Through the Northern Territory

In the last 6 days we've travelled almost 1,300km across the Northern Territory. Once we left Mt Isa we had a long day's towing westwards on the Barkly Hwy to Three Ways, a road house at the junction of the Barkly Highway and the Stuart Highway, which runs up the centre of Australia from Port Augusta to Darwin. In the 600 odd kilometres across the flat Barkly Tablelands there are so few settlements that the distance markers indicate the distance to the Stuart Highway - there are no towns at all. We spent a couple of nights at Three Ways (which is pretty unusual for them, almost everyone just treats it as an overnight stop over) and on our 'rest day' headed 100 km southwards to the Devil's Marbles. We had stopped here briefly on our way up the centre 2 years ago, but on that day we had been in a bit of a rush so hadn't been able to spend as long as we wanted here. It's a marvellous place, a huge area strewn with round boulders, seemingly piled on top of one another in deliberate design. We did not only the signposted walk, which has information boards on the geology of the rocks and the animals and plants that call the area home, but also wandered around the informal paths that wind through and over the formations.

From Three Ways we headed north up the Stuart Hwy, stopping for the night at Daly Waters, which is pretty famous in travelling circles. Although there used to be a township here, and even Australia's first international airport, used by Qantas in the days when planes could fly only a short distance between refuelling stops, there is now only a pub and a caravan park. The pub does excellent meals and puts on entertainment during the dry season, if the night we were there is anything to go by they must make a mint out of it, as the caravan park was virtually full and everyone came to the pub for the 'beef and barra' meal. Not surprising really, there isn't any other reason you'd bother to visit the place, and the caravan park is dry and dusty with horrid dirty amenities. The steak and fish were surprisingly good, and we quite enjoyed the 'outback show', but having now ticked off this destination we can't imagine we'd ever come back.

Next stop was Katherine, another place we visited before when we were in this part of Australia on our first time around. In fact, as Katherine is on not only the north-south route but also the road west, we have visited here twice before, so we were quite surprised to find that there were things we still hadn't done here. We spent an entire afternoon doing the 'cultural experience' tour, which turned out to be very interesting. The first part is run by Manuel, an aboriginal man in his late forties, who was born and grew up in the bush east of Katherine. Even in the 1960s his family lived a traditional lifestyle, hunting for their food and making all their tools and implements from the bush, he didn't even learn English until he was an adult. He gave a fascinating talk about his childhood and his life. We then split into 2 groups to do traditional painting. Wendy chose to do a 'dot' painting, in the style of the Central Australian aborigines, while John stayed with Manuel to do a line painting. Apart from us there were only 2 other people on the tour who also split up, so there were 2 people doing each style. John's line painting is a yam, which seemed to be the easiest of the pictures he was offered to copy, and while painting the outline was fairly simple the intricate coloured cross-hatching took him nearly an hour. Wendy's dot painting bookmark tells a story - a woman goes hunting goanna, then it rains and forms a waterhole. The hardest part was doing the feet, she practised until she was happy that she could do the foot print properly, but then painted a really good print on the wrong side, she'd forgotten that you have 2 kinds of foot prints. Her instructor painted over it and this time Wendy did her left and right feet on the correct sides.

While our paintings were drying Manuel gave us demonstrations of some traditional bush skills. He used 2 sticks to light a fire, something we've always heard about but never seen in real life. It only took a couple of minutes of twirling the fire stick between his palms for the first wisps of smoke to appear, once he'd produced an ember he tipped it into the waiting grass 'nest' and we had a nice fire going. He then demonstrated using a woomera, or throwing stick, to throw a spear, then we all had a go. We each managed to hit the cardboard kangaroo with one of our 2 attempts, even if it was only in the foot and the tail. At least if he'd been standing still we'd have managed to wing him!

We had a terrific afternoon, and we have unique and beautiful hand crafted souvenirs to show for it!

Katherine's most famous attraction is Nitmiluk, or Katherine Gorge, about 30 km away. When we were here before we did a long walk and the cruise at the gorge, but had run out of time without looking through the display at the visitor centre, so we drove out and spent an hour or so there. We also climbed up to the lookout to have another look at the spectacular view. We had hoped to be able to go canoeing on the river, but the late wet season experienced right across the top end meant that they still haven't been certain of clearing the gorge of salt water crocodiles, so the river is still closed except for the cruises.

