Experiencing outback Central Queensland’s country towns

23 to 28 August This was the start of an interesting week without plans, and we began by setting off for a little village we had been told about called Ilfracombe, east, just the other side of Longreach. Its "Great Machinery Mile" of tractors and old engineeringequipment is known around Australia to tractor buffs. We had heard tales of the “happy hour” there, and the welcome given to travelling folk. Running later than we have ever done before (because of kangaroos) we rang ahead to ensure a berth, and luckily got the last bay available, next to the highway where the road trains thundered by regularly. We got there half way through the daily "happy hour" celebrations and most were on their third beer and the jokes were becoming predictably blue. Actually they were downright filthy, but the audience was extremely appreciative. It was very funny but we realised we were about one and half decades too early! Happy hour is a tradition we encountered at a couple of campgrounds lately and seems to be a Queensland tradition.

And now, in complete contrast, with the desert well behind us, we settled down to a diet of tourism by travelling back and forth into Longreach – a day at the Qantas museum and a day at the Stockmen’s Hall of Fame sponsored by RM Williams. We were both totally absorbed at both museums and enjoyed ourselves immensely (contrary to our expectations).

Qantas started life at Winton, soon moved to Longreach where they were the only airline in the world to manufacture their own aeroplanes under licence. Then they moved to Mascot, flying boats and the link with Imperial Airways in UK, before becoming properly international with the purchase of their first Boeing 707. This aircraft is at Longreach, fully restored in the UK (and flown out with some trepidation a couple of years ago) by a dedicated team of retired Aussie engineers and cabin crew who went back there to rescue it from a graveyard at Southend Airport where it had languished for six years. It had been converted for use by pop and film stars, leased by Michael Jackson, Madonna, and others, before being purchased by a Saudi prince. The lingering smell of hookah pipes in the “living room” and the fully mirrored double bedroom, gold plated taps on the bidet, let alone the bar, give the imagination plenty to work on. In 2006 Qantas retired one of its last 747’s to Longreach, the ones that still used a flight engineer on board, before they were computerised. It landed there unladen and with almost no fuel on board, in order to be able to stop on the tiny runway. And that is where it will stay! The Qantas airline history must be one of the most interesting you would come across, and the new building that houses the displays is a good one.

The Hall of Fame tells the story of Australia’s drovers and cattlemen very well, in a building that defies complimentary description (others apparently love it). We have followed the tales of the explorers and pioneers, squatters and the big cattle barons. The challenges they met were in a world totally different from the one we live in today. The stories are admirable, and the link with the emergence of one of the worlds’ foremost airlines is well made. Considering its isolation Longreach has unique drawcards for the tourist dollar, and is a vibrant small centre on the Capricorn Highway.///

After three nights in Ilfracombe we moseyed a short distance east to Barcaldine and set up where happy hour is one of the advertising drawcards for the caravan park. We heard on the vine that a chap named Tom Lockie runs a day long 300km tour that, through his special connections, takes you to places you would not otherwise get to. He was part of the happy hour act, and at 7am the next morning we peeled off $280 and climbed aboard his Coaster bus for an extraordinary day. In some ways it epitomised the Australian bush experience. With the help of a local character (donkeys would have no hind legs in Barcaldine) Tom, who knows every bit of history about the place being an ex drover himself, makes seemingly innocuous things take on real meaning, it is fascinating indeed. An example. We were not ten minutes on our way when he stopped across the road from a very old, very ordinary and now very unused pair of gateposts. No, these were the posts that were the original town gates of Barcaldine. Meant for horse drawn wagons, cars going through (and especially if the gate was left open) were fined. After much lobbying the local Council provided a separate ramp and grid for the cars to use. Sure enough, there in the scrub were the remains of the grid. This dated back to about 1920, and whilst relatively recent in time, it’s simplicity is tantalising, and soon to be gone along with Tom himself. ‘Who will tell the tale then?”we ask. To which the answer is a shrug of the shoulders.///

We visited one of the most inaccessible and yet well known aboriginal art sites. On a property called “Gracevale”, it is the only art site where the cycle of life is represented by footprints etched into the rock. It has been visited recently by Navajo elders from N America for whom the representation of the cycle holds special meaning. The art here is also unusual in that it is thought to represent the Milky Way, and the Southern Cross is clear to see. The next site we visited was Mailman’s Gorge with Gordon's Cave, site of a massacre. The tale is a familiar one in which a government surveyor is speared by a tribesman. The entire aboriginal group was driven into the cave and all of the men young and old, were then murdered.

Now on private property, the ruined hotel site where the Cobb & Co coaches used to stop around 1890 is marked by the thousands of names of the travellers who whiled away a couple of hours by chiselling their details into Gray's Rock beside the old roadway. The roadway has gone now, except for parallel ridges of raised hard clay that can be traced through the scrub, where decades of hard wheels have compressed and hardened the surface. Rains have removed the material around the old ruts, leaving them now as ridges.

