This is the first mountainous part of the ride – the biggest mountains in Australia. The Great Dividing Range (“…is bleak, heavily forested, and inhospitable, and even today is sparsely populated.” Globetrotter) including Alpine Country and the Great Snowy Mountains run a bit inland along the coast from west of Melbourne to northwest of Sydney. Duckworth’s route, which I’ll follow east out of Melbourne to Bairnsdale, heads north on some “unsealed” roads to get to Canberra. Other routes go along the coast. I’ll take the Monaro Highway, perhaps a more trafficked road, north along the Cann River into the mountains to Canberra.

• Gippsland: The area east of Melbourne combines Wisconsin dairylands with Minnesota lakes and inconsistent often London-like weather. No highlights.

• Great Dividing Range: There’s some comment on this at the beginning of the section. Beyond the fact that I’ll be heading into some serious climbs, in the bike and tour books there’s not much specific comment about this part of the range.

• Canberra: The Washington DC of Australia.
  
  “Although Canberra is now the sixth largest metropolis in the nation, and one of the most important planned communities on earth, it remains Australia’s greatest obscurity. … In 1996 the Prime Minister, John Howard, caused a stir after his election by declining to live in Canberra. He would, he announced, continue to reside in Sydney and commute to Canberra as duties required. As you can imagine, this caused an uproar among Canberra’s citizens, presumably because they hadn’t thought of that themselves. ” In a Sunburned Country.
  
  From it’s inception, Canberra has always been a place of contention. So spread out in it’s original design (by an American), in 40 years, between 1959 and 1999, Canberra grew from 40,000 people to 330,000 and apparently it still seems wide open, perhaps vacant. Said to have interesting museums, world class food and well landscaped public areas.