Day 23 Saturday 3rd August, A Bus Trip around Armidale and a visit to a ghost town

After doing some investigation we found out that the Armidale Tourist centre conducted a 2 and ½ hour bus tour of Armidale and it was free! We headed down to the tourist centre and managed to find a spot on the bus. The driver and guide was very, very, very knowledgeable and our tour was very informative, probably a little too much for Rob! Armidale has many beautiful, historical buildings especially their churches. We were driven around to view many of the buildings, then visited an Aboriginal Art gallery and the Armidale Art Gallery. The Armidale Gallery had an amazing display of high quality artworks. They had been donated by a man called Howard Hinton. He had collected many pieces of works and they are now valued at over 43million dollars. Many of them are kept in storage as there is not the room to show them all. Works by Streeton, Norman Lindsay, Hans and Nora Heysen among others were on display. From here we were taken out to the huge campus of the University of New England. It was very interesting but the most beautiful building was the Chancellors offices which were in an old mansion up on a hill that overlooked Armidale. The grounds were amazing too. In the afternoon we went for a drive out to a ghost town, called Hillgrove. This was once an old mining town with over 3,000 people living there but now there are only a few houses that are occupied. They did have signs that described what had been there in the past. I visited the cemetery as it had quite a lot of interesting history, before we returned to the van.