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, a catch-up with dear Leo birthday friends – can’t wait. We have all sorts of plans for all the things we will do if home for a week.

4th August we stop in Deepwater, between Stanthorpe and Glen Innes, stop behind the Longhorn Bar and Grill and are delighted by the idiosyncranatic pub and the meal – lobster tails, with a standard of cooking definitely not usual in a pub! Things are finally going well!

It’s next morning and even Charlie is wagging his tail more – I think he knows he is going home! We have just gone past Glen Innes when the bombshell drops.

Anastasia Palaszczuk: ‘As from 1.00am Saturday, the border to Queensland will be shut, no exceptions.’ It’s now Thursday. This means our trip to Cooktown via the outback is history – we’ll never get across that border again.

“Nancy, your jaw has dropped, and you’re doing 80k in a 110k area, now it’s 60k. Close your mouth and stop the car. I think we need a cup of coffee.”

It takes only the best cup of coffee in the world (in our van) to decide. U-Turn! Cancel the repairs, delay the bigger fuel tank, never mind all the stuff we needed to drop off, see our friends on zoom only – we’re off back to Queensland, whatever the cost.

Will ever any of our ideas go to plan?

We get the Border Passes instantly online and at Wallangarra the policeman waves us through after checking our identity by drivers’ licence. So -we’re through. We were in so much of a hurry we didn’t ever stop for petrol.

We find an out of the way place in Queensland to lick our wounds – It’s Foxbar Falls, a ‘sort of’ caravan camp built around a private airstrip in the middle of the Granite Belt of Southern Queensland, and think how to do the van repairs in Queensland. (5th-10th August)

After making some phone calls, we’re off to Toowoomba to stay in the Jolly Swagman Caravan Park, 10th-12th August.

A Toowoomba Mercedes agent carries out two recall jobs and we just forget the other repairs – the fridges are held in by velcroe and the stove is dead. We mail the junk we don’t need home.

“Nance,” Ted’s looking at his phone while speaking, Oh no, what’s next? “Elaine and Terry are also on the road and headed for Charleville.”

“Righto, great, let’s go to Charleville,” I grin. Elaine and Terry circumnavigated the world in their sailing boat Virgo’s Child when we did on our beloved Blackwattle. Now we’re going to meet them far inland. The contrast will be amazing.

12th August we’re on our way, head to the Round Waterhole, which isn’t round at all, near Chinchilla for the night…

Then it’s on to Fisherman’s Rest (13th-15th August), near Mitchell – we do love these ‘out of town’ stops by some water…

Now we’re going to a bush camp at Charleville to meet with Elaine and Terry.

Let’s hope THIS goes to plan!

Camping by the Paroo River , just outside of Eulo is so good we have stay a few days to make it worthwhile. The river is graced with Pelicans, dark clothed blokes fish for yabbies and walking up-river in the remoteness makes you feel you’re the only person on earth. At night the fire – using wood cut by Ted’s new chain saw – warms us and the Milky Way is bright and clear.

Eulo is charming, a short bike ride into town. The local shop sells fossils along with coffee and groceries and they’re very proud of their diprotodon past. Diprotodons, just in case you missed it at school, as I did, are the ancestors of wombats and koalas, the largest marsupial ever known to have existed and roamed Queensland and New South Wales among other places from about 1.5 million years to 45,000 years ago. Stood two metres tall and were three metres long. Wow!

Next town is Wyandra, 26th July, which seems to have just one shop and a lock-up and they have a bigger variety of goods on sale than Coles, Bunnings, Kmart and Big W combined, all contained in a tiny dusty store – also includes the Post Office and a cafe, where we lunch happily.

Now it’s time to visit Charleville where we stay in our first CMCA bush camp – first time for everything – run by the grey nomads themselves. Conversations is about – well, grey nomad stuff – where are you going, where did you go last, what stuff broke, scrapes you get into -AND the coronavirus!.

Today we go by Augathella, an idiosyncratic, charming small town, dominated by a water tower which, like every other vacant wall in the town, has been painted in striking colours. Thanks Augathella, you’re lovely – maybe we’ll stay here next time round!

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Now we set off for Blackall and a find a caravan park where they put on a nightly fire pit and even provide dinner for a small price. Great fun and the conversation is – as usual – about types of vans, good spots to stay and where they want to go next, AND coronavirus!

A bike ride into Blackall finds a proud town but now there is a phone call from the husband from one of the women I have most loved in life from our time in Sydney. She has not long to live, so again we make a right hand turn in our travels and go south to Brisbane, making it in three days, arriving at Baden Powell Scout Camp at Samford on the outskirts on 1st August, and here we are still – once again, not where we thought we would be.

