At the posted coordinates you will find a sculpture of John Gorton and his dog Suzie Q, unveiled on 10 March 2021
From the nearby informations boards:
The Right Honourable Sir John Grey Gorton, GCMG, AC, CH (1911-2002) served as Australia’s 19th Prime Minister from 1968 to 1971.
Gorton was born out of wedlock and his mother died when he was nine years old. Former Prime Minister Menzies called it ‘an unfortunate upbringing’. After boarding at schools in Sydney and Geelong, Gorton graduated from Oxford University in 1935.
With his American wife Bettina, née Brown, he took up his father’s orange orchard near Kerang in northern Victoria, where they raised three children.
Winning a Victorian Senate seat in 1949, Gorton’s lengthy portfolio responsibilities included serving as Minister for the Navy, Works, and Education and Science.
The Liberal Party Room elected Gorton leader following Harold Holt’s disappearance and John McEwen’s transitional Prime Ministership. Gorton became the only Australian senator to assume the highest office. In a by-election shortly thereafter, he won Holt’s House of Representatives seat.
Intelligent, determined, straight-talking, unashamedly egalitarian, Gorton was a controversial and progressive leader. He wanted the nation, and his party, to develop a more independently Australian culture and way of thinking.
Gorton served in the Royal Australian Airforce in WWII. He suffered severe injuries in a crash landing at Bintan Island, Indonesia; his rescue ship was torpedoed.
In 1946, giving a speech at Mystic Park to other returned service personnel, he defined his political credo: to create ‘a world in which meanness and poverty, tyranny and hate, have no existence’.
Gorton’s national rather than state-based policy perspective evolved Commonwealth powers, social services, resource protection and external defence commitments.
Self-described as ‘Australian to the boot-heels’, Gorton was always happy to say hello and stop for a chat while out walking his beloved collie-kelpie Suzie Q. In 1993, a decade after Bettina’s death, he married Nancy Home.
To claim the find on this virtual cache:
1. Message me (through the geocaching message centre only please) with the location of the photograph on the nearby information board (hint: it was taken in 1969), and
2. Take a photo that identifies you (and/or your pooch) with sculpture and include this in your log (you do not need to include your face).
Virtual Rewards 3.0 - 2022-2023
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between March 1, 2022 and March 1, 2023. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 3.0 on the Geocaching Blog.