Barcaldine of course, is the home of the now dead “Tree of Knowledge” that has recently been recreated in controversial three dimensional form in the main street. The tree was the meeting place of striking shearers in 1891, and is where the union and Labour movement began. Premier Anna Bligh formally “opened” the new installation in May. There are some stories about who was responsible for the death of the tree but a well informed local told us that the tree, old as it was, was given the coup de grace by the local council. Some time after Premier Goss planted another tree next to the old one, the Council commissioned extensive exposed aggregate paving works surrounding both trees. They did not specify any protection works for the trees. Acid washing was used to expose the aggregate. Hey presto – two dead trees. Paving looks terrific though! The other story is that the council used the same watering truck to water the trees as they had used to spray Roundup on the railway lines. Who'd be a Council CEO?!

The installation is a real Jekyll and Hyde affair. During the day this enormous and frankly ugly black box towers above the township and is visible for miles around. It squats in the main street and traffic is now obliged to steer around it. At night though....green lighting from within the massive ribbed cube, illuminates facetted pieces of suspended hardwood in such a way that you can clearly see a ghost of the tree as it was in its maturity. The roots have been exposed and can be seen under a glass floor. As the workers were clearing away the soil they came across a brass plaque that had been secretly buried at the base of the tree by a grieving widow. Marked in remembrance of a “True Believer”, it was secured amongst the roots and is now part of the installation. After dark it is magical, and well worth stopping a night in Barcaldine for. It will work wonders for the local economy.

We drove to Isisford on our third day there, about 150 kms away. This is where a fossilised crocodile (Isisfordia Duncanii) has recently been found, and whilst it predates most of the dinosaurs, this one has characteristics shared only with modern crocodiles. So it is the ancestor of the modern crocodile, and you should see how this community of about one hundred works it for all it is worth. A visit to the semi-circular shearing shed (unique in Australia and one of two in the world; the other is in Argentina) at Isis Downs is something well worth doing. It is the property that Sir Rupert Clarke originally developed at the turn of the 19/20 Centuries, along with his solicitor. It was more efficient (but had the reputation of being a very hot shed) and was made possible by the invention of the electric shearing machine. That of course meant they had to generate their own electricity, itself a first in the industry. Clarke was obviously a very far sighted operator.

After a further three nights in Barcaldine we felt we had really “done” the country towns and it was time to move along. We had made contact with old buddy Dr Barry Gilbert, who spends every other month on Hamilton Island looking after the health and well being mostly of the shipboard tourists. He has kindly opened his doors to us in the second week in September, so now we have a plan and will spend a couple of weeks working our way to Shute Harbour where we can catch the ferry on 8 Sep.

Diamantina National Park and Lark Quarry

20 August You can tell a really good night by the willingness of the eyes to focus the following morning! We were fresh and raring to get on in to the Diamantina NP. The park was until recently the 507,000 hectare Diamantina Lakes Station, established in 1875, owned by Janet Holmes a Court, then purchased by the Queensland Government and gazetted as a National Park in 1992. The landscape is varied as the Diamantina River courses through the extensive Mitchell grass plains and red sand dune country, cutting a braided series of steep sided waterways deep into the sediment. The Goyder and Hamilton Ranges jump up as a barrier to the flow except at Hunter’s Gorge (where we camped beside Mundewerra Waterhole) where the water piles up in a flood and has scoured deep waterholes. The birdlife is plentiful, with Spoonbills, Pelicans and Kites cruising at altitude on thermals and probing and sifting the very clayey water.

We took an afternoon to drive the 87km Waracoota Drive that takes you through the dunes and claypans explaining much about the history and culture of the place. A highlight for us was to be up well before sunrise to walk the gorge and climb to the top of the jump up where the kites were circling, as the sun painted the rock faces and ledges in a cherry glow. Time for more good byes as we headed north east towards Winton, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn as we went. This was a significant moment for another reason, because from this point on we had no real plans, and were working on the basis that provided we could find some Telstra coverage to get the blog despatched everything would be fine. So Winton it was.

The immediate goal was to visit Lark Quarry on the way, 110 kms short of Winton. This is where the only record in the world of a dinosaur stampede is fossilised in the sandstone. The journey there was a delightful drive through jump up country, with many mesas and ever changing vegetation. The heat was becoming a real issue as temperatures rose into the high 30’s, 39C at one point. Realising the only way to view the 3300 dinosaur prints was by guided tour at set times, and we could not reach the place by 2pm for the last tour, we pulled up at Old Cork Homestead, another ruin, and made early camp beside the waterhole there. A welcome and pleasant spot. It’s a big difference between last year’s Kimberly waterholes and those here. In outback Queensland the land has been eroded to vast tracts of sediments that make any sort of movement after rain almost impossible. Here the rivers cut steep and deep into the soft clay making access to the water nigh on impossible. If you do venture in you emerge veneered in sticky clay. Don’t step on the spot where you drain the sink – instant removal of sandal will follow!

