Author Archives: Blackwattle Roaming

21st April, 2021, Cowell to Port Neill:  Wheat, wheat, wheat – now not much more than a stubble, but vast cleared hills to the horizon with only the road verges left with the sparse trees which would have covered the hills BWP (before white people).  We’re heading for the coast, and I have images ofContinue reading “Down the Eyre Peninsula – 21APR21”

18th-21st April, 2021 Kimba: …such a sweet little town that we stay longer than intended.  It’s full of colour – there are murals on many buildings, a huge one on the giant wheat silos and the school children have even painted their front fence with achievements on every picket and graced the playground with ceramicContinue reading “Hello Kimba, the half way mark”

15th April, 2021, Broken Hill to Peterborough: It’s often not the big tourist sites that one later remembers, but things smaller, more subtle.  The desert town of Broken Hill is the same. What I will remember is the corrugated iron. Walls, houses, fences. So many cottages, where you rake the front yard rather than mowContinue reading “Broken Hill – Peterborough and west”

13th April, 2021 – Bindara Station to Broken Hill: Days have been spent beside the curiously clay-coloured Darling River, very low but majestic in its meanderings. We wander through the bush, finding ‘crying trees (each lump on the tree is created to mourn a loved one’, ‘canoe trees (where a canoe is carved from aContinue reading “Trying to go west (still)”

Dear family, friends and our future selves 24th March, 2021: You may notice that the last entry was October last year, when Ted had hurt his back. We headed home then, in time for a new hip, his recovery and renewed enthusiasm to ‘start again.’ But now there was a difference! We could go findContinue reading “March 2021 and we’re off again”

It was so sudden – this morning we were in neverending plains of red dirt or yellow grass, the vastness of a big sky, so big it dominated everything in our tiny scrap of flat world. As we drove away from Hughenden towards the Atherton Tableland, we hardly noticed the rise – a slight increaseContinue reading “Oh so sudden…western plains to rainforest”

We’re amazed by the richer country that we pass through, with healthy looking cattle and sheep – they are apparently very proud of their ‘droughtmaster’ cattle, as we approach Winton. Here’s another town where we see everywhere the unflappable (pardon the pun) brolgas making their stately way through the streets. Tattersall’s Hotel seems to beContinue reading “Into dinosaur country”

If we thought that Camden Park was desert… … we were heartbroken to arrive in Longreach and hear about their eight year drought. The only signs of activity in Longreach are the Stockman’s Hall of Fame and the Qantas Museum, which has just introduced a new Light and Sound Show on the bellies of theirContinue reading “The heartbreak of eight years drought – Longreach”

So great to see Lainie and Terry after a long time, catching up on what our mutual sailing friends are – or are not – doing. We camp beside them for a few days in the CMCA bush camp. Charleville is a kooky little town with a Hotel charismatically called the ‘The Corones.’ It alsoContinue reading “Nothing goes to plan”

With heavy hearts for our very old friend visited in Brisbane, and also for the worsening Covid situation with all those family tragedies around the world, we now decide to return to Dungog for repairs, a larger fuel tank, drop off a lot of stuff now know we don’t need and, last but not least,Continue reading “Back to Dungog for repairs, but…”