MALLEE MAGIC

VICTORIA’S Mallee region is a vast expanse of wheat-and-sheep country that travellers have typically passed through on their way to other places considered more enticing, like the thriving riverside cities of Mildura and Swan Hill.

You can’t blame tourists for overlooking the region. Until recently, it had a reputation for being a harsh place filled with dying towns and struggling farmers locked in a never-ending battle against droughts, dust storms and plagues of rabbits and mice. Indeed, if you look at the Visit Victoria website, the Mallee is barely mentioned at all, buried as it is in a section called