Fantasy Freeway and the Farmers’ Folornness

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.