The Ghan is the train that runs north-south right across the continent between Adelaide and Darwin. We heard it was in town and went over to Katherine station to have a look. The train is over a kilometre long and we got there just as it started to pull out. At first the movement was almost imperceptible, it must take an awful lot of effort to get something that long and heavy going, but gradually the engine got into its rhythm and the train headed off northwards on the final leg of its journey.

All in all, despite having been in Katherine a couple of times before, we've managed to fill in a few days here very satisfactorily.

Mt Isa

Mt Isa is in the far west of Queensland and is the last town before the Northern Territory border. It was founded in the 1920s after a gold prospector accidentally found lead instead. Since then, the mine has proved to be one of the most productive in the world, producing lead, silver and copper in staggering quantities. The town has a population of more than 20,000 and provides the full gamut of shopping and services.

We're now more than 500km north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and while Mt Isa is still fairly dry, it gets enough rain in the northern wet season to fill up the local dam, so the locals don't seem to think twice about using sprinklers on their lawn or washing their cars. As a consequence it is much greener here than we have seen for a while, and the caravan park is well grassed.

Not unexpectedly, most of the tourist things to do in town revolve around mining. We spent a couple of hours at the history display at the tourist information centre, and about 10 minutes walking around the rather dull 'outback garden' attached. Because of issues with insurance, the mine no longer runs underground tours, but they have built a tourist mine at the information centre. This was built using actual mine machinery and volunteer miner labour, and is supposedly an exact replica of the real mine (except it only goes underground about 22 metres, instead of over 2 kilometres for the real mine). The mine tunnels are very tall and wide, to allow for the huge machinery that has replaced the old pick and shovel in modern mines. As you can see in the photo, we had to get kitted out in the full rig of overalls, gumboots and hard hat (with light, the battery of which is incredibly heavy and clips onto the back of the special belt).

We were underground for nearly 2 hours, then all piled back into the cage (elevator) for the trip back to the surface. We got no more than a metre off the ground when we abruptly lost power and the cage shuddered to a halt. Luckily it wasn't a full tour, there were 11 of us packed in and as you can see from the photo it isn't a very big space. At first we thought the guide was playing a game, but it quickly became obvious that we really were stranded. It also became obvious fairly quickly that the guide didn't have a clue how to get us going again. After about 10 minutes the guide contacted someone above ground for instructions, and eventually when we still weren't going anywhere the other person said they would come down. John isn't very good in confined spaces and by this time he was looking fairly green. The guide opened the hatch in the ceiling and we all peered up at the open air 20 metres above, until the other person appeared on the ground in front of the cage. More instructions followed, culminating in the guide using the 'hand brake' to gently lower us back down to ground level, and us all getting out and walking up the emergency exit path out. Quite an exciting finish to the tour!


When we first arrived in Mt Isa we were told at the information centre that the above ground

tours of the actual mine area weren't running for at least another 2 weeks. However while we were chatting with our fellow tourists waiting to be rescued from the cage we found that in fact a mine tour was running the following day, so we signed ourselves up. Despite the fact that most of the action takes place underground, there was still quite a lot to see, as the various minerals are separated and processed before being sent to Townsville for shipping overseas. In the photo in front of the information centre above you can see a replica of molten copper pouring out of the pot, the photo at right here shows the real thing. Interestingly, the morning we did the tour it was announced that the copper refining plant is going to be closed over the next 5 years, and the ore would be shipped straight overseas for processing, so tourists in a few years time won't get to see this.

Amongst all the mining attractions we also visited a couple of other Mt Isa sights. Winton doesn't have a monopoly on fossils, there has been a rich find of megafauna fossils at Riversleigh, about 270 km north of Mt Isa. Rather than going all the way out there to look at the hole in the ground where the fossils used to be, we visited the very interesting display which had videos and dioramas as well as some of the actual fossils, and recreations of the original animals.

We also went to the underground hospital, which was built in the second world war in case the Japanese bombed Mt Isa. The war never came that far south and the tunnels were never used, except apparently for night shift nurses who used them as a cool place to nap in the searing summer heat.

Finally we had a couple of games of golf, on a course that was surprisingly green and well grassed.

