As Victoria remained in lockdown and New South Wales was in covid crisis, we wondered about the logic of returning home. We were in complete freedom in Queensland, the sun was nearly always shining and life was wonderful. But sometimes, it's just time to go home, so we made our plans. Our route would take us along thousands of kilometres in less than a week.
We left the mountains behind and headed back into the outback. First stop was Charleville, about 600 kms west of the Bunya Mountains. We quite liked this town. Everyone was really friendly.
The key attraction here was the bilbies. Due to loss of habitat and the introduction of foxes, dogs and cats, bilbies became an endangered species. Rabbits are also one of their biggest competitors for food and suitable burrowing space. You never find rabbits and bilbies in the same place. In the 1980's, two guys started a breeding programme and have successfully reintroduced hundreds of bilbies into specially fenced off areas. The fences are designed to keep foxes, dogs, dingoes, rabbits and cats out and they cost a fortune to build.
The only bilbies that we can see here are a few that are kept in an enclosure with special red lighting. Bilbies are nocturnal and can't see the red so they think it's night time.
The bilbies were cute but we learned some seriously frightening facts here.
1. Australia has the worst mammal extinction record of any developed country. Other developed countries have lost 2, 5 or even 7 species of mammals. Australia has lost an astonishing 31! This is not a record to be proud of.
2. There are over 20 million feral cats in Australia. Every 24 hours they kill 75 million Australian animals.
On a side note, I also forgot to mention in an earlier post that Australia has only 0.3% of its rainforest left. I can't find this figure online to substantiate it but that's what I read on an info board somewhere.
These are really sobering statistics......
Keeping on the nature theme, we went to the Cosmos Centre one night. We were led to a large shed and, once we were all seated, the roof rolled back to the theme music for 2001 A Space Odyssey. Someone has a sense of humour. Four large telescopes were pointed at the sky and we spent the next hour looking at a couple of stars plus Jupiter and Saturn through the telescopes. The two planets were pretty cool. Did you know that Saturn makes diamonds in its rings? How incredible! I'm sure there's someone already trying to work out how to harvest them.
Another day, we did a tour of the Hotel Corones, a gorgeous old pub. It has an amazing history. We were encouraged to don a vintage hat each first.
The bar is one of the largest in the southern hemisphere. During the wool boom years, the crowd around this bar would often be so deep that the staff would serve the first two rows from behind the bar then other staff would weave their way through the back rows taking orders as they went.
There were many shearers who would shear all week, get their pay then roll up at the pub. They would hand the publican their pay, then, when they had drunk it all away, he would tap them on the shoulder and they'd return to work. What an existence!
The verandah was enormous. At peak times the publican would fill this with beds and people just slept on the verandah. It's hard to imagine this sleepy town ever being that busy!
The pub even had a ballroom, which is now the bottle shop. Incidentally, the bottle shop was chockablock full with cartons of beer. We learned that it was ordered in expectation of thousands of people travelling through to the Birdsville races. The races then got cancelled due to covid. Even out here, where there is no covid, it still affects people.
We then headed north and our first stop was Augathella - Home of the Meat Ants. Yes, you read that correctly. There's even a Meant Ant Park with a huge meat ant sculpture in it! It turns out that when the first footy team was created, someone commented that they scurried around like meat ants, so that's what the footy team called themselves. I love the footy team's song:
Ah, you've got to laugh!
Their other claim to fame (that's two for a very tiny town!) is that the 1950's film "Smiley" was about a boy growing up in Augathella. There was a mural about it.
Who's old enough to remember this song?
As appealing as all this was, the real reason we had travelled this way was to go to Tambo, north of Augathella, to see the famous Tambo chicken races! Ok, so maybe they're not that famous but they were so much fun!
The races are run each night by the local publican and money is raised for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The publican was a classic. We spoke to him earlier in the night and he was a bit busy and brusque but, give him a microphone and some coloured chickens and he transforms into a really funny and highly entertaining guy.
To cut a long story short, there are 10 chickens of different colours. They're all pets and he gives us a racing history for each one. He then auctions the chickens off (for the race only) and the 'owner' of the winning chicken gets half the funds raised while the rest of the money goes to the RFDS.
I had spoken to Cara earlier that day and asked her to pick a colour for the chook races. Thinking she was setting us a challenge, she wanted us to get whichever one was closest in colour to magenta. Funnily enough there was one that was quite magenta. Her name was Priscilla because she's the Queen of the Outback. The bidding was fierce because she had a good racing history but we secured her for $40. Others went from $5 for an older chook with little interest in racing to $50 for the one that had won several times recently.
The owner had a novel way of convincing the chickens to race. He put treats in a remote controlled car and they run after it. It was so funny to watch!
Finally, after half an hour or so of highly entertaining story-telling and auctioning (all in the freezing cold!) the race was finally ready to start. The chooks do four laps of the 'racecourse'.
If you only watch one video this week, make it this one. The video starts on the second-last lap. Our chicken is the purple coloured one. The first one across the orange finish line (it's actually a bar runner!) on the 4th lap is the winner.
I think it was a photo finish! Actually an incredibly excited young family 'owned' the winning chook.
We think Priscilla is lovely anyway.
