Bush camping delights

After days of being incommunicado, and some glorious nights of bush camping, we are in Winton, getting closer to my old family country.

Beside Coopers Creek.

There was no mobile phone coverage at Cooper’s Creek, just outside Windorah, where we spent most of the weekend. Dozens of large waterbirds lined the banks of the creek (should have been a river but Sturt, the explorer, who named it, wrote that he could not see a discernible current so it had to be a creek), waiting for yellowbelly and bream to come down the creek from the Thomson and Barcoo rivers, which joined many kms upstream.

Also looking for yellowbelly were the local fishermen. It was the annual Windorah P&C fishing comp, with the headquarters set up by the bridge across the creek. We joined in the festivities at night, having a few beers with the locals, meeting other bush campers from the South Coast of NSW, Victoria and Tasmania (Penguin, N&T), and had a very funny conversation with the local copper who reckoned he lived in the best part of the world, and what’s more, got paid to be there. There are only 8 children at the school so the town is looking for an injection of new families.

Four of the five giant solar circles.

When we finally left we marvelled at the solar farm that supplies the little town with its power, saving masses of diesel fuel for generators, and headed off for Stonehenge.

It’s just a pub and a few houses and the pub had sold at auction the day before for $140,000 (!!). We didn’t linger but headed for our first major bit of unsealed road, about 300km to Winton, via Lark Quarry, the national monument to a dinosaur stampede.

Once again that night, we found a spot to pull off the road and had a wonderful barbecue meal, watched the sunset while drinking our red wine and wondered occasionally what the poor people were doing. A couple of passing kangaroos stopped in their tracks, astonished to see a vehicle, but then mentally shrugged their shoulders and moved on.

The only trouble with that dirt road, apart from teeth-shattering corrugations in places, was the dust generated when we met road trains, but we learnt to stay put until the dust cleared.

The joys of meeting a road train on a dirt road.

Lark Quarry is magnificent. The building that shelters the tracks of stampeding small dinosaurs, startled by a large carnivorous dinosaur, is wonderful, and after we’d seen those trackways, we did a short half-hour walk around the surrounding spinifex area.

Now we are in Winton we’ll rest and re-group for a day or so, and I’ll make serious moves tomorrow with the info centre people to find out if my paternal grandfather’s grave (he died beside the Winton-Boulia road 100 years ago this year) is still findable from the road now linking those two centres.