Skipton - home of the platypus

As a fisherman, you get used to blank days. But it was sad that we didn't catch a sight of the duck-billed platypus in Skipton. As it is one of the world's rarest animals, however, that was to be expected.

In the bar of the Skipton Hotel - the only pub in town - the clock goes backwards (ie, anti-clockwise) and the landlord's son explained that it often catches the tourists out - "They think that everything here is a bit backward but it takes them some time to work out our clock."

And, as if to make up for our lack of success with the platypuses (not platypi, as the authorities have decided after years of debate), the ladies of the Skipton Memorial Historical Society had laid on a huge spread in the old, transportable courthouse, where drunken gold miners were once tried for crimes of wild debauchery when they had struck it rich.

Oh, perhaps I should explain: this is Skipton, Victoria, Australia, home to a thriving if shy community of platypuses, one of only two mammals in the world that lay eggs and suckle their young.

They thrive in Mount Emu Creek, which runs through the town from a small hill of that name - this bit of Oz is an area of huge expanses of flat plains - and they are the main tourist attraction for this community of some 600 souls.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a Skiptonian from the Old World, which makes this tiny but incredibly friendly little town an irresistible draw when you are Down Under.

Thanks to the dedicated ladies of the Skipton Memorial Historical Society, I can now share some of the stories of this lovely little place, founded back in the 1850s by a man called Thomas Oddie from Preston and so-named because his mother was a Skipton, Yorkshire, lass.

"I don't suppose you have any records of that lady's name," I asked.

"Of course," said the society's archivist Janet Walsh, darting off to the computer and its now well-stocked database.

This was all happening in the old Skipton Court House, a wooden pre-fabricated building that was once taken around the gold fields away to the west to dish out law and order in towns that mushroomed overnight, boomed and then went bust just as quickly when the seam ran out.

When the gold was gone, the court was given to Skipton which was, by the 1860s, a prosperous but rather prim little town - it is still illegal to carry an open beer bottle, not just on the street but also in a car (how that contrasts with Skipton, North Yorkshire!).

Now, the building is a little museum with a hi-tech heart.

Janet was back with the required information within two minutes: this Skipton was named in honour of our Skipton's Margaret Hargraves, who died in 1877 down the road in Ballarat, Victoria. What's the betting that there are still other branches of the family in Craven?

There are scores of links with the Old Country in the area. Skipton Australia was once partly in the Shire of Ripon, although these county-type boundaries have since been changed and the seat of local government is now more than an hour's drive away (even further away than Northallerton, in fact).

"This town runs itself with very little help from the shire authorities," said former society president Lorna Smith proudly. "We like it that way..."

And, indeed, it is a busy little place, with one of everything: one pub, one post office, one garage (servicing mainly quad bikes used on the local sheep stations) one petrol station and, sadly, like every other tiny Australian town, one Anzac war memorial to the dead of two world wars for King, Country and Empire.

Apart from the denizens of Mount Emu Creek, the town has another claim to fame. A boy who went to the tiny local school back in the 1920s, Henry Bolte, rose to be the state premier of Victoria for 17 years - not only a record time in office but one in which he remained highly popular, no mean feat in the cauldron of Aussie politics.

But times they are a'changing Down Under too, in a way which has an almost alarming resonance in Craven's Skipton. Lorna Smith explains: "There was a time when you would know everyone by name.

"Now, you perhaps know half the town that way - although you still know the others by sight, of course. A lot of new people are moving in, you see..."

And this - you've guessed - has brought about another oh-so-familiar pattern: soaring property prices. The town was aghast quite recently when one of the old clapperboard houses was sold for 200,000 Aussie dollars - about eighty thousand sterling.

"That was the talk of the town for weeks," said current society president Barbara Pett. "It means that one of the bigger stone houses would fetch almost twice that much, which is quite baffling.

"But we are a happy little community within a fairly easy drive of bigger towns and people are prepared to drive quite long distances to work if they can live in a place like this."

I was beginning to lose track of which Skipton was under discussion, the similarities being so close although they are 14,000 miles apart.

But I doubt we'll ever have platypuses in the Leeds-Liverpool Canal - although there might be some in the River Aire (no, not the one that rises in Malhamdale but the one we crossed on the road back to Melbourne, the River Aire, Victoria)!