Lark Quarry Conservation Park is a good modern building (as usual, architect unknown but we saw everyone else taking credit for it, mostly the politicians) that covers the dinosaur tracks. These were discovered after much careful detective work by the palaeontologists and geologists who hit the jackpot when they excavated a particular layer they calculated would be about 95 million years old, and likely to be fossil bearing. It is an interesting story. The many tracks of quite small Coelurosaurs and ornithopods (standing about chicken and kangaroo height respectively) are seen gathering beside the water’s edge, overlain by the 50cm long prints of a large Carnosaur (2.5metres at the shoulder). There you can see how the smaller creatures were caught napping and they turn and run in all directions. Speculating on time as you examine aboriginal artwork is one thing but this is another dimension altogether.

With the morning passing fast we made for Winton, arriving in time for Barramundi at Tattersall’s Hotel, under a welcome sweep fan. The prospect of spending two hours in the van so we could get the next blog up and running was not cause for celebration, so we tarried and enjoyed cold beer in a real pub.

Channel Country and towards the Diamantina NP

Leaving Birdsville the next day (18 August) we set course together northwards along the Eyre Developmental Hwy, or more delightfully named “Bilby Way”, towards Bedourie and the Diamantina National Park. Just out of Birdsville and before you reach Sir Sidney Kidman’s first property, “Carcory” a ruin, a new tree appears. First a couple, then in sparse copses and occasional lone sentinels. It is the Waddi tree (Acacia peuce), thought to be a remnant of the time before the last glacial era that shaped much of this part of Australia. As with so many things on these journeys, they are slowly dying out. It is an extraordinary wood that was traded by the Aborigines across the whole continent and was used by them for spear tips and other hard duties. Apparently it is the only wood that blunts a sharp axe, breaks the tooth of a saw, and a drill bit cannot penetrate. I don’t know how the indigenes made spear heads but I guess they must have used flints chipped from local marlstone!

Carcory is interesting in that whilst Kidman was the greatest of the cattle barons, and his company is still the largest land holder in Australia, his first venture turned sour and he lost 4000 head of cattle. He was a quick learner and didn’t look back after that. How he got finance I don’t know.

We persuaded Max& Linda to come with us into the Diamantina NP and left Bedourie about 2:30pm to tackle the 200kms of good gravel from Bedourie into the park. We knew we wouldn’t get as far as the park before sunset. The road rose gradually across iron black gibber plains and short bleached hay Mitchell grass, uninterrupted horizons spread in all directions. The spatial senses were on high alert and this was a new experience altogether. Curvature of the Earth. A pair of Brolgas over on the left. Then a trio of Emus strode in stately fashion and took off helter skelter. So began the best night we have spent travelling. With the sun twenty minutes from setting we pulled off the track onto a grassy flat area beside a shallow stunty tree edged dry creek and set up camp, our new chums nervous about the isolation (and Helen was prevented from calling up dingoes), but happy to be in company. We settled down with a G&T, bag of chilli chips and a couple of beers, cooked up a good meal, and laughed away under stars and stars and stars. There were so many stars none of us could find the familiar constellations, and we had to be satisfied with the Cross. The Bowmore failed to help in this quest but made our incompetence in matters astronomical something we all thought we could live with! We played Pepe Romero, and gypsy flamenco from the film Vengo at high volume, and knew nothing could be more fun than this – it was like being teenagers again!

Birdsville & Big Red

17 August. Birdsville, a town of 150 or so; except for the first week in September when 5 or 6 thousand partygoers descend (literally in most cases) on the pub and its immediate surrounds to celebrate a bit of horseracing. The 1926 photo taken beside the start/finish line illustrates a keen following of local fanciers at that time; about 100. Somehow this town has pulled off the trifecta and become something of a circus and flypaper for city money. In ‘79 it really was very remote, and its isolation at the eastern end of the French Line crossing of the Simpson Desert ensures mythical status. The pub, burnt down in 1979, has been turned into a slick operation that pushes the right buttons and avoids being too obvious. A good watering hole for people like us who got there the dirty way, but also for those who stepped off the Dash8 or Aztec that is parked across the street. Anyway, H & I were having our first ale and wondering where Max & Linda really were.

Thirty seconds passed and "Helen!" .....It wasn’t hard was it!

