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MMMmmmmmm - fresh pineapple! Nothing like a warm, astringent mouthful to let you know you’re in the tropics.
In the Mackay markets we buy fresh local pineapple, ginger and ocean barramundi to taste the tropical coast again.
After five weeks going up through central NSW and into Queensland, with warm days but very chilly nights and mornings, it’s glorious to sit outside without jackets and beanies - although we still have to be covered up to counter aggressive mozzies.
We’re constantly surprised by how crap the weather can be in Oz - I’ve vowed never to complain about New Zealand weather again. In Bathurst to spend a week with Torin and Andrea, we had rain and cold that would put Hamilton to shame.
(They saved the scaredy old parents from having to drag the van over the Blue Mountains and through Sydney to see them by bringing their tent to stay with us in the Bathurst van park - thanks guys and hope the tent has dried out by now!!)
On the coast again we can pack away the polar fleece - inland the days may be hot, but as soon
Just thought we'd pick up a few more bottles
who knew De Bortoli had a huge discount winery in Griffith?as the sun goes down the temperature plummets.
Inland Australia is a strange and different place. Without the busy, burgeoning coastal development of endless shopping malls, new roads, apartment blocks, house and land packages, it is the real Australia.
Weatherboard and tin, long dry grass, blistered paint, rough brown people in country cliché clothes.
Colonial buildings still in use for their original purpose, wide dusty streets designed for bullock teams to turn around in - now a convenience for caravaners who want a quick look, a Devonshire tea or bakery stop, then on their way.
Forbes is a case in point - beautiful neo-classical civic buildings in a town that is only just holding on to its dignity, a pioneering past of pastoralism and fleeting gold fever.
Parkes, only 30 km away is bigger, but seems to have traded its soul for more commercialism. It’s also the ‘home’ of the infamous Dish - the Parkes radio telescope which played a vital role in the Apollo 11 first manned moon landing in 1969. Infamous now because the 2000 Aussie movie ‘The Dish’ tinkered with the facts more than a little and had Sam
Pub in Forbes, NSW
Locals arriving at the Vandenberg Hotel in a horse and cart Neil saving the day and the Americans from fictional power failure.
They didn’t even really play cricket on it, although that scene was shot on the actual dish. On the day we visited they were doing maintenance so we watched the dish being tilted to its maximum of 60 deg to let off the anti-bug spray men, then slowly and quietly returned to its smiley faced upright position to search the skies for anything out there.
Dubbo’s claim to fame is the Taronga Western Plains Zoo - marketed as a safari park, but in reality an ordinary zoo which is so well planned and designed that it gives the impression you are in a safari park and close to the lions, rhinoceros, elephants, giraffes and monkeys.
The Siamang apes were fascinating, the giraffes gorgeous, but for me every time it’s those marvellous meerkats and crazy otters that are the most fun. It was interesting to hear (without any prompting from us - honest!) the meerkat keeper say their breeding programme is reliant on Auckland Zoo’s excellent meerkat menagerie.
The best thing I can say about Dubbo zoo is that Rhys, who hates
The Dish
radio telescope in Parkes - note the workmen in the lower left of the dish zoos and didn’t want to go, really enjoyed it. Make sure you go to as many keeper talks as you can - they make the steep entry cost worthwhile.
Northwest of Dubbo you start to hit the NSW outback, although places like copper mining town Cobar looked disappointingly green after drought-breaking rain in the region. Even that most outback of towns, Bourke, was luxuriant after recent floods in the Darling basin. The river itself, despite its endearing name, remained resolutely dusty-banked and dishwater grey-brown.
Although green, Bourke was satisfyingly depressing. This may sound churlish, but remember dear reader - the term “Back o’ Bourke” translates as ‘beyond the reaches of civilized society’. It has a couple of interesting examples of early colonial architecture, interspersed with shabby houses and shops with full length roller door shutters, which on a Saturday afternoon stroll gave it a sort of Soweto atmosphere.
Bourke is however inordinately proud of its new tourist attraction, the Back o’ Bourke Centre, which celebrates pioneers, bush rangers, bush poets and all that’s great about this great brown land. The centre is a brand new architecturally designed pioneer museum, situated north of the river
BBQ, Forbes van park
some parks have interesting features - this entry to the former swimming baths is in its original position, now the camp bbq from the town.
The town may be proud of the centre but it feels like the centre is a little embarrassed of the town and wishes to remain removed.
Overheard conversation of a group of grey nomads in the camp laundry confirmed the view that the less time spent in Bourke the better - they would only go to the bowling club (the only restaurant in town) on the courtesy bus and would never risk parking their own cars in town at night.
Bourke may be the most remote town in NSW, but carry on up the Matilda Highway and you’re soon in Queensland and a town which has a more recent claim to notoriety. Cunnamulla was the subject of a TV documentary in 2000 which exposed endemic youth boredom, underage sex, petty crime and general outback eccentricity.
Since watching it Rhys has wanted to see the place for himself. It was even more depressing than we’d expected when we rolled in with the van around lunchtime on a Monday. The town was deserted except for a few kids having a game of footie on one of the main streets. Information centre
Panning for gold
unsuccessfully, at Sofala near Bathurst closed, schools shut...had the town just curled up its toes and died?
The local caravan park had signs of life, although the ‘office’ was in complete disarray with boxes of junk piled up everywhere. This was soon clarified by the dishevelled camp manager - she was packing up to leave after managing the camp for 36 years.
Why was Cunnamulla shut? We weren’t in NSW anymore Toto and it was a Queensland long weekend we didn’t know about.