We leave Cameron Corner to roam Queensland, still gobsmacked that there was no-one checking the border, and it’s off for Noccundra. The road is the worst yet, corrugations galore, multiple dips and breaks in the road, but it’s fascinating for its aridity – still in the Strezlecki Desert, named after the Polish explorer, Paweł Edmund Strzelecki. One extra-large bump and the drawers fly out of the cupboards, and one of the fridges collapses. Tiny screws litter the floor of the van. There are a lot of words from Ted Nobbs that it’s better not to repeat here. He ties our van together with Velcro and we’re off again.

Birds are prolific though, specially tiny vivid pale green Inland Budgerigars which fly in great waves. Unfortunately one flock flies directly into our windscreen, I feel the bump, know there’s a dead budgerigar back there somewhere. The emus are strikingly coloured loping up the road beside us. We’re passing giant stations – stop when we see a car, and have a chat – turns out to be the owners of Epsilon Station – only 200,000 hectares of a station – they’re out taking bird photographs with a serious looking camera.

After many hours of driving I am alarmed by what I see ahead.

‘Ted, there’s something black up there… or is it just a mirage?… Could it be dangerous?’

‘What? Where?’ He’s not watching, sending messages to our Sprinter manufacturer, asking why the refrigerator screws all over the floor of the Sprinter are so small.

It turns out to be bitumen, we’re back into 100km territory and here’s Noccundra – well it’s just the hotel really – and enjoy a great meal beside the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the half-outdoor dining room.

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Soon we’re in Thargominda, meaning Echidna, and one of the many Australian homes of the marsupial the Diprotodon, ancestor of the wombat and koala and supposed to be the legendary bunyip. It went extinct about 44,000 years ago, but it still treasured in this area.

We’ve been used to seeing country towns a little neglected, with shops closed, a shadow of their former selves or merely a nostalgic memory of what they were like. The amazing thing about Thargomindah, population 270, centre of the Bullo Shire, is the staggering amount of money recently spent on new buildings and monuments, and general street beautification. See below, and ‘Eat your heart out’, Dungog!

Next it’s Quilpie or Cunnanulla, Quilpie or Cunnanulla – but we’re reached Eulo on the Paroo River (on the way to Cunnunulla) and may never move again.

But the road on the way here – ah what a revelation. It starts with vast areas of knee-high wheat-coloured grasses flooded through all the sparse trees, glowing in the morning sun. Then we are in red gibber plains, then white gibber – back to the cockleshell look. The scene keeps changing, green to yellow to red to dead from drought. The land is flatish, with perhaps 5 metres undulation, but enough so that we pass through thousands of waterholes, each side of the track, where the recent rains mean the bushes and trees and grasses are flourishing greenly. Lots of birdlife. Then we rise, just that five metres and, while the recent rains means that the grass is green, the trees are spiky dead ghosts, obviously killed by years of grim drought.

But here we are, by the Paroo. While they are threatening to close the border between Queensland and NSW again, maybe we’ll stay in Queensland as long as we can.

• Milparinka is just off the road – in fact it isn’t there at all any more – just the pub and two houses for the caretakers. It was an early gold mining centre and just the stone remains of the buildings of quite a substantial town. At its height, Milparinka had a newspaper, police office, chemist shop, two butchers, a courthouse, a school, a hospital and four hotels – there’s only one left. With Charlie early in the morning I roam the town, faithfully marked as to the origins – the police station, the lock-up, the courthouse, the bank, the bakers, then the names of all the people in front of the block where they lived. Sometimes there’s a fireplace left, sometimes just a cellar – there’s even a well where all used to collect their water.
• The river is as dead as the town itself. We love the place – the very silence and history of it, the wide open spaces, the volunteers who run a ‘kinda’ caravan park – paying us far more attention than our measly $20 a night deservcd. The volunteers running the ‘park’ – big square of red dust – are raising money to restore some of the buildings – great cause. We stay three nights and could have stayed more.

18JUL2020 – TIBOOBURRA

The big day has arrived, we’re trying to get into Queensland. First up to Tibooburra to get fuel for car and humans and then on to Cameron Corner, the junction between Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales. We have our Covid passes ready on our phones.

Tibooburra is pretty much like many western towns – one street, with a rickety looking line of shops, lot of red dirt and quirky locals. Can’t stop too long – we’re in a hurry before Queensland shuts off the border to NSW!

18-19JUL2020 CAMERON CORNER

We’re pretty nervous about arriving at the border – our passes are in order, ready on our phones, but will they close Queensland before we get there?

The corrugations are intense – all our drawers fall out, one of the refrigerators collapses, but lunch in the Strezlecki Desert is something you don’t do every day.