Again, lovely to catch up with these good people, met last year on the Darling. Their news surprised us because when asked how long they would be on the road this year we were told they had enjoyed themselves so much last time, going up as far as Cape York, that they had leased their Gladesville house in Sydney for two years and really were nomads! We dined together in the pub and laid plans for the following morning when we were to conquer Big Red.

Sadly none of you will be able to go to The Working Museum in Birdsville to hear John Menzies describe and see him demonstrate machinery that he has collected. Toys, saddlery, household items, lawnmowers, pumps, chainsaws, fridges, buggies, Furphy tanks, wheelwright equipment, beautiful mules making chaff and raising water etc. etc. This has been the town’s major attraction for many years but his wife has been taken ill and gone to hospital in Adelaide; John has decided to call it a day after this year’s races. To see the ingenuity of a past era of mechanical thinkers, frankly we have gone backwards with all the digital stuff. Much will be recalled into use I’ll bet. After spending the morning in the Museum we gathered our senses and drove the twenty or so kilometres out to the day’s main challenge.

Nappanerica is the traditional name given to the last of something like 600 dunes that have to be crossed if you come over the Simpson from Dalhousie Springs and Alice. The dunes average about ten metres in height and between a hundred metres and a kilometre between, with the occasional whopper, and Nappanerica (or “Big Red” as our own brothers so poetically name it) tops the lot. No intrepid Aussie can resist the challenge of going against this one, 4WD prowess is at stake here, as the Channel 10 chatter on the UHF makes plain. Pure men’s talk.

“Bernie, do you copy?”
“Gotcha Johnno”
“Jeez, youse in Low third or High second mate? She’s a bastard on them corrugations, just can’t make the last ten ”
“Yeah, I can see yer havin’ trouble from up here, give her some real stick yer donkey”.
Or more correctly: “White Prado attempting Big Red westwards, are we clear?”

And if no one answers off you go – great fun too. The thing is lots of people do this and the crests are completely blind, so cars are fitted with tall red flag topped poles to avoid a head on. We ventured towards Eyre Creek where wild flowers were rumoured, but in the knowledge there were another 592 dunes ahead there was little point in going further. What was clear was that you don’t cross the Simpson towing anything, so the Big Red challenge was it.

A brief digression. Back at Mungerannie Hotel half way up the Birdsville Track we met a woman who complained of the cold temperature there (it was a lovely 26C) saying that the heat in Birdsville was 33. She was correct and the temperature continued to rise as we approached B, and again while there. As we reached Bedourie to do some fuelling up the temperature rose a further 3C within a distance of just 20kms. We were beginning to realise things were not as they should be as local folk complained to each other of the sort of summer they were likely to have. The thermometer in the car told us coolly that it was 38C outside. This is August, Qld temperatures were exceeded by 10C. It still is as I sit in Barcaldine in my shorts hotter than we were at any time on last year’s trip.

Birdsville track to Birdsville

On 16 August we had to say our good byes. As we headed north east out of Marree they went north west for Coober Pedy. Our track now was for Birdsville. The Birdsville Track of course is the subject of much conversation because many city folk and others set off for the Birdsville Races that are coming up in the first week of September. The track is not difficult but the remoteness means you should not go out there unprepared, but they do. There is a memorial (that cannot be reached) to the Page family, who, in 1963, perished having broken down about 100kms south of Birdsville. They had left their car and gone in search of water (they were found over a month later in different places), breaking one of the cardinal rules. Surprisingly they were local people from Marree and would have surely known the risks they were taking, in December. They are buried out there, all five of them. Whilst in a morbid frame of mind, and in a similar vein, we were told in Innamincka of a family of four who two or three years ago got into trouble. A pilot spotted the square white patch that was all that was visible of the roof of their Land Cruiser, many kilometres off the main track, in the dunes where the wind had covered them for over eighteen months. All were there.

As you start north from Marree, and travel just 27 kms, you come to Lake Harry. The old station there had a long history with the cameleers, but became big news when a date palm plantation was set out in the 1890’s. A bold experiment that perhaps ought to have worked, but there’s not a sign of the 2622 trees they planted. A lot more money was allocated in 1910 by the SA Government and a bore was sunk that provides piping hot water at a well head that serves the cattle that are still occasionally watered on this old stock route. All has come to nothing however, and the place is a sad ruin today. What is special though, is the solitary hot shower head that stands proudly over its tilted old concrete base. We leapt at the opportunity, stripped off and enjoyed a grand wet down regardless of passing traffic. There are several bores along the route. At the half way point we stopped for a night at Mungerannie Hotel. A well equipped pub with good facilities and excellent camping along the wetlands which are created by an artesian outflow, it is an essential stopover on the Track.

