There are plenty of lush green rolling hills and beautiful countryside to be seen in the inland areas in the south west region of Western Australia. A must visit sight is the massive 8000 square metre art work that is the Wellington Dam Mural. The Wellington Dam is the second largest dam in in Western Australia, second only to the dam at Lake Argyle. The artist, Guido Van Helten is no stranger to painting giant murals and has done so worldwide including inside a nuclear cooling tower in Chernobyl! This is his biggest work to date.
Due to the difficulty in accessing the large curved wall for painting, the artist had to use a custom built floating platform and split the work up into grid blocks, painting to final completion one block at a time. This article tells the story of how it was done. Realistic paintings are difficult enough to do, but to do it on this scale and to be only be able to work on one small area at a time in isolation must have been particularly challenging. The result is very realistic and mind bogglingly huge!
About 15 minutes from the Wellington Dam is a roundabout where there are thousands of garden gnomes! Pull over and stretch your legs as you peruse the thousands of garden gnomes at Gnomesville. This is one of those attractions that invite public participation and one-upmanship! What started as a few gnomes has grown quite out of control with thousands of gnomes now dotting the area. It’s a kitschy attraction but a bit of fun especially if you have a cheeky gnome to add to the collection.
Not far south of Gnomesville is a lovely arboretum called Golden Valley Tree Park. An arboretum is a botanic garden comprising of trees. This one was broken into two parts, one section for Australian trees and another for European trees.
There are some people in the charming small town of Nannup who love roses! Beautiful, plentiful rose bushes are blooming everywhere in this cute town. It has a small, delightful market on some weekends, a comprehensive free app for tourists and a nice walking trail by the Blackwood River.
There are stunning displays of flowers along the Blackwood River walking trail but was saddened to find that most of these are invasive weeds, garden escapees.
