We're almost home

And so we left Lake Dalrymple and the people we had met there, including the ageing cattleman who was living out of the back of a truck, left, with a tarp thrown over it, while he took care of cattle he had on agistment on a nearby property. Until the drought breaks, that’s his life.
We drove across the base of the great Burdekin Falls dam spillway, then covered the 135km to Collinsville in several hours as it was a really bad dirt road. From then on, we were in the heart of coal-mining country with massive coal trains on the railway lines and good bitumen roads, so we headed south towards Nebo and stayed at Lake

Our truck dwarfed by the spillway at the Burdekin
Falls Dam.

Elphinstone, a natural lake where black swans and coots live and where local water ski club  members have a shed.

It was further south towards the Rockhampton-Longreach highway that we saw the first green grass in paddocks since we had left NSW all those months before, and even then, it was only fleeting.

After catching up with friends in Gracemere, on Rockhampton’s western outskirts, we went on to Yeppoon for three lovely nights with our friends, Judith and Barry.

We talked and laughed and ate and drank until we left on Tuesday morning, heading for Mount Morgan and Biloela and places south. We loved Mount Morgan, with its historic buildings, and ended our day at the Mulgildie pub, just south of Monto, where camping is encouraged in the pub’s backyard.



Lots of oversize loads were on the coal country roads,
including this giant bucket.

We had a great meal at the pub, chatting with the young Swedish backpacker running the bar, then fell into bed soon after 7.30pm, exhausted by our revelries of the previous few days.

Before reaching Monto we had detoured to the Cania Gorge National Park and Cania Dam so today we detoured again south of Monto to the Waruma Dam. There were masses of caravans and motorhomes camped right on the water’s edge but we weren’t tempted to stay.

One of Mount Morgan's old buildings.

Along the way today we bought groceries at Eidsvold and fuel at Mundubbera, where we started to see the citrus orchards for which the area is famous.  

We stopped early at Gayndah, as we were both tired, and tomorrow will make a final push to stay with friends near Pomona, then spend the weekend with family in Brisbane.

After that, it’s back to Richmond Hill and HOME!

Across north-west Queensland

October 15: This is the day of writing, but don’t know when we’ll be back in internet service area to post this blog.

 

We’re happily camped high on a hill overlooking Lake Dalrymple, the waterway formed by the Burdekin Falls Dam, south-east of Charters Towers.

The country across the NT and Qld is as dry as dust.

To get here from Tennant Creek in the NT, which we left on Oct 9, first we called just outside that town at the old telegraph station, part of Australia’s communications history, then made a turn to the east at the Three Ways (just a roadhouse) and continued across the rather tedious Barkly Tableland until we reached Camooweal, where we spent the night in a small park behind the service station.



Brolga sculptures from old junk in the
 hamlet of Nelia

It was a short drive the next day to Mt Isa, where we wanted to catch up with the sister of John’s son-in-law, Chris. We had a great afternoon with her, spent the night in a caravan park, and left next day for Richmond. There we stayed for two nights beside the town’s artificial lake, a great place, with a paved path all around, lit at night, and a wonderful place for the locals to fish, ski and indulge in other water sports.

A storm blew up on our second afternoon there and we actually got some rain! The country is desperately dry and camped in the caravan park were some volunteers with Aussie Helpers, as well as the founder, Brian Egan. They had been going around the local stations, seeing who needed hay, as they had seven road trains of hay coming west from Bowen the next Friday. Graziers were invited to bring their trucks to town, where a barbecue would be held and they could collect their fodder. It’s all paid for by donations and run by volunteers.

One of them told us they had a camera crew going around with them, and in fact, they were being filmed the morning we left, sitting at one of the caravan park barbecue shelters, planning their day. The camera crew is from the UK and they are making a documentary on drought in Australia to be shown on the English-language version of Al Jazeera TV network.

 

Richmond is home to Kronosaurus Korner, a wonderful museum of fossils found locally when the area was part of a huge inland sea. The Kronosaurus was a particularly nasty bit of works, reproduced in fibreglass outside. The fossils are marvellous, including the most complete dinosaur skeleton in Australia, quite a small chap.

From Richmond it was only a short drive to Hughenden, which I hadn’t visited since I was a child, when we lived there for a few years.

On the way in I was thinking it was sad that I had nobody alive in the family to let know I had found and photographed our old house/school/or convent where my sister and I learnt music. As it turned out, I couldn’t find any of those places. The house has been replaced with something more modern; the state school is vastly changed and now caters for K-12; and the lovely old convent was torn down and replaced by something more utilitarian. The caravan park, near the railway station, used to be the site of the hospital when we lived there in the 1950s, so that was vaguely familiar.

