over the place from King William’s time.
Here on the Murray River, a prime site for Aboriginal occupation, there is effectively zilch, none, nada, zero, nothing. Well nearly anyway. I read about a walk you could do through the countryside to see evidence of Aboriginal occupation in the form of cave paintings. We deliberately drove along the road it was supposed to be off and never found it. Try again. It is supposed to be worth seeing. Spent longer on the research on how to find it and more by good luck than good management did locate the site. It is significantly undersignposted. Actually not at all.
Just a small point of recollection here and I mention the first tour group I took to Perth in Western Australia. On the outskirts of the city they have a Pioneer Village. I did check it out before I took them as all other tour groups went there but I had not been before despite having lived in the city for many years. As the tour group from Thailand went through the place one of its members wanted to know whether I had been there before, it was so lacking to be somewhere you would take International tourists.
This rock painting near Chiltern would have them insisting on their money back and a deluge of negative comments about your tour business for taking them to such a waste of time.
On a granite rock overhang there is a barely discernible partial drawing of an animal. It could be a kangaroo or even a Tasmanian Tiger the optimists think it is.
That’s it. That’s the local evidence of sixty thousand years of occupation.
I obviously gave up on the Aboriginal connection for tours.
The problem is that the business I had in Bangkok had four tour guides. I would make up an itinerary, take a guide with the group on the tour, and subsequent tours I did not have to be on hand but could be telephoned to sort out any problems. The proposed functioning here in Albury was for me to do it all every time. I must admit to having lost most of my enthusiasm for that scenario.
