It’s true. The weather in the last two weeks has been cold enough to freeze the tail off a Kangaroo. That’s original isn’t it? We saw on the TV weather that there has been a big high over the centre of Australia and that has been bringing cold winds right up the east coast giving cold weather to Queensland (Roma -3 at night). A couple of mornings we have woken up to only 3 degrees inside our van and frost covering the cars outside. But this is the Tropics. Yes. That’s true, at Charters Towers we are something like 400km North of the Tropic of Capricorn. So we are in sympathy with you folk in Christchurch getting snow.
To get back on the trail – we could see the two chimney stacks of Mt Isa miles away and smoke was chuffing out of the red/white striped one. We learned that was from the copper mine. The tall grey one was from the lead mine. We hastened around to the Information Centre to check if they had wireless internet and they did. So we paid for an hour, dragged in the laptop and ordered two coffees and waited while our backlog of 28 emails were downloaded onto the laptop. At Mt Isa, we came back under Vodaphone coverage, so we got a couple of outstanding texts as well.
We had a wander round the shops and restocked the larder and then drove up to nearby Lake Moondarra for lunch and a bit of quiet time. The lake was well down but still a welcome sight being the only bit of water we had seen on our outback travels, excepting for our hop up to Katherine. We camped up at the Mt Isa Caravan Park and decided to have our evening meal at the Irish Club where they have an ex-Melbourne tram in one of their bistro rooms. It was a huge club and it was also the night of the third game in the State of Origin Series, so the club was jam packed. Cost us $15 each for a 3-course meal while we watched the game amid shouts cheers from mostly Queenslanders and the odd Blue supporter. We had to leave at 9.30 in order to get the free bus back to the camp so we didn’t see the second half but we learned later that Q’land had won.
Maureen is really getting into the swing of this freedom camping after our trip through the middle where there were few caravan parks and Mt Isa was only one one of four that we have paid for since leaving Port Augusta a month ago. The roadside rest areas through the Northern Territory were very well set up, even if there weren’t many trees around. Many had clean toilets and a shelter and if you didn’t get there early, you didn’t get a very good spot. New Zealand could learn a bit from the Australian rest area set-up. They have a road team that comes through each day to empty the bins, clean the loos and generally maintain the areas. In some, they even leave firewood for the Aussie traditional campfire. At the rest area where we camped last night, there were five groups, including us, who sat chatting round campfires.
One of the rest areas on the Q’land border was an old WW2 airfield site and so had a memorial celebrating 50 years after the finish of the war. They had also kept part of the old road that was put through by the Americans during the war years, replacing a dirt track, so the soldiers could get through from Q’land to Darwin which was under threat of course from the Japanese. It met up with the main South/North road at Tennant Creek.
So after Mt Isa it was on to Cloncurry then southward down the Matilda Highway to Winton – home of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. This was where Banjo Patterson first put together the words of this great song, so there is a museum come art gallery for that. It’s also dinosaur country with many fossils being found here. Apparently this whole area used to be covered by sea at one time. We camped the night at the back of the historic Gregory Hotel, but it’s a bit like George Washington’s axe as the hotel has been burnt down three times. Next morning it was Longreach, the place where QANTAS started out as Queensland and Northern Territories Aerial Service Ltd. The museum there has many items on the airlines history and a static display of a Jumbo jet plus the first Boeing 707 flown by QANTAS. I was keen to visit that and we also visited the Stockman’s Hall of Fame which contained many items on the cattle country and the people who built it up.
On the road to Longreach, we must have passed hundreds and hundreds of ‘roadkill’ kangaroos. In one 10 km stretch, I counted over 60 – you can see it was boring driving as well. Most of these are hit by trucks during the night when the kangaroos come out to feed and obviously sit around on the warm road for a cuppa tea and a chat. A girl where we camped had rescued a little ‘Joey’from the roadside. They called it ‘Stinky’ because he smelled so badly. We have a photo of Maureen holding it – after it was cleaned up of course. The crows and the occasional eagle feed off the roadkill and make it a fine art of flying away about 30 metres in front of you and immediately settling back 30 metres after you have passed by. You get 10 points for getting a crow but minus 50 for an eagle…they are such a beautiful bird, gliding around like our Harrier Hawk, but twice as big. There are a few Maggies around but the surprise in this area was flocks of bright green budgies that are so fast and agile. We were doing 80k and a flock was pacing us.
After that we backtracked to Winton and then up the Kennedy Development Road to Hughenden and over to Charters Towers. The Kennedy Road is the start of another road system that runs from Cairns down through Winton and over to Alice Springs, down to Uluru and thence to Perth. Some of it is sealed but in a poor condition. At some stage, the States and Federal Govt will put money into it to open up this third route West.
Charters Towers is an old gold mining town like Bendigo. And, like Bendigo, it has many rich historic stone buildings from a time when there was great wealth in the town. It was the second largest town in Queensland 100 years ago and the main street has many shops with verandahs like in the 1920’s. So tomorrow it’s off to Townsville, the Tasman Sea and the Great Barrier Reef, only about 100k away. Our fuel bill was just on $1,700 for June, but we covered a huge distance coming up through the middle. Strangely enough, we took a liking to the outback scenery in Northern Territory as opposed to the flat dry grasslands of outback Q’land. NT seemed to have more colour with the red soils, small gum trees and scrublands the occasional bare patches.
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