There’s not a soul at the gate to South Australia. It’s fast shut though, with some scary warnings if you don’t shut it after you,. Next you turn right and there’s the gate to Queensland, with a Welcome sign and not even a gate in existence to shut. So much for all the fuss!

(Haven’t been able to enter this as no telephone, no internet – punishment for going bush, but catching up now)

Sometimes in life you can be lucky. Thanks to brilliant chiropractor Anna back in Dubbo, we’re on our way again in just a couple of days – which were otherwise pleasantly spent, enjoying it more than the last time we were here, when it was somewhere between 45 and 49 degrees each day. We also bump into Dungog friends Anne and Barbara, looking chipper after a week roaming National Parks, and spend a great evening ‘catching up’. Now, as we leave, it’s raining across the western plains and cloudy each day – hope the roads are passable further west. Who would have thought we would have rain to worry about?

COBAR:

It’s away west on gunshot-straight roads to find ourselves in a leafy red dirt campsite by the old reservoir near Cobar – there are a couple or three campers around somewhere, but they’re out of sight of us so it feels like we’re the only people in the world, – except for the apostle birds wanting our lunch and the elegant pelican making her stately way along the river.

A couple of glasses of wine after barbecue dinner has us wondering whether we might stay a week or more,. This idea starts to falter when it begins raining overnight, stops long enough to walk Charlie, keeps pouring during breakfast. Finally, when we are surrounded on both sides by deep, wet mud, morphing into lakes, it’s time to get out and, sadly, move into town.

There’s always a compensation – our van park is within biking distance of the main street. Cobar is a fascinating old mining centre, with lots of graceful 19th Century architecture. The name Cobar comes from the indigenous people’s pronunciation of the word ‘copper’ – due to its inception as a copper mine.

‘Hey you’ve got a Jack Russell on the back of that bike there!’ He’s getting into his dusty old car – long beard, scruffy trousers, kind face.

‘Sure,’ says Ted with a smile.

‘I got one o’those – well, he’s got a bit of Jack in’im somewhere. You’re not from Victoria are you?’

‘No, New South Wales… what about you?’

‘Ar well, I’m from New South Wales now – living in me car ever since we got outa that high rise in Melbourne where they locked us up.’

I can’t help gasping. ‘You were in one of the those high rises?’

‘Yup, not any more though’

‘How did you get out?’

‘We tunnelled our way out – been living in the car ever since.’ He grins, starts his engine and screams off at 10kph.

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However, can’t stay, Cameron Corner is waiting for us, so we’re heading for…

WILCANNIA:

We’ve been driving under gray skies for so long it’s pure delight as we break out of the clouds into blue and white skies and splendid sunshine. These people out here aren’t very good at corners – the roads are still ramrod straight, although the salt bushes are getting smaller and the trees more sparse. We’re getting used to the mirages on the road – amazing to us town dwellers. For a while there are wild goats everywhere, occasionally crossing the road just as we arrive. There are sheep too – black faced and spread across vast spaces – no grass, just small nameless (to us) plants and the inevitable blue grey salt bush.

We find an almost caravan park by the half empty river, just out of Wilcannia. Here Charlie is again run at by three large dogs. Scary moments for a little dog – and more particularly his big mother (yes me).

Wilcannia is also a heritage site – marvellous old stone buildings – the court house, the police station and residence, an old stone supermarket. It used to be the Queen of the Darling in ferry boat times – now the only way they can keep water is with a weir. We wander happily, Ted going mad with his camera, ever the historic building-lover.

Wilcannia

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WHITE CLIFFS

We’ve made a big decision – we’ll take the shorter track, dirt between White Cliffs and Tibooburra, instead of the all-bitumen via Broken Hill, as it hasn’t rained for a couple of days.

It’s not far on the bitumen before we see White Cliffs in the distance – it’s hard to miss it, with the sides of shallow hills peppered with dugouts. At first – and second and third – sight, White Cliffs these days depends on tourists more than opals.

It’s a short exploratory stop including coffee (in our van – best coffee in Oz)

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Finally we’re OFF the bitumen and, hopefully, not into deep red mud. Soon we read a sign that they actually close the road if there’s too much rain, so we should be okay.

Now the land is getting more and more sparsely spread with vegetation, sometimes flushed with green in patches because of the recent rain, but there are more and more gibber plains, shining like cockleshells on a beach. We stop for lunch in a sea of red dirt – the 360 degrees of big sky and red dirt makes my chest swell with the wonder of it – here we are, finally, where we dreamed of!

