The Young and The Restless | Where the bushrangers and big cats lurked

But if there’s any trait of mine I’m proud to have imparted to them (even though I’d be very grateful if it were my aim), it’s my spirit of adventure.

After spending much of the school holidays sleeping late and holed up inside their own caves playing games on devices due to moody weather that couldn’t decide if it wanted to burn them or drench them most days, I half expected them to decline my offer of a 7am start, a two-hour drive, followed by a couple of hours hiking on last week’s public holiday.

But to my surprise, all three were on board.

So off we trekked to Kooyoora State Park, home to Melville Caves. In this place, bushranger Frank McCallum (better known as Captain Melville) camped in the 1850s and kept watch from his high vantage point over the southern flat plains for passing gold-conveying coaches and mounted police.

And perhaps even more fascinating, depending on what flavour of history (or myth) piques your interest, it’s also where the fabled Bealiba Beast (a ‘panther’ legend says was left behind by departing US troops) is whispered to have lurked.

Surprisingly, given it was a long weekend, ours was one of only three vehicles in the car park when we arrived.

On the one hand, that’s great; fewer people makes nature feel more natural.

On the other, with the rapidly warming morning, I was nervous about there not being much human traffic around to scare the snakes away from the overgrown paths to the top, with kids who have that extraordinary lung capacity uphill and quite often power ahead looking at anything but where they’re stepping.

Thankfully for us, we saw no dangerous noodles or man-eating cats on our ascent, just an unperturbed kangaroo who didn’t even stop chewing his mouthful of grass as he locked eyes with us mere metres from where he grazed.

The track to the lookout is short but steep (although you wouldn’t know it watching the kids scale it effortlessly), so we explored the caves to the sides and climbed giant boulders for different viewpoints across the surrounding valleys where huge nuggets of gold have been discovered.

At one point, we could no longer see a path, but the area was small enough so that even a directionally challenged human such as myself could still navigate back to it with their internal compass — there was no need to pack flares and a Mars bar.

It has always been fascinating to imagine how these geological formations ever got dispersed in the fashion they are.

They make for such a pretty landscape, and, as we do with clouds, my boys and I often look at their shapes and liken them to animals, objects or scenes.

There’s a boulder at Melville Caves shaped like a bird and looks just like Bird Island from The Angry Birds Movie; it makes me giggle every time.

We descended from the lookout on the opposite side to our car, down to the top car park, taking the long way back to the lower car park, past the free campground (where you can even take your animals), so we could stretch our legs a little further and get a nice wide side view of the cluster of stone.

There are other bush walks you can do in the area, but we had a lunch date with extended family in nearby Inglewood to make and had copped enough UV rays for one day, so we chucked the L-plates on the ute and got the learner to chauffeur us into the pretty historic town.

We explored Inglewood on foot, reading the history of famous folk who were born there, admiring its grand, old-world architecture and gagging with unpleasant visions at Storm Drain Lane after reading the plaque that told us decades ago it used to run freely with blood and offal through the town when residents would slaughter their own meat in their backyards.

I must say, I’m glad we’d already eaten by the time we inherited that little morsel of information.

With all there was to see, we grabbed some fishing worms from a local at-home seller (that we ended up sadly drowning on our unfruitful spot of fishing in the Campaspe on the way home) and headed off.

I couldn’t even tempt the boys with an ice-cream after the huge meals they’d eaten at the Empire Hotel (or maybe it was just because of the traumatic stomach-turning tale of Storm Lane Drain).

Next stop: Mt Arapiles, west of Horsham, for a little deeper exploration.

After all, legend says the five billy cans full of gold dust Captain Melville stole and allegedly buried there have never been recovered.