Last post from Longreach?

I guess on long trips one must expect a few unplanned issues and things to fix. As you can see from our other blogs we have travelled much of this huge continent, and that's not to mention unblogged trips up the Canning Stock Route in 2012 and Cape York Peninsula to the tip in 2015, with attendant wendings on the way there and back. Very few issues in all of these but this one is a different story - starting in Alice Springs with replacing a dud water tank, exhausted gas struts, new shock absorbers on the trailer, computer hissy fit with brake lights, and dirty gas; a busted tyre outside Newman, dead battery in Broome sorted by a delightful young RACV man, the smack up the back at 80km outside Fitzroy Crossing, disintegrated back door window in Camooweal, and the latest – trailer brake connection playing up between Cloncurry and here in Longreach, despite Ian’s best efforts cleaning and tweaking the pins. The very helpful autoelectrian who has squeezed us in today is working on it – brand new system needed sadly so it’s topping up the bank account again and sitting in the municipal library after exhausting the main street’s attractions (Jumbuck bakery, Station Store for a new hat and look at the Cobb & Co horse-drawn wagons leaving with their load of tourists).

All these outback town services are overloaded with work from the many tourists. We now judge big towns by the quality of their industrial areas – those in Alice and Broome which we now know intimately, are tops, as are helpful tradies in places like Newman and her in Longreach. In times of enforced waits, or in areas like Queensland where lovely and remote free camps are no longer available, the quality of caravan parks becomes an issue. I wouldn’t recommend the Vacation caravan park in Broome for example, with its rude signs threatening dire fines if you so much as touched a power point to charge a mobile, a most basic camp kitchen squeezed between the toilets and rubbish bins, and our dirt site bang beside the main Port road with trucks bellowing past from 5am. Two nights ago in Winton was a doozy, the Matilda, run by Mad Mick who hasn’t upgraded the most basic and unclean facilities for yonks. Saved however by a brilliant and very funny bush poet called Gregory Heath over a decent roast dinner served up by the long-suffering Sharon. He had his audience in stitches, particularly a multicultural version of The Man from Snowy River recited in many accents with matching hats. He even got me up on stage playing a rough bloke with flaming farts! 

Whinge over, and I took time out in the well maintained Longreach Tourist Park
yesterday afternoon cooking a chicken curry in the Dreampot, washing some of the dust out of a few clothes,

watching cheeky Apostle birds and topknot pigeons and musing on the blog while Ian revisited the Qantas museum. 

Still in a somewhat maudlin mood I have been reflecting on how tourists now would have very little idea really about what they are seeing, or not seeing as the case may be.  In the ten years we have been travelling these vast distances, we have rarely felt crowded and had many places to ourselves eg 6 days on the Anne Beadell across the Great Victoria Desert without seeing another vehicle. Now tracks like that and the Canning stock route and Simpson Desert are deeply corrugated by too many vehicles travelling too fast, any bitumen tourist route is busy with caravans of every sort being cursed by huge road trains, littered every few metres with road kill of kangaroos and wallabies, and all caravan parks are heaving. Rereading Nicholas Rothwell’s evocative Red Highway reminded me/brought together many of the tales we have heard and histories read, particularly of places visited in the Kimberley region. I have been feeling a profound sadness about the changes and what has been lost, for example Fossil Downs station was a grand place renowned for its hospitality and notorious parties when owned by the late Maxine MacDonald. It has been bought by the rapacious Gina Reinhart who illegally padlocks the gates preventing indigenous people exercising their legal access rights to country. Rose (Mimbi caves) told me about the manager of old Gol Gol station who was good to her family, and shot himself - and there he was in Rothwell’s book: Vince Jones, going blind, who told Rothwell’s glamorous narrator and station owner “not to keep the last dance for him” at Fossil Downs the night he used his Luger pistol on himself years ago. 

The rock art we have seen a lot of is now never talked of and hard to access, for good protective reasons of course. I wept as we had to pass a Kalkadoon site visited outside Mt Isa in 2010 as the track now is pretty well impassable (we tried too late in the evening the night before). The many tales finally being told about the massacres and havoc wrought upon Aboriginal people are in sync with the havoc 200 years of white settlement has brought on the landscape and mass extinction of native animal and plant species. At the excellent museum at Mt Isa (incidentally a more cheerful tale of the multicultural success of a mining town) a rather poignant panel showed the replacement of native animals by the introduced ones of sheep, cattle and horses. I would add feral cats.

A completely chance meeting followed by an excellent dinner last night with friends Cynthia and Neil, escaping Woodend’s winter, has restored my equanimity; they copped a debriefing in the most understanding fashion.

So, while waiting for the latest problem fix we can reflect briefly on our Queensland travels. Mt Isa’s Museum café provided the best big breakfast we can remember, and its Riversleigh Fossil Centre’s dioramas and videos an excellent reminder of Australia’s famous fossil discoveries near Lawn Hill, visited in 2010. In fact our 2010 blog about Queensland at http://orseda3.blogspot.com saves me repeating things about towns like Winton, Longreach and the dinosaur trails which have revitalised the tourist industry up here. It is the locals you chat to who make a day memorable as much as the sights to be seen, like the two women in Winton newsagency who raided their emergency sewing kit to give us a needle and cotton, which I had omitted to pack for lost buttons and torn hems.

A German migrant, Arno, collected every sort of junk for his wall

Winton’s grand North Gregory Hotel and Arno’s wall were good to see again though. So was the deconstructed in 1984 town of Mary Kathleen with its uranium mine.

Turning south onto the Landsborough (Matilda) highway from Cloncurry towards Winton and now Longreach really means we are pointing for home, and feeling ready for it too despite the prospect of cold nights on the way. Tonight camped in an uncrowded fashion behind the pub in Isisford, a slow old town beside the Barcoo River is a nice contrast to the hordes free camping nearby in the dust without facilities, as also were about 200 vans on the Thompson river outside Longreach - ghastly.

A detour to the Carnarvon National Park for a long walk to see the rock art is probably the next and last hurrah. I think we are running out of steam about any more blog posts.