Travelling down through the Gulf the weather was hot and the
land was drying up at the end of the dry season, but it was still
beautiful. Camped beside the river at
Gregory Downs was wonderful and we understood why a few of the people we spoke
to had set up there for several weeks.
It would be easy to do, especially since it was free. But we packed up reluctantly and headed
south-east, making for the small town of Julia Creek for the night.
By way of an 80km or so detour, we came through the tiny
town of McKinlay. Nothing here at all
except the pub. And what a famous pub it
is – used in the filming of that now classic film, Crocodile Dundee. I struggled to accept it was the same pub, as
it didn’t look quite the same, but we saw from the photos inside that they had
added another facia on the front, which made it look a bit different. Inside there were many photos and pieces of
memorabilia on show from the days of filming and of course, the mural on the
end wall. We also learned that it had
recently sold to its new owners for the princely sum of $1.2 million. A pretty good price for a pub in the middle
of nowhere!!
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| Walkabout Creek Hotel, McKinlay |
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| Never go out with them, if you do you'll never come back. |
Julia Creek is one of those towns that has a main street and
not much else, but it’s a pretty main street and the community are making such an
effort to welcome visitors that we appreciated what they had to offer. They have set up a free campground on the
outskirts of the town (no facilities), on Julia Creek, so we gladly set up
there for the night. It was still around
the 39 degree mark in the afternoon, so we headed for the local swimming pool
and took advantage of a swim and a shower for the tidy sum of $1.60.
Since it was approaching beer o’clock we took ourselves to
the pub for one or two on the way home.
Sunday night special in the bistro was $15 roast beef and roast vegies! How could we refuse!! And it was also the night of the NRL Grand
Final so we stayed to watch the Bunnies trounce the Doggies. All in all, a great night.
Julia Creek also has a wonderful new visitor information
centre set up in some old fettlers’ cottages on the main street, with an
interactive walkway and a live display of the recently discovered new species,
the Julia Creek Dunnart. It also has
several cafes and a great library that does book exchanges. All this would have been brilliant, except it
was a public holiday in QLD (not something we knew) and everything was
shut!! We had been bush for a few weeks
and had promised ourselves a good coffee and raisin toast in the café for
breakfast that day and we were really looking forward to it. Imagine the disappointment, but we were
rescued by the local supermarket owner, whose store was open for a couple of
hours and who made a surprisingly good coffee!
After chatting to him for a while we were on our way again,
making the journey a bit further east to Winton. Driving down through cattle country is really
a sad experience. The Gulf country
further north was dry, as you’d expect at this time of year, but you knew that
the wet season was coming and it would bring it to life again. Here in the western part of QLD they have
been suffering drought for some time and everything is beyond brown, its grey
and all has turned to dust. And this
goes on for as far as you can see. We
arrived in Winton mid-afternoon and drove around a bit trying to find a spot to
camp. All the waterholes and creeks had
dried up, and camping beside those was not going to be a pleasant experience. We ended up staying in one of the caravan
parks in town for a couple of nights, as it was the best of a bad lot of
options.
Winton is the dinosaur capital of Australia, with the
discovery of more fossilised remains of dinosaurs in the area around here than
anywhere else on the continent. We set
off the next morning to visit The Age of Dinosaurs Natural History Museum, established
on one of the local properties to showcase what had already been discovered,
but it’s also a working laboratory, continually finding and preparing more
remains. They have racks and racks of
bones extracted from the surrounding area, waiting the painstaking process of
preparing them for the museum. Enough
work for the next 30 years they say.
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| Banjo - the sculpture |
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| Banjo - the skeleton |
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| Rows and rows of old bones |
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| It takes months to chip away the rock from the bones |
The afternoon was spent touring the other sights of downtown
Winton. After lunch we took in the
Waltzing Matilda Centre, a whole visitor centre and museum dedicated to the
famous song, penned by Banjo Patterson at a nearby station. The claim is also that the first ever
performance of this iconic song was in the North Gregory Hotel in Winton’s
main street.
