Fakes
CONIFER
GLEN OSMOND, ADELAIDE, SA – Outside a Mobil petrol station are six real pine trees, and eleven fake ones. The fakes are concrete works of art commissioned to celebrate the oldest fossils known to man – a pre-Cambrian batch uncovered in the area in 1940. Tony Bishop is the visionary involved. He enlisted local artists, such as film director, Scott Hicks (Shine and Hearts in Atlantis) to create their own bogus botany. [Corner of Glen Osmond and Portrush Roads]
CABIN FEVER
HOBART, TAS – Roger Bastone has a thing for the Titanic, and it shows in one of the rooms in his Battery Point Guest House. The Empire Suite, all four-and-a-half stars of it, is a painstaking replica of stateroom from the ill-fated passenger ship that sank off Newfoundland in 1912. A carriage clock on the mantelpiece is frozen at 1:36am, the minute the White Star liner was swallowed by the Atlantic. There’s even a fake porthole with a seahorse swimming past. At the end of the day you can settle down for Titanic-label port. The wallpaper, the mirror: every detail true to history (except telly hidden in the sideboard). [79 McGregor St, above Kelly Steps. Public viewing not available. But for $170 a double the room is all yours. Phone 03-6224-2111]
WORKMANSHIP
MAROOCHYDORE, QLD – James Cook may have only sailed two-thirds of the way around the world if he’d skippered the scale model near Maroochy River Resort. That’s the reduction ratio used by Bill Goodchild when constructing his honourable fake. Seaworthy she may not be, but Goodchild’s Endeavour is certainly lagoon-worthy and is moored off the Waterfront Hotel. [Visible, though not visitable, owing to termites in residence, on David Low Way, Eudlo Creek]
THE ITALIAN JOB
NOOSA, Q – His first name is Richard, but being a gondolier, he prefers Ricardo. His gondola, a picture-perfect imitation of the Venetian McCoy, plies Noosa River and its offshoot canals. The boat takes up to six people, with a sunset cruises the most popular. And you can have a look at how the Queensland Medicis live as you slide past their holiday homes. [Half-hour cruises cost $70, one hour, $100, with a seafood cruise also available. Bookings essential. Phone Ricardo on 0412-929-369]
BRICKS AND WATER
WOLLONGONG, NSW – The North Beach Surf Sheds have a cunning dimension. If you stand near the water and look inland you’ll start to see a warship emerge, complete with a shark siren on the mock-funnel. The design reflects the era. Built in 1938, with the world at war, the sheds were seen as an additional defence against any far-roaming Nazis, or their allies. Ironically, the building adjoins a foreshore walkway known as the Sri Chinmoy Peace Mile. Uphill, in a grassed emplacement, three cast-iron cannons point at the breakwater, aiming to quell the notional Russians of 1893. [Top end of Cliff Road.]
AS GOOD AS GLASS
ZEEHAN, TAS – The West Coast Pioneer Museum has 100 bizarre minerals, but two stand out. The first is a mustard sea-urchin called crocoite which was adopted in 2000 as Tasmania’s mineral emblem. The second is tektite, resembling a windscreen fragment and otherwise known as Darwin glass. Tektite, it’s believed, formed on the slopes of Mount Darwin in southwest Tassie about 730,000 years ago. Geologists can nail the date as the unique mineral was created when a giant meteorite plummeted into quartz bed, the extreme heat melting the rock into ersatz glass. Aborigines found various uses for the stuff, from cutting to trading. For many years historians were baffled as to how the West Coast people had come across glass long before European settlement. The answer lay in the stars. [Main Street. Open daily 9-5. Entry $9, $8, family $20. Phone 03-6471-6225]
ODDITIONS
Stonehenge may stand on Salisbury Plains, but there’s a valiant replica on a dairy farm at 387 Gap Road, between Teven (NSW) and Alstonville. Unlike the Druid original, this marvel has shorter steles (pillars) but massive horizontals.
There is a figurehead replica is in the hotel foyer of the Heritage Resort in Dampier (WA). The original was found in 1989 by a dugong researcher north of Cape Peron. A Norwegian barque, the Gudrun sank in 1901 after the ship’s carpenter, a man with a few screws loose, drilled holes in the keel on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope.
No need to brace yourself as you cross the cattle grid near the Minjina Roadhouse, close to Wittenoom (WA). The ‘iron bars’ are series of white stripes that seem to deter nomadic cattle all the same.
Below the bottom station of the Blue Ribbon Chairlift in Mount Hotham (V) is a fake cattleman’s hut on the banks of Swindlers Creek. The shack was whacked up for the Silver Brumby in 1993, a kids’ flick starring Russell Crowe as The Man.
Compressed air and a covert computer (hidden in a rain-tank) shake a room in the Cunderdin (WA) Municipal Museum. The havoc lets you live through a fake quake. The Richter force equates to the 1989 Newcastle nightmare of 5.5. amazingly the 1968 Cunderdin quake, centred in Mackering, was even stronger at 6.9. [Open daily 10-4, entry $4, $3, $1.50, family $9. Phone (08) 9635-1291]
On Minjungbal Road, the renamed Pacific Highway, coming into Tweed Heads (NSW), you’ll see a nature reserve called Faux Park. Weird, as the park looks genuine from a distance.