We were told a sad tale at the Mirra Mitta bore, that rushes out of its pipe at 98C and creates a wetland that goes for over a kilometre. The tour buses stop here. Last year a touring toy dog was being given some relief when it slipped in and boiled on the spot. Oh dear.

Northwards again, we kept working away at the 515kms of the Birdsville, passing through the dog fence again, along the route taken for many years by Tom Kruse, who carried the Royal Mail up from Marree. In the bad flood years, and there were several in the early fifties, the Cooper Creek spreads 5 kms wide and closed off the country for months at a time. Kruse had a truck on both sides and a steel punt named the MV Tom Brennan (12 feet long) was used to carry everything across the swirling creek. Stock included. For Helen her new passion for things botanical continues and grows. She was grumpy when we sailed past a fenced area containing rare Mt Glason Acacia that she read about several kilometres past. Her diary is full of lists of plant species and birds spotted.

The open gibber plain turns redder and the sand dunes appear. Here the Tirari, Strzelecki, and Sturt Stony deserts meet. Old Mulka Homestead and Mulka Store, again in ruins now, appears on the left. Here George Aiston ran a general store that served the country around. He did well selling water that he leased from the government who had sunk a bore. Drought finished him, but he managed to trade for several decades before dying in the 1940’s. He corresponded with scientists and others on a wide range of topics, all over the world. The interior photographs showing his living room and his rare collection of armoury, swords and pistols, are extraordinary as you stand amongst the rubble now and consider how lives have changed. Finally the dunes scale down a little and the water tower of Birdsville appears on the horizon amongst welcome trees. We have arrived...where are Max and Linda?

With friends at Muloorina

It is said, of the contacts you meet travelling like this, that you meet a new best friend every day. It rings true because it seems the people you do meet and get along with, are met all in good spirit. It was a delight to meet up again, and we carried on as if we had known each other for years. Jill had purchased a large round of pork to roast, and we had corned beef and chicken, and good champagne suitably iced in the wash bucket beside the main road in the mud! Muloorina Station is where, in 1963, Donald Campbell and his team set up camp and attempted the world land speed record. They were thwarted by weather and so they mothballed the Bluebird at Muloorina over winter, to return again in 1964, when Campbell successfully broke the record at over 400 mph. This was stuff of boyhood dreaming and it was special to arrive on our first morning when we drove out to the Lake’s edge, and read an old bronze plaque set up on the edge, overlooking a seemingly endless and so flat salt bed. His record was set 20 kilometers out, as far from humanity at that time as it would have been possible to go. Strange to achieve something as abstract but of our world, out there, where its irrelevance was complete. Another sign advises not to drive out onto the lake bed, especially because the tyre tracks may stay there for the next twelve years. So there were of course graceful figures of eight and sweeping S curves heading off into the distance! And it is a shame really, because the sense of something special is strong and it is thoughtless to go there. But hey, when you’re eighteen! The variety of plant species in such a hostile environment is amazing – Daisies, Chenopods, Grasses and the Pea families can be seen all within a few square metres.

The waterhole at Muloorina is about 1.5 kilometres long and is charged by a hot spring that smells typically sulphury, but is good to sit in. The hole itself is deep though, and very cold. Helen predictably was straight in and loved it for ten minutes whilst the rest of us retired after 1. We played solidly for two days and three nights, covering a lot of ground in the process. The last night was very windy. Tables and chairs blown over, dish cloths into the bushes, and a neighbour’s rubber dinghy swept across the lagoon and left, winded and forlorn, crumpled against a fence. Bill was not happy after a night spent tossed around in their Ultimate van. We were pleased that the Crossover only rocked a bit and felt very secure.

Strzelecki Track south to Arkaroola in the Flinders Ranges

11 August. I have now strapped the spare wheel on the roof instead of the back door because the door was destroyed by the corrugations last year, with the considerable weight of the wheel and tyre. We’re feeling excited with the prospect of re-visiting Arkaroola at the northernmost end of the Flinders Ranges. There is a wonderful drive there that we missed last year, so we will do that and catch up with much needed showers and a restaurant meal. We head southwards on the Old Strzelecki Track, towards Arkaroola.

Yesterday, before leaving and heading south, we visited the many creekside camping spots where all ten residents of Innamincka in the 50s used to desport. Policeman’s and Ski beach; sublime places overhung with red gums and patrolled now just by Pelicans, Galahs, Corellas and the odd shag. We were reluctant to leave the cool banks, to head into the Strzelecki Desert. Taking the Old Strzelecki Track (first opened by Harry Redford the cattle duffer who drove 1000 stolen head through there in 1870 - he was caught, sent to trial with ample evidence against him, and let off by a jury so impressed by his feat of derring do they couldn’t find it in their hearts to send him down....!), we found a marvellous road with no traffic to speak of. The Telstra god shone his beam of communications for two minutes in the middle of nowhere, and our messages popped into view. We grabbed the opportunity and SMS’d as many replies as we could. Must have been a gas project in the vicinity- indeed, Moomba oil fields. A dust storm enveloped us so we felt cocooned and thankful to be in a small air conditioned world of our own. How those explorers kept it up year after year beggars belief. It was strange to visit Montecollina Bore, shrouded in driven grit, where water almost too hot to touch spills into a sandy dam, cooling as it goes and forming a magic wetland for birdlife in the process. These are Australian Shelduck.