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| Everyone loves the swagman! |
We then had a walk around
town taking in other heritage sites such as Arno’s Wall. Someone called Arno built this wall around
his property, running for 70 metres or so and included all sorts of junk in it,
including the kitchen sink. Not sure
why, but it’s on the list of “must-sees” in Winton.
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| Arno's Wall |
The caravan park was beside the main road, so lots of road
trains slowing down as they came into town meant noise through the night, but
not as bad as we were expecting (and not as bad as our camp spot in Emerald,
but more on that later). And it was
lovely to be visited by two brolgas in the afternoon, just as tame as anything,
coming strolling through the campground.
But by far our most welcome visitor (well, by me anyway) was the ginger
cat who adopted us during our stay there.
We christened him Boris, and he was very affectionate and contentedly
curled up beside my chair in the evening, and was still there the next day. It would have been nice to offer the poor
little stray a home, but not practical. So
we said goodbye to Boris when we left and told him to be careful of the road
trains.
The journey east continued, with our next planned stop to be
Longreach. More miles and miles of open,
grey countryside. I don’t know what
those poor cattle have to eat in those paddocks; maybe they don’t. Maybe the farmers are feeding them. So sad.
Longreach is a pretty town, but again we struggled to find
somewhere to camp that wasn’t a dust bowl.
This time even the caravan parks were dire (and not cheap) so we decided
we’d spend a few hours in town, and then move further on towards Barcaldine. There’s plenty to do in Longreach, with the Outback
Hall of Fame and the QANTAS Museum, and also a pretty main street. We had lunch and wandered for a while, but
decided that we would be back in Longreach sometime, so skipped the big
touristy things. It was noticeable,
travelling another 100km or so east, that suddenly the countryside didn’t seem
quite so dry, that there was a bit of green about.
At Barcaldine, we found a pretty camp spot on the Alice
River, about 15km or so out of town, and settled in there for the night. And that night we were treated to an
uninterrupted view of the total lunar eclipse that happened on the full moon. We have seen four full moons rise now on our
journey, and this one was the best yet.
The next morning we packed up and made our way back into
town and took some time to wander the main street of Barcaldine. It’s another pretty little town, and the main
street is dominated by the monument to the Tree of Knowledge, where it was said
that the very beginnings of the Australian Labour Party took place. The monument is a very confronting piece of
architecture, and I’m not altogether sure it fits in with the rest of the town,
but you can’t dispute that it is impressive, and beautifully done, with the
centrepiece being the (now dead) old tree, and the ceiling above covered in
hanging “leaves” which are wooden wind chimes, that tinkle away
constantly. Very clever.
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| The Tree of Knowledge monument |
After leaving Barcaldine, we travelled through the greener
countryside, heading for the town of Emerald.
It seemed the natural place to stop on our journey east to the coast, so
we set about trying to find somewhere to camp in town. Our source said there was free camping beside
the Botanic Gardens in Emerald, so we thought that would be great. A nice walk through the gardens into the town
– what could be better? The camp spot
turned out to be right beside the Botanic Gardens alright, but also right
beside the main road out of town, and right under the railway bridge! Oh well, it was only for one night. We set up camp and headed off to explore the
town.
Turns out there wasn’t much to explore. Emerald is a service town to all the surrounding
properties, and does that job well. It’s
just there’s not much else for visitors to do.
A visit to the Big Sunflowers filled in some time (apparently the area
used to produce sunflowers, so someone thought it would be a good idea to
recreate Van Gogh’s Sunflowers 25 metres tall).
We then returned to camp and sat and read under the shade of lovely big
trees in the gardens. The plan of
heading east to escape the heat was working; the temperature in Emerald was
only 34 that day.
I haven’t counted yet how many different campsites we’ve had
along the way this trip, but it’s been a few.
There’s been wonderful open skies in the desert, the beaches of the
Dampier Peninsula, the ranges in the Kimberley etc etc, but our camp under the
railway bridge at Emerald will always be something we look back on – and laugh!!! If the noise from the road trains wasn’t bad
enough (although that did die down in the middle of the night), we were wakened
by the toot of an oncoming train, that thundered only metres over our heads for
what seemed a very long time. So
ridiculous it was funny!
