Blogs from Bourke, New South Wales, Australia, Oceania

Everybody has heard of Bourke but usually it is as part of the “its back of Bourke” quote that indicates that something is way out in the outback. Few people get to visit this town to find out what a gem it really is. Bourke is a regional centre that tries really hard to appeal to tourists and encourages support of its local businesses. The Mitchel caravan park is a good example. It is a medium sized caravan park with van sites around a central area of lawn that contains the camp kitchen, fire pit and a playground. Every day there is some sort of activity. This includes billy tea with muffins, hot dog night, burger night, happy hour and a BBQ night. These either occur near the camp kitchen or around the fire pit. Some ... read more

he everyone, we have survived day one with plenty of excitement. Started the day at 4.50am and drove for 12 hours through to Bourke in New South Wales. This is as planned. We stopped many times to stretch the legs and has lunch etc. Got to Bourke and had to go through town to get to the Kidman park. Was a very interesting evening with Bush poetry (yes bush poetry) and dinner put on by the park. Was a great evening in front of a big fire and about 70 other people. We slept in their "cabins" which looked like converted 40 foot containers. Had a good night sleep after the poetry . Have a picture of one of the towns called Cobar. No picture of Bourke as it was getting late when we arrived.... read more

Today we drove to Bourke by lunchtime with the intention of driving town the Darling River. But after calling into the info centre were told the road is closed due to rain. It may be open tomorrow, so we decided to stay at the Kidman Camp overnight and try tomorrow. It is so sad to see how dry the country was tghee we. Poor sheep and cattle everywhere. However at Bourke is nice and green due to recent rains. Time to catch up on washing etc. beautiful pool area. 2 pools, one of which had a baby tiger snake swimming in. I had to rescue it, flicked it out but it wasn't very grateful,sat up and dated me to approach. ... read more

The road to Bourke passed through cattle and sheep country. It was largely flat, with little vegetation and appeared monotonously the same. However it bears noting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we calculated, based on observation that since leaving Clermont we had averaged 5 pieces of road kill every kilometre. That’s 500 per 100 km. A whopping 2,000 in just the distance we covered that day. That’s an awfully large number of animals killed on the road. These were mainly kangaroos, a smattering of wild pigs and even the odd sheep. Of course these were not all fresh. The fresh ones were often covered by crows which have obviously learnt if, or when they need to flee for their life. Secondly, a scary driving experience. All of a sudden Greg seemed to have no control ... read more

Geo: -30.0888, 145.938Todays Challenge - To photograph at least one more of those rare and elusive outback trees.As we rise this morning we have to shower in the ablutions block as the underground rooms are to small to include on-suite facilities. We head down to the dining room for breakfast and meet up with the same grey nomads we had dinner with last night. Rod packs our very dusty car and we are on the road again at 8.45am.At about 175 km from Cobar we spot a heard of wild goats and suddenly a glint of light catches our eye, can it be one of the elusive outback trees? As we approach we notice two trees about one hundred metres apart, one sprouting shoes and the other bottles of all colours and sizes. We photograph both ... read more