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The road starts to curve now, as we have to take the high road between vast salt lakes. We also find out why they close the road when wet. The vast plain is threaded with creeks with seasonal rain. We ford dozens of them, sometimes only separated by just a few hundred metres. Sometimes the signs says ‘Dip’, sometimes ‘Floodway’, and sometimes ‘Causeway’, seemingly unrelated to how deep they are (maybe it’s related to which Roads Manager of the day was on duty). Some are bitumened to make them easier to cross. We’re on our way to Milparinka, old gold-mining centre.

At first everything goes well. Driving through these western NSW plains is like passing through a movie set. Trees float on the horizon, grass grows between a long railway track as straight as the sandy red road ahead. Young green cotton fields are both sides, monstrous wheat silos compete with the newer cotton buildings. Gidgee trees splatter the fields untidily and the irrigation channels thread through the fields, showing occasional sun reflections in the distance.

I didn’t realise that there was real Bogan territory in existence, but here we are in the lovely Nyngan, in Bogan Shire – MUST take a photo with the ‘Big Bogan’. Then it’s back through Brewarrina again, this time to get photos of the 40,000-year-old fish farms.

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We visit Bourke, settle down in the Mays Bend campsite, overlooking the Darling River -finally, the Darling… so happy to be here.

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‘Nance, come and look at the sunset – what a spectacle!’

‘I can’t at the moment’

‘Why not?’

‘I can’t move.’

‘What do you mean you can’t move – you’re going to miss the sunset.’ Ted turns around to look towards where I am stooped beside the van. ‘What the blazes (substituted word) are you doing? Are you looking for something?’

‘I leant over to pick up Charlie and now I can’t get up.’

‘Nance, that’s pretty bad timing – you’re missing the best sunset we’ve ever had.’

So the next morning Google says the nearest chiropractor in the west is in Dubbo, and we’re back on the road again, heading east, just where we didn’t want to go.

Kooky, quaint, quirky, funky, outlandish, crazy, offbeat, peculiar, freakish, curious, strange, even quite odd, or just nutty. Yes, we’re at Lighning Ridge.

All the tiny mines and mining camps are here, just like they were in the ‘old days’ (meaning 1987, last time I was here), except for the arrival of non-miners. Yes, those who love an aberrant life, those who wanted to ‘get away from it all’, those who ended up here accidentally and those who just can’t stand whatever we think of as ‘normality’, seem to have lightened up the Ridge and made it what it is today – a charismatic blend of blatant tourism, true idiosyncrasy and Australia’s version of a cartoon depiction of the American ‘Old West’.

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Our visit, likewise, is not without a little drama – 7 bindi-eyes in my back tyre mean that half a day is lost getting the tyre repaired. But that isn’t the biggest bike drama. After a half day of all the bad words in the English language, Ted finally succeeds in getting the wheel back on the bike. (Me? Well, I’m a lady of course. Men do bikes)

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Then there’s the Spa – out in the middle of a country field – how good it is – 41 degrees when the air outside is freezing!

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From Barkala Farm, we go to find the place where Ted lived until he was six, in Pilliga when his young father was rising in the Commercial Banking Co, (now the NAB) and he was given his first manager’s job – in Pilliga. Arriving in Pilliga, we go to the Post Office to ask where the old bank might be, only to find that we are standing in it – the very building where Ted slept as a toddler!

Well, as you can see by the photos above, there’s not much in Pilliga these days, so we’re on our way to Walgett. It’s red dirt country, mulga trees, salt bush and prickly pear. Entrances to sheep stations, but never a sheep in sight. The bright green cotton crops are vast – no fences (is this road on private land?). Mirages water the horizon, an eagle rises in front of us, black with yellow splotches under its wings.

Now there’s a place on the way we just HAVE to visit – ‘Come by Chance’ – because we’re so fascinated by the name. We veer off the road, led by Maps, and are within 5km of it when ‘Maps’ goes haywire and tell us to do a U-Turn, that it’s 24km in the opposite direction. We even pass a sign that talks of their picnic races, but can’t, even after several consultations with Maps, find the place. Oh but then I remembered Banjo Paterson:

“But my languid mood forsook me, when I found a name that took me,
Quite by chance I came across it — `Come-by-Chance’ was what I read;
No location was assigned it, not a thing to help one find it,
Just an N which stood for northward, and the rest was all unsaid.“

So we came to Walgett, which looks a lot like many western towns – IGA, Coles, a couple of coffee shops, just one main street and everyone chatting to each other – and to us.

We find a pleasant tree-lined spot just out of town in a Rotary Park, with a lagoon spread with tall reeds, a spouting fountain and a prolific birdlife – friendly domestic ducks and drakes wanting a feed. An early morning walk with Charlie is enlivened by a chat with ‘Les’, my new second-best friend, driving a B-Triple, who cheerfully tells me the story of his lifestyle on the road between Swan Hill and Dirrambandi.

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