The next morning we awoke to something completely foreign –
grey skies. We were so used to brilliant
blue skies every morning, it felt very strange.
And just in case those grey skies decided to offer some showers, we
decided we’d better get the windscreen wiper blade that had broken a few weeks
earlier changed. So after a quick visit
to Repco on the way out of town, we were on the road again, heading to
Rockhampton. Goodbye Emerald, and thanks
for the memories!!
After free camping for a few days, we needed showers, so
headed straight for a nice caravan park in the banks of the Fitzroy River in
Rockhampton. We arrived early afternoon,
and set up camp, with wonderful green grass underfoot, lovely tropical gardens
surrounding us and the cooler temperatures of a 29 degree day. We spent the afternoon wandering around the
Rockhampton Botanic Gardens and Zoo, a lovely way to spend the afternoon, and
took ourselves out for a steak dinner that night in the “Beef Capital of
Australia”.
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| A furry inhabitant of Rockhampton zoo |
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| Big Pony-Tail palms up here. |
Sunday was another lovely day and we headed off to visit the
nearby town of Yeppoon on the coast. A
TV ad years ago, “one of these things went off a few years ago in Yeppoon, blew
a bloody big hole in a Torana”, tickled Doug, and when he saw that we were
nearby, we had to make a visit to Yeppoon.
It turns out that this was the weekend of Pinefest in Yeppoon, a
celebration of all things pineapple (one of the biggest local crops). We took in the local community market first,
which meant I was able to stock up on some lovely organic fruit and veg, and
then we parked up on the Esplanade, and sauntered around, looking at shops,
taking in the atmosphere and we enjoyed a great morning tea in a local
whole-food café, yum!
Yeppoon is a
lovely little town situated on Keppel Bay, and looking out to Great Keppel
Island and beyond.
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| Great Keppel Island |
Our drive back took
us further down the coast, and we stopped in to check out the millions and
millions of dollars of marine craft at Rosslyn Harbour. I’m glad we’re not into boating – it seems to
be an expensive hobby.
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| The Singing Ship monument to Captain Cook near Yeppoon |
We arrived back in Rockhampton in the afternoon, and spent
some time walking through the heritage area along the river. There’s some beautiful old stone buildings in
that precinct – and then we took ourselves back to the park to sit in the shade
and read our books. That night the
bowling club around the corner was our chosen destination for dinner, with an all-you-can-eat
buffet for $15. Yep, there’s a reason it
was only $15! Enough said!!!
With the temperatures now reaching a pleasant 27-29 degrees
each day, our spirits have been restored, and we are now soaking up the sun at
a little place south of Bundaberg called Elliott Heads, where the Elliott River
meets the sea. We are only metres away
from a beautiful beach and only 15 minutes’ drive to Bundaberg.
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| Our beach |
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| Early morning walk |
We’ve been here for three days already and
love the area enough that we feel we could move up here and live. We’ve done the touristy things that Bundaberg
has to offer, and they’re pretty good.
We took a tour of the Bundaberg Ginger Beer factory, and of course, a
visit to the 125 year old Bundaberg Rum Distillery. Both places offered really good tours to the
public and a visit to the gift shop afterwards helped to part us from a few
dollars.
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| Ginger Beer factory |
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| Tasting the rum at the distillery |
Today we’re just sticking close to camp, getting caught up
with washing, blogging and perhaps I’ll make a curry! You see the hard decisions I have to
make? Doug is away walking on the beach
and I’m sitting enjoying the beautiful sunshine. This place is fantastic – and real estate is
cheap (hmmm plenty of food for thought!!!)
Although the evenings are getting a bit cooler now too, with long
sleeves needed the last couple of nights, and the duvet making a reappearance
after a couple of months of being pushed aside.
I’ve seen a report on the news today of terrible storms and
weather around Sydney and the Blue Mountains.
Tell me again why we’re travelling south? Oh that’s right, because we’ve only got just
over two weeks to go. I’m not sure how
we’ll adjust to being back in reality again, but we’re not looking forward to
it. Oh well, I’d better get back to
working on the tan while I can.
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