Month: August 2015

The thousands of regular readers of this blog are having withdrawals with the severe shortage of postings in the past few days. But here in the central west of Queensland, Longreach—the gateway to the outback—they have a saying, “there’s no business like show business”
Forget the outback! Since we lobbed here at midday on Friday we’ve been out every night to dinner and a show and every day visiting the famed Stockmans Hall of Fame and the ever popular Qantas Founders Museum.
Blimey! Hardly any time for an afternoon nap, let alone write a blog post.
Friday night dinner and a show at the Heartland Theatre at Qantas Museum, very pleasant 2 courses with melody and yarns from a couple of folk singers.
Saturday, something with a bit more robustness at Smithy’s Place on the banks of the Thomson River at sunset with brilliant camp oven tucker, damper and a very entertaining cowboy singer.
Oh yes! And a coach to pick you up and drop you off at home again. Especially as there was a fishing competition on the river and it was a toss-up who caught the most; the fishermen on the river banks or the cops and their booze bus on the road in.
Sunday we were still very much up for it with dinner and a show at the Stockman Bar and Grill. A tasty roast with all the trimmings and trick riding, whip cracking, singing cowboys/girls.
Today we slept in and missed the Cobb and Co stage coach ride out to a local farm. Or perhaps we were a little bit cowboy’d out?
Longreach. What a top spot and well worth a trip across this vast land to enjoy everything on offer.

JV

Yeehaah!
At a quarter to four in the morning the heavens opened up in Winton and we awoke to the sound of quite heavy rain on our metal roof. Rain at last! What a truly refreshing sound of raindrops on your roof. But this morning, not a smidgen in the rain gauge at Winton airport; but the little lady in the craft shop told me she had 12mm at her home and a friend out of town had 17mm. (nearly half an inch in the old money!).

Winton is proudly a very neatly manicured town.

Dinner last night at the historic North Gregory Hotel was a real treat; delicious meals served within the original Art Deco styled dining room and plenty of like minded nomads occupying the tables.

And today we explored the usual haunts like the bakery, Winton Club where the Qantas business model was discussed, (only open Friday nights!) open-air picture gardens, arts and craft shop, Searle’s Outback Store, service station and a local waterhole.

So today’s pictures feature grey skies versus the usual big blue dome above.
Tomorrow we strike out for Longreach and the culmination of the Qantas history.

Being disposed to the occasional rendition of Banjo Paterson’s poems it interesting to spend time in Cloncurry and travel the Matilda Highway thru McKinlay and Kynuna townships to Winton in the central west of Queensland.
Paterson travelled with his fiancée to visit friends on Dagworth station near Kynuna, where he met Christina McPherson who collaborated with Banjo, writing the score for Paterson’s words of Waltzing Matilda.

It is thought to have been first performed publicly at the North Gregory Hotel in Winton, on 6 April 1895, apparently at a banquet for the Premier of Queensland.

Paterson’s verse Clancy of the Overflow is supposedly based upon a fellow he knew in Cloncurry Thomas MacNamara who died there in 1942 and it was reported that his wife Teresa MacNamara passed away in the same town in 1948. The words can be found here
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/paterson/ab/man_from_snowy_river/chapter4.html
So the Australian bard had close links with this region, as he had with much of this country’s outback. The Blue Heeler hotel at Kynuna is still there today and claims Paterson heritage. But it is a pub that lacks pizzazz, with as much literary leaning as a termite mound.

But not so the Walkabout Creek Hotel in McKinlay where Hoges shot much of the Crocodile Dundee movie. The pub is full of memorabilia, the Outback Safari Tours truck John Mellion drove, even down to the prop for “that’s not a knife–this is a knife”

So heaps of fun stuff to pursue in the last few days but as we neared Winton the trial of no rain for three or 4 years is plainly evident. We hear that the farmers are doing it tough, but as I sit here writing this post, thunder clouds are casting a pall of darkness over the town. Perhaps we may just have brought some rain with us!

And tonight we plan on dinner at the North Gregory Hotel in the Main Street. I might even sing Waltzing Matilda to the strains of rain on the tin roof.

Travelling from Lake Argyle across the top end of Australia you cross hundreds of creeks and rivers with the ever attendant ‘road subject to flooding’ signage.
In the dry the land looks quite parched. The Barkly tableland probably an unchanged landscape thousands of years old.
And then you arrive at Mt Isa and behold a town that is dwarfed by the mining activity which delivers riches in lead, zinc, copper and silver. Thirty years after MIM began operations it needed water to grow the business and so in 1958 they dammed the Leichhardt River. A privately funded project costing $2.4mil giving 2600 hectares of water surface on the lake at a depth of up to 11 metres; oodles of water for mining and residential consumption well into the future and providing for all the aquatic recreational pursuits you can only dream of.
Tennant Creek also has a similar, but somewhat smaller dam/recreational waterways; put simply— dams—-that is a guaranteed lifeline to people in this arid country.
But the top end of this country is far from a dry as dust waterless country. Fitzroy crossing flood records water flows of 30,000 cubic metres of water every second flowing out into the sea. In this tableland country of north west Queensland alone, flooding rivers criss cross the plains and join together to fill Lake Eyre.
Australia has plenty of water. We just need to get on with saving some.

They say the population of Tennant Creek was 3,100 at the 2001 census and similar in the 2011 poll. Sounds curiously like Albany: whenever a child was born a bloke would always leave town!

