After spending the night at our campsite, Shaun went off to work while Zoe, Ian and I set off to visit the Healesville Sanctuary about forty minutes away. Healesville is in the Yarra Valley wine region and a very smart, prosperous looking place, we had all been there before but not had time to visit the sanctuary. So we dropped Monty at doggy day care in a kennels nearby and in we went.
It turned out to be a great place to visit, all native Australian animals, many extremely rare and endangered (mind you, you can never be too sure in Australia, the place is so vast it is not unknown for entire species to be hiding for decades). The Healesville Sanctuary is one of several animal institutions working on a project to save the Tasmanian Devil. In the wild in Tasmania, the Devils have developed a form of cancerous mouth tumor which is incurable and contagious. It started in a small area but is rapidly spreading across the whole of Tasmania and nothing can be done to stop it so several breeding communities, like the one at the Healesville Sanctuary, have been set up away from Tasmania using some of the remaining healthy Devils before the disease reaches them. The breeding programmes have all been successful but the operation becomes more complicated as time goes on. They obviously need to avoid inbreeding so every couple of months the keepers consult a massive Tasmanian Devil database to see which Devils can be bred with which and a mass swapping of Tasmanian Devils takes place. The plan is to eventually repopulate Tasmania with healthy Devils once the current wild residents have completely died out so the disease cannot be passed on, they are ugly little critters but it is awful to think, without this programme, they would be completely wiped out.
The birds in Australia take your breath away with their beauty and the most gorgeous were on show here, there was also my absolute favourite spectacle to watch, a birds of prey show. So we left here very satisfied and Zoe took us off to a Chocolate Factory she knew where we all did a little bit of last minute Christmas shopping and a lot of eating before we picked Monty up and headed back to the campsite.
We said goodbye to Zoe the following morning as she went off to look at Montsalvat, because we had not stopped talking about how fabulous it was, and we set off for home.
We took the Hume Highway this time because we needed to be back to work at the Tilligerry Habitat on Christmas Eve, so we stopped overnight in a road side rest area near Goulburn. We popped into the town for gas before we headed off in the morning and there it was... a proper Big Thing! Goulburn is home of The Big Merino and it is fantastic, dominating the skyline as you drive into the town. Ian insisted on posing beside it for a size comparison and, I'm guessing to point out how anatomically correct it is.