Heading on southwards, we turned off the Strzelecki Track that goes on to Lyndhurst, and continued south towards Lake Callabonna and then Lake Frome. L. Callabonna unfortunately can’t be accessed without a permit from the University of SA. It is where hundreds of Diprotodon and other megafauna skeletons are to be found where they had become mired in what was a great bog. Apparently there are whole skeletons sticking up out of the chalky mudflats. By 5pm we had had enough and we turned into a clearing and parked in a creek bed beside some lovely red gums. These moments when we set up for a simple meal after toasting the sun with Bowmore or a glass of decent red, are very special.

The road this morning took us to Arkaroola and it was the worst corrugated stretch we have seen since the Mitchell Plateau road last year, and that is saying something. However we are settled into the place, within reach of showers and the bar, a meal is booked tonight. Another episode of “Rome” is to be seen on the laptop before we stretch out for another night under the stars, sort of.

Arkaroola is a significant and famous place. Mawson (of Antarctic fame) studied the geology of this region in the early part of the last century, and developed some break through theories about geology and more particularly glaciation, that he tested and proved through his subsequent visit to Antarctica. He was involved in the development of radium that was mined and carried out by camel back in the 1920’s. He taught Reginald Sprigg at Adelaide University, who as one of his best students went on to be involved with Sir Mark Oliphant in the development of the base material for the first atomic bomb. The material for that dreadful weapon was mined, in utmost secrecy, at Arkaroola. Reginald Sprigg purchased the place when he retired, and with his wife Griselda, they developed it with eco-tourism in mind back in 1963. What forward thinkers.

Our first night’s highlight had to be the buffet meal accompanied with a bus tour of very hungry troupers. I have never seen rib eye steaks the size of those we ate. The troupers were impressed too and I had the sense that we were benefitting from their presence. I was thinking of pudding and sidled up to the buffet again, as the sticky date was brought out, in a large tray and camouflaged as mince under a blanket of mash. The nice old chap in front of me, impressed by his timing as he slipped a second rib eye onto his plate, took a step backwards, grasped the ladle firmly, and scooped a pound of pud onto his plate, beside the carrots. His companion, seeing me pouring the recently arrived cream over mine, not the gravy, nudged her fellow, pointed (politely) at my bowl and was rudely rebuffed. The drive into Arkaroola is long and arduous and after such privations he was not to be put off!

There is excitement this morning because we are going on the Ridgetop Tour this afternoon, after a short drive up a gully to have a look at the old Bollabollana copper mine and smelter. It is hard to imagine constructing a complex series of buildings out in this remote location, but, as happened all over the bush in the 1870’s, there was activity everywhere. Water was available and must have made all the difference. Today at Arkaroola it is 20 years since the creeks were fully charged, and the 200mm rainfall still quoted as average hasn’t been seen for many years. It is 15 months since we were here last, and they have received about 35mm. Thank you very much! Hardy plants survive, though young Red Guns are stressed; Helen was excited to find a new Eremophila – see pic on left.

Some of you may remember that a few years ago Mitsubishi advertised the Pajero by getting it to the top of what appears to be an impossible peak. That is at the end of a quite magical drive into the tortured and wracked rocky landscape running 20 kilometres or so from the Arkaroola HQ. That is Sillers Lookout at The Ridgetop. Eleven game grey and silver nomads (there is a difference) were strapped into the back of an open sided Land Cruiser and we were carried up rocky slopes that had us boggling. The Pajero made it yes, but the Land Cruiser is amazing. Porsche tried to get their Cayenne up there to impress the glitterati but apparently the LC had to tow it up the last climb! Geoff, my faith is shaken!
The customers, a little sore but doing stretches between exclamations at the splendour of the place, were fed tea and lamingtons to the complete satisfaction of everyone. The $99/head cost had us pulling faces when we paid for the tickets, but there can be no doubt, it is worth every cent.