It was another big drive the net day. First stop was Blackall, home of 'The Black Stump'. In 1887, surveyors set up their equipment on a black stump here to fix the longitudinal and latitudinal positions of the towns of inland Australia. Before long, people considered anything west of Blackall to be 'beyond the black stump'. Sadly, the original stump got burnt in a fire and a sculpted one now stands in its place which isn't the same at all.
We swung west to head to Idalia National Park. This was a long way from anywhere. It wasn't particularly spectacular but was interesting enough. There was a cool wave rock.
The next part of the drive was really interesting. The road from Blackall to Yaraka, our destination that day, travelled through what was one of the most highly populated areas by animals that we had seen for the whole trip. The road had only been sealed in maybe the last few years, so maybe the animals hadn't got used to having so much traffic along it but they were everywhere. We saw so many kangaroos and wallabies but also three pairs of brolgas and many emus with chicks!
Unfortunately, with animals comes road kill. There were so many dead kangaroos and wallabies! It was interesting to see though that the emus and brolgas always made a great effort to get away from the road when a car came. Kangaroos and wallabies though seemed to decide that the best thing to do when a car comes is run in front of it. It's amazing how often they would do this. We missed one roo by centimetres and it was our closest shave for the trip, thank goodness.
I was saddened to see some areas being cleared of native scrub. I don't understand why it would be important to clear 10 or 20 acres when the property is maybe 10,000 acres. Dead trees lay rotting in the paddocks, a sad reminder of this belief people seem to have that we can just take what we want from our environment all the time.
Finally we arrived at Yaraka, a tiny town with a population of 18 in the middle of nowhere. We had chosen to stay here because we had heard it had a great pub to stay at, complete with pet emus. We were welcomed by this sign.
The story about the emus is that a local found an abandoned nest, took the eggs home and raised the three chicks. They now just wander freely around the town. One had returned to the wild ages ago and Carol had disappeared lately. As it was breeding season they presumed she was sitting on a nest somewhere. Anyway, Kevin was around somewhere we were told. I couldn't find him but didn't have much time to look as the pub owner ran a 'tour' each night to a local spot to watch the sunset. It was free but a donation to the Royal Flying Doctor Service was appreciated. We could easily have driven to the lookout point ourselves but thought it might be fun to join in with others so we jumped into the minibus.
The tour started a bit dubiously when the pub owner spent 5 minutes telling us about a power pole we drove past. We got told the type of power pole and all about the electricity supply. We climbed up to the top of a local mesa where he left us to our own devices to explore while he got stuck into some people who were clearly setting up to camp there when they weren't supposed to. I know they were doing the wrong thing but he was really rude to them.
The views of the surrounding land and the mesa and its outcrops were sensational!
The pub owner then sat us down (he provided chairs for the purpose) and proceeded to lecture us for ages in the freezing cold. He was all pro-farming and was against whatever got in the way of that. He opened his lecture by canning PETA then moved on to criticise local politicians who banned land clearing and even managed to criticise Aboriginal land rights in the process. It was the most opinionated, bigoted spiel I've ever heard. There was no pause in his tirade. John left and wandered around elsewhere til the lecture was over and it was only the cold that eventually stopped the verbal barrage. We were all staying and/or eating in the guy's pub so I think everyone just shut their mouths. An argument with him would have made for an uncomfortable night.
Finally we made it back to the pub where, in a twist of fate, I had one of the best parmas I had for the whole trip! Our bedrooms were 'rustic' (their term). They were old shearers' quarters which had been painted up nicely but the wind blew in around the gaps in the window. We had single beds and John didn't get a lot of sleep. There were only tin walls between the rooms and you could hear everything. During the night, someone got up to go to the toilet and they must have woken everyone else because I heard every other door open and close afterwards as everyone else went to the toilet as well. I was woken in the morning by someone farting in the next room!
I went searching for Kevin the emu again the next morning but couldn't find him. We didn't want to hang around for any more lectures so we were out of there by 7am. It was all an interesting experience!
From Yaraka we headed south and were soon back into territory we had passed through at the start of our trip.
On both runs through this area we wanted to see the Toompine Pub. It's just a pub in the middle of nowhere and calls itself 'the pub without a town'. The pub has been closed for renovations for months but this time the publicans daughter had opened a coffee van so we dropped in. There was the pub, the coffee van, a hall and a cluster of dongas. That was it. The publican's daughter home-schools her kids in this van while serving the occasional customer that passes through.
It was good to be back in Cunamulla. It felt like coming home. We had a good sleep then got up early the next morning and, not wanting to stop any longer than necessary in New South Wales, drove from Cunumulla to home in 14 hours. It was about 1,300 kms (there weren't too many police in outback NSW!) Between the two of us it was fine. Weirdly, there were no police or any checks at the NSW/Vic border! We saw the sun rise in Queensland and saw it set in Northern Victoria.
So that was our trip - the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. I would go back to Queensland again at the drop of a hat. The winter weather was fantastic - even when it was cold, the skies were usually a stunning, cloudless blue. I think that's what I loved most about it. I also loved the way everyone is so laid back. No stress here!
Thanks for following along. It's back to the "real world" now until we see what covid allows us to do next winter.
Bye for now.
Heather and John.
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