Mt Gambier’s Blue Lake and the Umpherstone Sinkhole

It turns out that I never finished telling you about our Broken Hill driving tour last summer. It ended quite differently to how it started, as we took a long southern detour and came home via western Victoria. The most stunning sight in this leg of the trip was without a doubt the Blue Lake of Mt Gambier. The remarkable colour of the lake, which changes from grey in winter to the amazing turquoise you can see below in summer, has yet to be explained – we were just glad to see it in its prime.

The Umpherstone Sinkhole was actually turned into a leisure spot last century, with the bottom filled with water so that people could float under the very impressive “curtain” created by the hanging vines, but now it’s a very attractive garden. Adam Dimech has written a good summary of the history of the sinkhole.

Leaving Mt Gambier, we continued east, homeward bound, but stopped to explore another large hole in the ground at Wannon Falls. The brown of the land was beautiful and struck me as quintessentially Australian. At the time of our visit, the flow over the falls was quite tame, but it seems that it can be quite impressive at times.

Finally we came to our final overnight resting place: Hamilton. I’m sure that the fact that we visited it on New Year’s Day contributed, but I found it to be a wonderfully quiet place – if you’ve visited it at other times and found it differently, let me know! By the way, the lake at Hamilton is picturesque but I’m afraid it just doesn’t compare to Lake Hamilton in the Canadian Rockies.

2 responses to “Mt Gambier’s Blue Lake and the Umpherstone Sinkhole”

  1. Sandy

    You made me want to bring a book and jump there for a relaxing afternoon!!

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