#4: [01-Apr-23]

#3: [18-Mar-08]

#2: [16-Oct-05]

27-Oct-2001 -- North of Walpeup, Victoria

We left Melbourne at about 7:00 pm on Friday night with a five hour drive to Ouyen in the north-west of Victoria ahead of us. Our plan was to attempt four confluences (35°S 142°E, 35°S 143°E, 36°S 143°E and 36°S 144°E) on the way back to Melbourne on Saturday.

Sadly, there was a serious car accident on the Calder Highway near Woodend an hour or two before we left Melbourne and the emergency services workers were still on the accident scene as we drove by, which slowed traffic to a stand-still and added about an hour to our journey. Anyway, we got into our motel in Ouyen shortly before 1:00 am and hit the sack ahead of a full day of confluence hunting.

Using a fairly detailed fold-out map of the entire state of Victoria, I diagnosed that the confluence was located roughly due north of Walpeup. Coming from Ouyen, we took the Mallee Highway towards Walpeup and then took a right hand turn at Meridian Road just as you arrive in Walpeup (35º08.11’S 142º01.50’E). We headed north along this road (which was initially bitumen, but eventually became a very wide dirt road) until the direction arrow swung around to the right indicating that the confluence was about 230 metres from the road.

We parked at 34º59.96’S 141º59.85’E, climbed over a fence and quickly found the confluence in a paddock that looked like it recently had a wheat crop.

This is a pretty easy confluence to get to if you are in this part of the state and is good example of what most of land looks like up here – wheat, wheat, wheat and more wheat!

About 250,000 flies followed us back to the car and I’m pretty sure every one of them got into the car with us. It took a few minutes at high speed with all of the windows down and the sun-roof open to get rid of them all.