The weather was pretty decent for walking, too, though a few percent less humidity would have been better. The surface was pretty nice for walking as it was almost entirely gravel, with a bit of grass and only a very small amount of sealed path.
The fact is that all the walks, all the journeys, all the living that I do here is done on Country that has been stolen from others. What I can say is (a) the landscapes we walked through looked like they would have been excellent for living, with water nearby and park-like forest for hunting, so I can easily believe that Brayakaulung/Gunaikurnai people would have gathered and spent time there and (b) if one wishes to avoid walking through any sites of genocidal violence towards and dispossession of Indigenous people, then one must avoid walking anywhere in so-called Australia - not merely at sites of known massacres. There’s also a novel called Providence Ponds which is supposedly fictionalised but which "includes hostile encounters with Aboriginal people" - I haven’t read it.) This doesn’t mean that Indigenous people weren’t killed here. ( Peter Gardner mentions the Perry River in his notes, but that massacre site is down near the Avon. I can’t find any mention of this when searching online for Providence Ponds or Perry River plus various keywords. When I mentioned to my folks that I was planning a walk at Providence Ponds, they said they'd heard that this was the site of a massacre of Indigenous people. The whole walk, once we got away from the highway, was an aural treat. Of course, with the eponymous ponds, there were loads of frogs. We spotted and heard heaps of birds apart from the emus: choughs, magpies, currawongs, butcherbirds, wattlebirds, two cockies (who absolutely screamed the bush down when they saw us), rosellas, wrens, flycatchers, fantails and loads of other twitchy, chirpy little things. The ants had been very busy building their tiny iron age hill fortresses, and we also walked through a few clouds of butterflies. I guess I’m burying the lede here, because we also saw two emus, a few wallabies and a small mob of kangaroos. There were some mysterious lines that looked like something small burrowing just under the surface of the sand. We spotted lots of kangaroo and wallaby prints as well as fox and possibly feral cat tracks. The track was often grey sand, which was soft to walk on and afforded us the opportunity to do some vicarious wildlife watching. As I’m probably going to need to change to new shoes sometime on the Heysen Trail, I might get another pair of Lone Peaks online - and if I can, I’ll get the extremely bright yellowy ones! The Lone Peak 6 seems like a similar fit overall - I’m not sure if the 2-3mm narrower toe box might just be because I’ve squished the 4.5s wider than they started - but my main gripe is that the shop only had the most boring colourway available in my size. I wonder if they’d had a chat to the 6s as they sat together overnight and decided they were ready to pass the baton on.
A couple of hours into this hike, the threadbare section on the outside of my right foot completely gave way, and I had to walk the rest of the day with a big hole in the side of my shoe. I’d worn down the tread fairly significantly, and the upper was not in good shape. The day before this walk, I’d gone to Running Warehouse and bought a pair of the new Lone Peak 6s, but I thought I’d take the 4.5s out for a farewell hike. I got them about a fortnight before the first lockdown in February 2019. Speaking of my shoes, I was wearing my beloved Altra Lone Peak 4.5s. (Note: I left a review of the trail and commented on the issue - and the map has now been updated on AllTrails. When I went back and looked at the reviews on AllTrails, most of the reviewers don’t seem to have actually walked the route at all - they’re all just giving 5 stars and saying how much they like Woodlands Historic Park. The dirt bike trails ended at a large dam, and we picked our way around the perimeter and popped out once again on the Moonee Ponds Creek trail. Overhead, a string of planes came in to land at Tullamarine. We backtracked a bit and scrambled up a hill/escarpment/old slag heap and followed what looked to be dirt bike trails up towards the bike path. What? Yep, this was definitely where the route was marked. However, faithfully following this well-reviewed route, we popped up onto a vehicle track with a “no trespassing in this area” sign. We had not really been expecting to end up ranging through grasslands on rough vehicle trails, but so be it. Following the GPS track from All Trails (downloaded into Gaia, which I have found a better app for navigation), we entered a kind of uncared-for, creek-flat, ex-quarry wasteland.
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