With our duties at Arkaroola now complete, and a blog to be posted, we left on 13 August as early as caravan park conversations would allow (three quarters of an hour later than should have been the case) and made for Leigh Creek, where we posted our first blog last year too. There is a little village called Copley on the way, that we visited last year as well. They sell quandong pies and coffee of Carlton standard (well, we’ve been on the road a while now). Don’t miss this place! In Leigh Creek we purchased a range of meats all cryovaced for the weeks ahead. The blog took us ages as we knew it would, making it later and later for our meet with Bill & Jill Johnson of Fremantle, at Marree, 120 kilometres north. There had been about 5mm of rain to the north the previous night, and we were hearing messages over the UHF about dodgy conditions ahead. By 4:30pm we pulled up in Marree, next to our friends’ van totally covered in thick clay. I felt sure after waiting since 11am they would be either very irritable or very drunk, but it was all smiles and hugs from these lovely new old friends. With no time to waste we high tailed it north towards Muloorina Station, near the shores of Lake Eyre, where we set up beside a fine lagoon with pelicans patrolling and the sound of great merriment as we started the job of catching up.

Our expectations for being able to do regular blog posts are dashed I’m afraid. I am writing this a day short of Winton in central Queensland in the hope we might get some NextG coverage there - the first since Leigh Creek. There is much blog to catch up on but we’ll make sure we have at least this much up tomorrow, after we have inspected the dinosaurs.

Innamincka and Cooper Creek

It is Saturday evening, 8^th, and I’ve already lost a day somewhere. As is becoming usual (and one of the best parts of this travelling lark) the sound of the Tilley lamp provides a comforting backcloth to the frogs and cicadas, sounds of birds’ wings and the turn of diary pages as Helen catches up with her day. History again. We are on Cooper Creek about a quarter of a mile downstream of R. O’H. Burke’s “Dig Tree” at his Camp 65. Innamincka is about 70 kilometres to the west. The tragedy and irony of that ill-fated expedition is well described here; and it is good to be here almost on our own, to absorb the place. Three aircraft departed yesterday – the airstrip is right next door! This area has a future – gas fields all about, but you don’t see much of them. Santos owns the place with the Kidman Company sub-leasing to run stock. A delightful old fellow sits under the shade of the information hut and yarns about his days flying for the Kidman Coy all around this area in the 70’s. His tale of dropping medical supplies to stranded cattle stations during the floods in the early 70’s, with medicines stuffed into the middle of loaves, and dropped from 20 feet from the open door of his Cessna 172, are the stuff of yesterday’s outback.

Sunday 9th, and time for a nice drive! We camped beside Cooper Creek at Cullyamura waterhole last night, all alone again and happy as Larry (what put a smile on his face?). Except for the sleeping. Very hard mattress and not a decent night had yet. However we managed a relatively early start this morning and set off on back roads that are thankfully fairly good, for the short 2.5 hour journey to Innamincka. Whilst the main roads are stony and slow at 40kph, cut up by the heavy trucks that service Santos et.al., the back roads are good and take you deep into the gibber plains where distant mesas edge the horizon and you start to feel almost, you know...intrepid. Innamincka’s history is interesting. It was the centre of medical support for the whole region until 1951, sporting two unmarried registered nurses and a lovely purpose built hospital constructed in 1928.

The nurses married the policemen and so there was a regular turn over every two years. Marvellous photographs of the social life that people out here had, with tennis parties and annual picnic races, but things went pear shaped and by 1952 the place was a ghost town. And so it remained until 1993 when the National Parks reconstructed the old Australian Inland Mission hospital and it stands today in its former glory, but as a place for information. The pub next door, and the general store beside it just about describes Innamincka township. Ten kilometres east, along the banks of the creek, is the spot where Burke died under a Coolibah tree, marked with a modest rendered memorial with the simplest iron plaque “Robert O’Hara Burke died here. 30^th June 1861”. After such a journey somehow that is all that need be said at that spot.

We are camped again on the creek, but where the midges dive for the light. Two kilometres walk along the bank takes you to a place called “the choke” where rock banks crowd in and reduce the otherwise broad creek to about 10 metres. The stone is an iron rich sandstone that has blackened with a dark oxide coating. For an area of perhaps half an acre this rock has been covered in petraglyphs, pecked into the surface over thousands of years by the once resident aborigines. What a wonderful place this must have been millennia ago; a crossroads for indigenous culture and trade.

Corner Country

The daytime temperature is becoming very pleasant at around 25 Celsius and little wind. On dirt station roads spotting lots of emus, kangaroos, some donkeys, we followed Charles Sturt and his exploration team up through Milparinka, visiting the spot where he spent 6 months waiting for rain in 1845, at Depot Glen on Evelyn Creek (named after Sturt’s sister). There was a drought and he was moving about 200 head of stock with him so they needed good grazing as they went. He set up a depot here, and left the place under the command of his no. 2 Robert Poole, with orders for his men to build a cairn on top of a red hill (Mt Poole) just ten kilometres away(!). This to avoid his men from getting distracted and bored while he was off north exploring the Great Stony Desert! So there was enough water in the creek to keep his whole mob fed and watered for 6 months, during a drought. Today the creek is bone dry and hasn’t seen water for over a year. Poor Poole died of scurvy the day they broke camp and is buried beside the creek under this Beefwood (Grevillea) tree.

