BlogSire

It’s not often that I get to take some time off so when the Australia Day long weekend came about I decided that my family and I should have a little break. We booked a place at Henley Beach for a couple of days and had a great time. The place was clean neat and roomy and only
a minute from the beach.

First thing Saturday morning we decided to go for a little drive down the esplanade and ended up in Glenelg where we stopped to get some breakfast. We then went for a little walk around and looked at the few stalls they had at the end of Jetty Road when I came across this little beauty.

This is typical Aussie Humor and for those who can’t read the sign at the stall it says; ‘Beer And Bullshit Area” and sells all manner of items one would love to have at the bar as well as other little knick knacks.

After leaving Glenelg we drove down to Brighton where we saw The Arch Of Remembrance, the gateway to the jetty. This monument was built in 1964 to replace the old one which turned into a replica of The Leaning Tower Of Pisa after a violent storm.

The Arch was built as a monument to those who gave their lives for our country. To one side of it, a drinking fountain was constructed by the women of Brighton as a memorial to Kitty Whyte (Kathleen Duncan Whyte nee Mcully) who at the age of 35 dived off the jetty and was attacked and killed by a white pointer shark. 1926 saw a tragic loss of a woman who in 1919 saved a swimmer from drowning and was awarded a Grand Diploma by the Royal Life Saving Society.

Many people when talking about family trees think of it in terms of genealogy, but here in South Australia we have a tree which a family lived in for roughly five years. This would make it one of the few actual living tree house

It all began on the 3rd of October 1855 when Johann Friedrich Herbig arrived in South Australia on the Wilhelmine from Germany. Although poor he manage to lease about 80 acres of land on a time payment schedule and not having enough money to build a house he lived in a old gum tree that was found on his property. This hollow red gum tree is located at Springton South Australia and is about 60 km’s from Adelaide. It’s about 300-500 years old, has a diameter of 7 metres and a height of 24 metres.

He lived in the tree for about five years. He met his bride to be, Anna Caroline Rattey on the 1st of December 1876 and married her in 1858 and they lived in the tree together. A year later the first of their sixteen children, Johann, was born in their tree house. It wasn’t until their second son was born a year later and the tree became too small for the growing family, a hut was built.

He died on the 18th October 1886 aged 58 due to an unfortunate accident. The tree has been occupied on several occasions by others and today the Herbig Family Tree represents a graphic link to early European settlement of the area