Winton

Winton may have lost out to Longreach as the home of Qantas, but it has firmly established itself as the home of Waltzing Matilda, although the song wasn't actually written here. However, the first public performance was at a pub in Winton, so the town has been riding on its coattails ever since. One of Winton's major attractions is the Waltzing Matilda Centre ("the only museum dedicated to a song") which gives more information than you could possibly be interested in about the history of the song and the seemingly endless versions recorded in the last 100 years. By the time we'd spent a few hours there we thought we would scream if we heard the jolly swagman one more time, but apart from that we quite enjoyed it.

Not content with just relying on a song to bring in the tourists, Winton has started to promote itself as the Dinosaur Capital of Australia. We visited the Australian Age of Dinosaurs expecting to find a museum, but the overpriced tour took us into a big tin shed to see unqualified amateurs cleaning up bones from a local find. The young guide was very enthusiastic but didn't appear terribly knowledgable. Apparently we were just a few years too early, as a new "fully interactive" museum is being built, no idea of when it will be open.

Far more interesting was Lark Quarry, which protects tracks left by a dinosaur stampede nearly 100 million years ago. According to the reconstruction, hundreds of small dinosaurs were drinking at a waterhole, when a large canivorous dino appeared (a bit like T-Rex, only smaller). The little dinosaurs fled in panic, leaving thousands of footprints. You can see the foot print of the big meat eater in the photo on the right, along with little prints of the ones that scattered in panic. Although the prints look raised in the photo, they are in fact proper footprints sunk into the ancient mud, preserved as the mud was covered in silt and gradually turned into stone.

The area around Winton is flat grassy plains for hundreds of kilometres, interspersed with flat topped mesas where harder rock has prevented erosion underneath. We spent a day at Bladensburg National Park, doing both scenic drives and a walk to a good lookout on the edge of a mesa. You can see all the way to the horizon, you really know you are in the outback.

Apart from all these attractions Winton has a few minor items of interest for the tourist. We visited Arno's Wall, built by a local artist and incorporating all manner of items he scavenged over the years from the tip, the World's First Musical Fence, a post and wire fence that gives off different notes when hit with a stick, and the local open air theatre, home to the World's Largest Deckchair. Winton certainly offers thrills for the visiting adventurer!

Longreach

Longreach is in central Queensland, nearly 700km inland from Rockhampton. It makes the most of its rich history and we found plenty to occupy ourselves for a full week here.

Many Australians would know Longreach as the birthplace of Qantas. Whilst this isn't strictly true - the company was inaugurated in nearby Winton in 1921 before deciding to set up Australia's first purpose built airstrip and aircraft hangar at Longreach, as this was the end of the rail line. The Qantas Founders Museum gives an exhaustive history of the company and its founders, as well as providing a good understanding of the area and society at the time. There are quite a few original and replica aircraft on site, and we did the tours of a 747 jumbo jet and Qantas' first ever international jet, sleek 707. The latter had gone through several sales after Qantas was finished with it before ending up in the hands of a Saudi Royal. The interior is basically as it was when the museum acquired it, apart from some items such as the crystal chandeliers that the Saudi's removed before the sale. Unfortunately one of the conditions of sale was that no one is allowed to take any photos of the interior, so to get a glimpse into a world of luxury that most of us wouldn't even dream of then you have to do the tour. The 747 tour was also interesting, despite us having flown on many of these planes, as we got a look at parts of the plane that a passenger doesn't normally see. John even got to sit in the cockpit! We spent a full day at the museum, then went back for another couple of hours the next day to finish off the bits we still hadn't seen.

Another full day was spent at the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre. As well as displays on almost every conceivable aspect of outback life and history, there was a one hour live show of horses, camels, sheep dog and even a bullock team. We went back to the 'Cattlemen's Grill' here for John's birthday dinner last night - out here in the outback there aren't a lot of restaurant options that don't focus on steak!

Not content with just looking at things in museums, we also managed to experience some outback history for ourselves on a stagecoach ride. This was much more comfortable than we had expected, the bullock hide stabilisers slung underneath the carriage do an excellent job, at least while the horses were cantering along, when they broke into a brief gallop things rocked and rolled a bit much for comfort! The noise was incredible, hence the definitely non-period wireless headsets we are wearing to hear the commentary, but the dust coming in the open carriage windows was pretty authentic!

On one morning we did a tour of the local agriculture college, which was supposed to take an hour but stretched out to almost two. We also wanted to do some walking on the town common, but we found that the trails marked on the map we'd got from the info centre didn't exist in reality, and given the warning signs about snakes at the entrance gate we certainly weren't interested in forging our own path through the long grass.