It was a much cooler day after the storms so we drove 70km north to Porcupine Gorge, called Australia’s little Grand Canyon. It is indeed magnificent.

The Boer War memorial kiosk.

The next day, we went on to Charters Towers, had lunch in Lissner Park which is such a green oasis in the middle of the drought-stricken country all around. I thought the birds were chattering in the grand old trees above us until John told me to have a look . . . they were full of thousands of flying foxes! The lovely old kiosk, as it is called, was a memorial to the Charters Towers men who went to the Boer War, all horsemen. I had spent formative years of my adolescence in that town, so enjoyed seeing it again (that’s the third visit for me since 2007).

Some of the thousands of flying foxes in Lissner Park.

We decided to go towards Townsville, turning south at Mingela, through Ravenswood to the Burdekin Falls Dam, with a dirt road linking that area to Collinsville, for anyone who’s following us on a map.

The caravan park is the site of part of the village for the 1900 dam construction workers in the 1980s and we walked around this morning having a look at where some of the buildings were. There are still two tennis courts and what was an old swimming pool (there’s a newer one for the campers). The resident ranger told us when collecting the VERY expensive camping fees ($15 a night!) that he’s met a former dam worker in Townsville who told him they were really well looked after, with a bar and a store, and girls brought in on a Friday night, installed in a donger, and taken out on the Monday.

The Burdekin Falls Dam, with the roadway to the left of the pillars
at the base of the spillway.

There is a flock of peacocks here, apparently descended from a pair one of the men living in married quarters here during construction had in his garden. He left them here when the dam was completed in the late 1980s and apparently the flock built up to about 200 before some culling. Even the three peacocks still make a racket when they give their unearthly shriek, and their many peahens honk. Wallabies are everywhere, and so is their dung, but last night we sat outside and had about four feeding on leaves only a metre or so away.

There are not many campers here, but two have moderately large dogs. However one is blind and the other is very old and deaf, so I think the wallabies and peacocks are safe.

When we leave tomorrow morning we will drive across the bottom of the spillway towards Collinsville, obviously a way not available when water is rushing over the spillway. The ranger tells us it’s a fairly rough road, but as veterans of the Plenty, the Tanami Desert and the Gibb River roads, we’ll tackle it with good humour.

It promises to be a hot afternoon so we’ll take a dip in the pool and relax in the shade of the big African mahogany trees around the campground.

 

Starting the long drive home

With some reluctance, but also some joy, we left Darwin on October 7, heading homewards after all these months.

We’d had a wonderful time in Darwin, parked in the driveway of the home of Fred and Lyn Barlow, with our stay extended to two weeks because of John’s operation (see previous blog) and the need for his surgeon to check him a week later.

We got the all-clear on Monday, Oct 6, so we were ready to go by the Tuesday morning.

One stop on the way south from Darwin was at a mango farm which produces the most glorious ice-creams. We’d had some at the open-air Deckchair Cinema in Darwin, John phoned, and arranged to collect some on our way south. So now we have the bottom of our little freezer packed with these 200ml tubs of tropical flavour.

Gorgeous boy at Mataranka.

We stopped in Katherine just long enough for me to catch up with a cousin there. We’d had lunch in Darwin with her sister and husband and the daughters of each of these cousins. They were all off to Singapore later this week to help the son of the Darwin cousin (Coral) celebrate his 50th birthday and recent marriage to an Indonesian beauty. So I was so glad we caught up when we did.

Then we drove down the Stuart Highway to Mataranka (about 38 C but no humidity, so it was actually a little more pleasant than Darwin) where we stayed the night.

We had to dissuade an over-friendly peacock and his harem from pinching our cheese and bikkies before dinner, but the caravan park was almost empty, showing that it really is nearing the end of the dry season.

Today we have driven more than 500km to Tennant Creek, just south of where we will go back to turn east tomorrow towards Mt Isa.

The countryside is dry and often quite burnt but there is still something wonderful about these Central Australian open spaces. Also wonderful, and mirth-producing, are the thousands of termite nests, many of which have been ‘dressed’ in t-shirts, caps and sometimes sunglasses by passers-by.

We couldn’t stop to photograph many as invariably we had massive road trains on our tails, but we certainly enjoyed looking at them.

Tomorrow we’ll have an easy day, just a few hundred km to Barkly Homestead, then on to Mt Isa.

We’ve admitted to each other that we are really ready to go home after all this time, and all the things that have gone wrong, although an enormous amount has gone right and we’ve seen some glorious parts of Australia.