Milparinka has a pub and some restored public sandstone buildings that are relics of its days as a gold town. As was Tiboobura, 40 km on, and the hottest place in NSW. Tibooburra’s highlight is Clifton Pugh’s nude murals, and others by Russell Drysdale, Rick Amor and Eric Minchin in the Family Hotel, which Pugh owned for three years until his death in the 1990s.

Tibooburra is the gateway to NSW’s most remote national park. We followed the Jump Ups Loop road through the Sturt NP past various watering points, through dry creek beds, across gibber plains and spotted some of its 450,000 kangaroos. After several days on the road the night we spent at the Cameron Corner pub was great light relief – full of banter and baby boomer music. Cameron Corner is where the NSW, Queensland and South Australia borders meet; you have to open the gate to get through the 5,600km Dog Fence. James Woodford’s book The Dog Fence is a great read about its history and the characters who maintain it.

The Long Paddock; and Mutawintji National Park

It seems these travels into The Centre become journeys into the past, unavoidably. Last Monday 3rd August we departed Bendigo greatly relieved after doing battle again with Telstra to get this internet connection sorted; leaving the city gates at about 1:30, we headed for the Cobb Highway past Deniliquin to Hay, to spend our first night camped beside the Darling River. Those with more than a little familiarity regarding stock will doubtless know the stories of The Long Paddock - that droving run from Wilcannia on The Darling (where wool bales were loaded for carriage to Adelaide) to Echuca/Moama where the cattle on the hoof went to feed the gold rushes in Victoria. Known as the Cobb Highway now, it was of course also the famous route taken by the Cobb & Co coaches, taking up to 17 passengers at a time, and many days between. It is thankless looking country, but a tinge of green among the bluebush at the moment, with grassy verges beside the road and lots of yellow flowers (weeds?) blooming in the pasture.

You can’t help being carried along by stories from the past; there seems to be little future for these places to focus on now. We heard in Hay how there are families still, whose names appeared on the honour rolls of these towns a hundred years or so ago, enormous properties, whose Riverina heritage was strong through awards for best Merino fleece or the like, whose still local descendants live now in abject poverty. Certainly there are regular reminders in the many irrigation channels, now redundant, of how use of the land has changed so much from the heyday of The Riverina. Now families on the land are grouped together into cooperatives and selling vegetables to the supermarket barons. Thing is, there is a myth about The Riverina still being part of the backbone of the pastoral economy, that seems to live on in the city. Am I wrong? (Helen demurs, with a reminder of Banjo Paterson’s poem about Hay, Hell and Booligal. You can’t escape the fact that things are changing in the bush very fast.

We spent a night in Wilcannia beside The Darling. The locals were having a ball at about 4am, their calls reaching us across the river from the township across the way. This was once a lovely old town, now largely closed up except for the police station, courthouse and the aboriginal’s pub. Nowhere is the march of change more evident than here and it is very sad; even with the sun shining on once bustling streets edged with sandstone building you’d die for in Carlton, it fails to encourage any sense of optimism for these communities. But with miles to do we turned west out of town , with Mutawintji National Park in our sights, where rock art can be found. Leaving the bitumen of the Barrier Highway towards Broken Hill, we turned north through arid country. A strange isolated patch of Spinifex made plain our northward passage. Strange because it ran out within a kilometre and we saw no more Spinifex for several days, and still have seen hardly any. Helen was bubbling with excitement as we arrived at Mutawintji NP in the heat of the day, because she had found three walks we could do before dinner, only eight kilometres! I’m very aware as we go, that men have a poor record on the stopping stakes. The woman in the camper next to us now has already confirmed that her partner refuses to stop for anything unless it is lunch and at a pub. So naturally I volunteered to join her on two of the walks provided I had a good night’s sleep between. We climbed up onto the ancient ranges and looked down into lost gullies where yellow footed rock wallabies can be found and other marvels. And far too many feral goats. I nearly always stop now when commanded, and generally comply in most things. Brownie points have to be hoarded carefully.

We would dearly love to keep you better informed; however we are in the hands of Mercury, who’s ways we ponder with curiosity. In a sandstorm, nowhere really but having left Innamicka four hours behind, a two kilometre window of NextG communication opportunity opens as if from the gods...we get our stored messages and frantically SMS who we can. Thank you Mr Telstra (and Moomba oilfields), we are pleased that American fellow has departed. Then nothing. So this will come to you hopefully on the 13th, from Leigh Creek west of the Flinders Ranges.