Nagambie visit: 2025
Picture of Billy Burgers in Nagambie, Victoria.
I spent a few hours at the famous Tahbilk winery yesterday, principally to taste through the new Centennial Releases (to be reviewed on The Winefront shortly). Along the way I passed through the nearby township of Nagambie itself. Bright day, bright clouds, incredibly dry summer. Nagambie is about a 90 minute drive from Melbourne, perhaps a touch more than that, though it’s a pretty easy drive, highway most of the way. This ad hoc gallery is of the Tahbilk estate and the Nagambie town, in illogical order.
The light was fluky, because of the cloud cover. I need/want bright light for the style of image that I’m chasing, the brighter the better, and so I kept having to wait for the sun to come back properly out. As I was standing there a local resident approached with the opening line, “What’s so special about Nagambie that makes you want to photograph it?”. We had a chat; he was disappointed when I said that I was taking images for fun; he hoped I was doing a book. He’d bought, he reckoned, a place in town for $300,000 seven years ago that is now, by his valuation, worth a million. He told me of all the damage that had been done to Nagambie’s old buildings, in the name of progress, though he reckoned the (disused) cafe above is still pretty original. “There’s a lot of wine in that building,” he said, apropos of nothing. I asked him what the below structure had once been and he reckoned wheat storage. It reminds me a bit of the Oxley building at Milawa.
Apparently the “Ford” sign above relates to an old service station but also, according to this bloke, prior to that it was a Ford car dealership.