Longreach is inordinately proud of Harry Redford, who stole up to 1,000 head of cattle in 1870 and drove them down to Adelaide. Amongst the herd was a white bull specially imported from Britain, and when sold in South Australia the bull was recognised, which ultimately led to Harry's arrest and trial. Despite everyone acknowledging that Harry had indeed stolen the cattle, he was found not guilty, apparently causing the judge to say "I thank God that the verdict is yours, gentlemen, and not mine". We drove 45km along a 4wd track to the lookout supposedly used by Harry and his men to keep an eye out while they were gathering the cattle, it would certainly have been a good place for it as it was the only hill rising out of the flat plains that stretch out as far as the eye can see. We spent the rest of the day visiting Muttaburra, where the virtually complete skeleton of a dinosaur was found in the 1950s - the replica in town is almost as cute as its name, Muttaburrasaurus Langdoni, Aramac, with a statue commemorating Harry Redford's famous white bull, and Ilfracombe, which didn't have anything much but we walked around checking it out anyway.



Just when we thought we'd done everything we could fit into a week, we heard on the local radio that sheep dog trials were being held at the Longreach showgrounds, so went down to have a look. To our surprise we were the only spectators who weren't actually involved in showing dogs themselves, everyone was very friendly and explained the rules of the game, which required the owners to get their dogs to herd three sheep to various marked out areas, including over a ramp and finally into a pen, all within an allotted time of 12 minutes. In the hour or so we spent watching the best score we saw was 88 out of a possible 100, with several dogs failing to get the sheep around the course in the allowed time. Having seen such trials on TV when we lived in NZ it was interesting to see it in real life, although the course was a lot dustier than the NZ ones!

Blackall

Blackall is about 300km north of our last stop, Charleville, well into the Queensland outback. Despite the fact that last weekend was a 5-day holiday, with Easter and Anzac Day, this weekend is also a Queensland long weekend for May Day - don't these people ever go to work?? For the town of Blackall it was an extra celebration with the local show - we spent an hour or so browsing the country delights, including pig races, the local version of Babe certainly got up a turn of speed!

The major tourist attraction at Blackall is the Woolscour - the only steam driven wool washing installation left in Australia. While no actual wool is washed any more, the steam driven machinery still runs, and the tour was very interesting, not least for the glimpse into a time when Australia actually did value adding to its produce, rather than just shipping all our raw materials over to China. It reminded us of the flour mills that used to exist all over Australia, before we just shipped the wheat overseas.

Blackall also had a quite interesting heritage walk.

We've now got far enough north that the weather is really starting to warm up, with days reaching the high 20s, although nights are still fairly chilly at between 7 and 12 degrees. Still, given how wet the coastal area is right down the east coast, we feel pleased to have come inland.

After leaving Blackall today we stopped at Barcaldine, about 100km further north. Barcaldine was the scene of the great shearers strike in 1891, that later led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. The strike leaders were jailed for their attempt to ensure that all shearing sheds remained closed to union members only, and agitators decided they needed parliamentary representation if they were ever to achieve justice for workers. We visited the Workers Heritage Centre at Barcaldine, which has interesting displays on the strike, plus a lot of other displays related to various workers groups and unions in Queensland. The Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine is a gum tree where early Labor Party organisers met, the local tourist board must have been gutted when it died in 2006 as it was a major tourist attraction in the town, however the dead tree stump has now been tarted up with a covering that supposedly represents the shears on a shearing blade, and it is still drawing in the tourists.

Roma - Charleville

We headed to Roma, about 350 km west of Toowoomba, on Easter Monday. We had originally planned to be there earlier, but due to Roma's Easter festival we hadn't been able to get a booking at the caravan park. This turned out to be a good thing, as Roma experienced torrential rain and floods just before and during Easter, the caravan might have been washed away if we'd been able to stick to our original plans. The highway access only reopened 2 days before our arrival, with the road showing quite a lot of damage. We were concerned that we would find the caravan park was a mudhole, but obviously the water goes away as quickly as it comes up, as the only evidence of the flooding was debris and grass caught against trees, signs and bridge railings. Apart from a few lingering puddles the ground itself was dry.

