Opals and oil wells

It’s sunny here in Quilpie, where we arrived yesterday. It’s a bit of a sentimental journey as my mother was a nurse here in the 1930s, and somewhere at home I have a black and white photo of her at the ‘end of the line’ . . . where the railway line from Brisbane ends with some buffers.

So John took one of me yesterday afternoon in the same place.

We visited the excellent visitors’ centre, with fabulous photos of early days in the region, and admired the cattle and even a stockman on a horse, all cut out of steel, adorning the median strip in the main street.

Opal-faced altar and lectern in St Finbarr's Church, Quilpie.

Quilpie has long been a centre for boulder opals, and we popped into the very modern  Catholic church to see the altar front, font base and lectern, all made of a mosaic of opal.

It’s been cold at night (down to 4C) but we’ve been snug in the motor home. This morning we drove south-west for about 100km to the tiny town of Eromanga, famous not only for being the town furthest from the sea in Australia, but also for its oil fields and a mini-refinery that’s been operating there since 1985. Fossils of some titanosaurs (REALLY big dinosaurs) were found in the district in the past few years but none are yet on display.

There's oil in the western plains.

It’s always been a centre for opals, and a great little park is called the Opalopolis. There is a huge mural showing the properties, roads, and most interestingly, the Cobb and Co routes . . . just mind-blowing, where those coaches went in the outback. The pub, built in 1880, was one of the coach staging places.

On the way back to Quilpie, we not only saw wedge-tailed eagles as big as dogs, feasting on road kill, but also stopped at what is known as a ‘donkey well’ right beside the road, where we sat in the motor home and had lunch to the accompaniment of the engine on the well pulling up the oil. It’s just one of many on the oilfields close to the road.

We’ve met our first roadtrains on the road, have stacks on red mud on our wheels, and are starting to feel we’re really in the outback, with the sky extending from horizon to horizon. And what a sky it is.