The Darling Downs

The fertile black-soil plains in south-west Queensland—west of the great dividing range—is known as the Darling Downs, with the Condamine and Maranoa rivers and their tributaries flowing westward through the area and hence to the mighty Darling River*.
For a couple of nights the tiny town of Condamine has been our home. This little hamlet hosted a huge flood in 2011 which inundated everything, forcing evacuation of the town. You will readily recall those floods and associated deluges at Toowoomba and of the Lockyer Valley and all the way down to Brisbane.
Today at nearby Miles we visited the historical village museum, a street-scape of locally resurrected buildings from yesteryear, thoughtfully situated and restored making for a magnificent tourist enterprise. A bloody lot of hard work by successful volunteers down through time.
Tonight we enjoyed dinner at the wonderful little Condamine pub with Buddy and Maureen Statham, cattle and farming folk from about 25 kilometres out of town. Sorry: didn’t take the camera!
We are planning a couple of nights in nearby Dalby before arriving in the big-smoke Toowoomba.

*Five years ago we spent a holiday following the course of the Murray River from its mouth in Lake Alexandrina in SA to the Snowy Mountains near Canberra. At Wentworth on the Murray we saw the amazing confluence of the Darling River as it joins with the waters that form the Vic/NSW border.