Roma's main tourist attraction is the Big Rig, a display celebrating the history of oil and gas exploitation in the area. This was initially an accident - in 1900 a crew drilling for water were surprised when the well gushed gas, mud and water. The gas poured out unchecked for 5 years before the local town council decided it could be useful, they built a gasometer and used the gas for street lighting, a marvel that apparently drew visitors from as far away as Brisbane. Unfortunately they were 5 years too late - 10 days after turning on the lights the town went dark again as the gas ran out. Not to be deterred, further wells were sunk looking for gas, the next successful attempt was unfortunately using a steam powered drill - the gas was ignited by the fire in the steam boiler, 'turning night into day' for 45 days, and once again drawing in the sightseers, before they managed to extinguish it. Luckily today's gas industry is a little more professional, and provides a lot of the region's industry, as well as still drawing in visitors like ourselves. We spent half a day checking out the Big Rig exhibitions and displays, and attended the night time sound and light show. We also did the history walk around the sites where the original wells were sunk, some of which still provide the town's water supply today.

Apart from the oil and gas history, we also did the standard history walk around town, a nature walk along the local creek (luckily on a sealed pathway, the creek banks were still very muddy) and visited the 3-D mural at the civic centre, which was very well set up with an audio explanation of the various mural elements.

From Roma we headed nearly 300km further west to Charleville. Although Charleville is officially in 'the outback', the incredibly wet year experienced by all of Queensland means the local landscape is lush and green, with the grass waist high in places. Last year apparently there was no grass at all, just dry red dust. For a small town Charleville has a lot to see, and we ended up spending 3 nights here instead of our intended 2.

The caravan park we stayed at does a good job of 'value adding'. Once a week they offer 'campoven' meals - lamb stew with mash and damper, with apple crumble and custard for dessert. With John's wheat intolerance we usually avoid this sort of thing, but they assured us they could provide a gluten free option. When we found the $20 cost included $5 towards a yabby race we were hooked. The meal was terrific, and the entertainment very outback. Each couple was allocated a yabby (for those not in the know, a yabby is a fresh water crayfish) then some extra yabbies were auctioned off. All the yabbies were put in a round pen in the middle of a sheet, then at the starters gun the pen was lifted and the yabbies set off - well, some of them - most, including ours, just hung around in the middle of the sheet. The owner of the winning yabby collected 50% of the entry fees, the other 50% being donated to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. It was great fun, and a great way to meet the other campers.

Charleville's main attraction is the Cosmos Centre, based around star gazing. We spent a couple of hours looking through the displays on the planets, sun and galaxy, and did both the day time and night time telescope viewings. We were on our own for the day telescope viewing - obviously not many people are interested in seeing sun spots and the sun's corona, although we found it fascinating. The stars draw everybody in though, there were at least 30 people for the rather chilly (despite plenty of warning several people still turned up in shorts, they seemed very grateful for the blankets provided) night time telescope viewing, with Saturn and its rings definitely being the highlight.

Another night time Charleville attraction is the Bilby Experience. At $5 per person we didn't expect much, which was probably just as well. It was our volunteer presenter's first night (we suspect the Royal Wedding had taken away the usual volunteers) and she could certainly have done with some knowledegable support. The reason for the Bilby centre is a sanctuary constructed in a national park about 300km south of Charleville (although we were left with the impression from the talk that it was only 15km away), fenced to keep out feral foxes and cats and stocked with captive bred Bilbys. After the 30 minute talk and video we visited the breeding pen, where these nocturnal animals were scampering around. Although interesting, it wasn't nearly as good an experience as we had at Narrogin, when we actually walked amongst the bilbys.

During World War II, the Charleville airport was taken over by the US air force, and became a no-go zone for the locals. It wasn't until after the war that they found that not only was the airport used to launch bombing sorties into the Pacific, it was also a top secret testing station for the Norden Bomb Sight, an invention that enabled pin point aerial bombing. We did a very interesting tour of the remains of the US base, mostly hidden in the bush. You need to exercise some imagination to visualise over 3,500 US servicemen living and working in what is now basically mulga scrub.

Dry years and droughts are nothing new in this part of Australia. In 1902 the government meteorologist imported a set of 'Vortex Guns' in an attempt to break the grip of a devastating drought. The 'guns' emitted a wave of pressure that was meant to trigger the clouds to produce rain. They didn't work, which in the end didn't matter because less than 12 months later the drought broke with, you guessed it, floods. 2 of the 'guns' remain in Charleville, a monument to man's ability to believe anything if he wants it enough.