Actually, Tennant Creek is an indicator of just how populous the Northern Territory actually is, for this community on the north-south Stuart Highway is the territory’s fifth largest township.
Having travelled over 500 km from Mataranka down the highway, we felt we had earned a couple of nights in Tennant Creek. Where there is the well preserved Overland Telegraph Station, a man-made recreational lake, old gold mine workings and a high point lookout.
And strangely, this township didn’t even get a start in life until after the discovery of gold in the early 1930’s. This country’s last great gold rush it is claimed.
Refreshed we hit the road again this morning, (Friday) heading for the Barkly Highway which crosses east-west from Cloncurry in Queensland to the 3ways junction near Tennant Creek.
An easy 220 km drive on this super smooth highway, in country that is akin to a Savannah grassland, to the Barkly Homestead where we filled both tank and tummy and taking the afternoon off to post a little on the blog and picking up the now mostly dis- used needle and thread.

What a funny little town Mataranka is!
Adorned with life-size clay sculptured early pioneers, strangely posed throughout the neighbourhood and I guess the community’s endeavour to associate itself with the folklore novel We of the Never Never.
A broken-down pub, a service station famed for its meat pies, art gallery and coffee shop with newly minted signage which is now closed and currently for sale. The supermarket has fresh bread each day but one must wait for the arrival of ‘the truck’ —-mostly in the late afternoon!
But!
In the land of the never never lie hidden aquatic jewels in a setting of lush palm, bullrushes and paper bark trees. And today I learned these freshest of warm water pools come from the Barkly Tablelands 500 km away, which in turn comes from the Gregory River in Queensland. Flowing all the way through an underground limestone aquifer, geologically covered by non porous Basalt rock. Fractures in the earth’s crust allow the limestone to surface and bestow Mataranka with the most dazzlingly beautiful crystal pools.

Every day we are awakened by a surprising cacophony of birds chirping. So beautiful in their tuneful chorus’ and uniquely colourful. Photographing them all as you see them is not very easy, so courtesy of Google here is a selection of wonderful birds we exchange with.

On our last day in Katherine I bought a map of Australia. Although we have plenty of maps across many pages of an atlas, all very detailed, but nothing to highlight what a big country Australia is.
At the time of writing this post we are actually in Mataranka 110km south of Katherine which itself is 310 km south of Darwin. Looking at the Aussie map we have a long way to go to Tennant Creek before we venture east along the Barkly highway toward Mt Isa. (The Barkly is actually north of Tennant, but we’ve come this far why not see what the Creek is like).
Last Thursday we departed Darwin for 4 nights in Katherine with its gorges, hot springs, river and Katherine Country Club. The museum was closed and Springvale Homestead has been closed for 2 years; but the Katherine river was flowing over at Knott’s crossing and Edith Falls was flowing into a giant popular swimming hole with its beautiful shady picnic areas on the banks.
At the hot springs I got talking to Christine, an Aboriginal woman who told me of the dream time rainbow serpent that burrowed into the ground and re-appeared at the Rainbow Springs at Mataranka. Mythology with a touch of magic, for the 2 are linked by a limestone underground watercourse stretching over 100km.
Arthur Giles first settled in this area (1878) at Springvale, commencing the cattle trade so evident in this region with the enormous volume of cattle road trains that rattle past the enormous volume of nomad caravans in the top end. It should also be noted that the cattlemen have not erected any monuments to a certain female PM who introduced taurus interruptis.

Yesterday we took a day tour to the Mary River wetlands and a gentle boat trip out on the Corroboree Billabong to see the bird life and hunt down real crocs. So splendid being picked up from our caravan park at the very reasonable hour of 10.15am, chauffeured to the billabong via Humpty Doo pub, catch the wildlife out on the lake and all with lunch included.

Four nights we had in Darwin.
Pursued all the normal touristy things; the waterfront and cafes; the museum and art gallery and more cafes; Fishermans’ wharf and cafes; Mitchell St eateries; Casurina shopping centre and a gem called the Casurina Club.

Today (Thursday) we travelled down the Stuart Highway to Katherine once again, for out last visit was only fleeting and this time we plan to see the Katherine Gorge etc.

Then it is off toward Mt Isa and the inland Queensland route southward.

And the the name of the swagman down by the billabong?

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree
Andy sang as he watched and waited ’til his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me?
Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me
Andy sang as he watched and waited ’til his billy boiled

Who’ll come a-waltzing, Matilda, with me?

Hooray!

We’ve at last ventured into another capital city after leaving Perth 10 weeks ago and eager to leave the white sox coated in red dust well behind us. (If only for a while)
A quick 90km north from Batchelor this morning we swung into the Hidden Valley caravan park in Darwin. Did my usual novice nomad intro at the reception and we are now proudly ensconced in a shady location keen to spend time doing things city folk do.
Like, trapsing around the very big Casurina Shopping Centre, opting for lunch at the alternative Casurina Club and mixing it with everyone at Mindil Beach for the markets at sunset.
You have to be a former market manager to command the attention of young pup security officials and get parked up close to the action——10 metres from the start of the stalls.
Mindil Beach is the culmination of all those accents and languages you have heard while travelling the north. A genuine melting pot of interracial sounds and sights; holidaying young families, backpackers, retirees and everybody in between.