And yes, she’d seen the documentary and along with most in the town she didn’t like it, but “it wasn’t all untrue”.
After a stroll around the deserted streets and admiring a magnificent statue of a swagman (see pic) we returned to the van park to be accosted by Len from the dilapidated bus next door who used to be in the French Foreign Legion and showed us his medals to prove it, as well as teaching me magic tricks and trying to sell me opals.
We decided one night in Cunnamulla was enough to sate any normal person’s curiosity and headed next morning for Charleville.
Not just another outback
Hill End general store
Rhys, Torin & Andrea being tourists at one of the first places where gold was found in NSW town, Charleville has more of an air of prosperity, no doubt due to all the rain that has put smiles on the faces of cattle and grain farmers on the huge stations of outback Queensland.
Charleville also has two rather special tourist attractions. It’s the only place you can see the bilby, an adorable rabbit-eared, rat-sized marsupial that is so endangered they thought it was extinct and have now initiated a breeding programme.
“The Bilby Experience” is the PR and fundraising vehicle for the venture and involves ‘seeing’ them dimly in an aviary style enclosure at night under red lighting, (no pics sorry) but seeing a bilby was a thrill for me.
Rhys of course was underwhelmed, but it was cheap so he came along anyway.
I did however have to go solo to the Cosmos Centre and Observatory. Outback Australia is a great place for stargazing - huge expanses of cloudless black velvet sky with little ambient light or atmospheric pollution - and the enterprising Charleville community has made the most of this by building an observatory to cater for large groups.
Herded into a large building in the middle of
a field, our group is seated in near darkness and after some astronomical information the roof slowly splits in the middle and moves apart, revealing a glittering, moonless, celestial ceiling. We all get turns at the telescopes and I get a close up view of Alpha Centauri, the Orion nebula, Saturn and an open cluster of 150 stars 7700 light years away - phew!
Definitely recommended, but as Charleville is more than 700km inland from Brisbane, it might not work as a day trip!
At Charleville we turned right to head out towards the coast at Mackay. At Roma we again struck the vagaries of Queensland public holidays. Arriving on Thursday at the van park close to the showgrounds where the Roma Show had just started, we discovered that shops, galleries, the whole of Roma in fact, would be closed on Friday for Show Day.
And it was. Like a morgue except for the show. So there was nothing for it - we went to the show - horses, cattle, fairy floss, dodgems, snake handlers and the all-Australian boxing challenge for local boys to face up to professionals - yes they still do it!
vines in Orange
they grow grapes in Orange, not oranges A show’s a show wherever you go folks.
One of the not-to-be-misseds of outback Queensland is the Carnarvon Gorge between Roma and Emerald. Soaring sandstone cliff formations, crystal waterfalls and mountain pools, tropical rainforest palms in cool green valleys, wonderful wildlife to be seen along magnificent bush walks. Well, Rhys was on a gorge strike and we missed it. (How about the 25km of unsealed roads - Rhys)
But I was not going to miss fossicking for gems around Emerald. You don’t actually find emeralds in Emerald, or rubies in Rubyvale either (pioneers found garnets and thought they were rubies) BUT there are sapphires at Sapphire and since that is my birthstone, that’s where we headed.
The gemfields of central Qld is a fairly rough area, to put it kindly. Emerald itself is a nice enough town, receiving an economic boost from vast local coal mines. Sapphire? Well, try to imagine driving out into the middle of nowhere, distant hills of volcanic origin, but the land for miles around has been dug, turned over, piled up and dug over again so that it resembles a moonscape now covered in scrub and long
Cozy camping!
keeping warm in the van in Bathurst grass.
Fossickers lease land (stake a claim) rather than own it, so they live in corrugated iron lean-tos and/or old caravans that have been added to each fossicking ‘season’ in winter (too hot in summer). Some come out here to fossick for fun or because it’s a cheap holiday, or to drink themselves into oblivion.
Some come to fossick in earnest - members of gem clubs or to supplement their retirement income by selling their finds.
Tourists can buy a fossicking license for a month for only $6 and go into designated fossicking areas to try their luck. It’s land that’s been mined before, but usually not by machine and as an old fossicker told me, they didn’t have ready access to water in the pioneer days and were only looking for big finds, so there are many gems still there to be found with a bit of patience and a lot of sifting and washing.
I was keen to make a day or two of it and find my own fortune in the rough, had the Department of Mines maps for fossicking areas, but for some reason Rhys didn’t seem to
Meerkat!!
Dubbo zoo think it was a good idea spending all day out in the hot sun in a gravel stream bed, digging around in long grass full of snakes, for something we didn’t really know was there, or if it was there, what it would look like.
So we decided to do the touristy thing first and ‘do buckets’ - buy a bucket of gravel from one of the fossicking parks where the claim owners ‘teach’ you what to look for.
We arrived when the Saturday markets where on, so spent an hour wandering round asking ingenuous questions to find out which was the most likely place to pick up more than a souvenir bag of dirt.
Now at this stage I must stress that Rhys had about as much interest in this whole gemstone thing as he did about walking in gorges, and I could tell was just humouring me. “You won’t find anything Hils...” was his constant refrain.
Late next morning we turned up at the chosen fossicking park, picked a dusty 2 gallon bucket full of dirt and rocks from a casual assortment of similar buckets and started dunking half of
Koala!
Dubbo zoo too. (the meerkats were much more interesting) the contents in a double sieve arrangement placed in a 44 gallon drum full of already muddy water. Our ‘training’ in what to do was fairly cavalier and consisted mainly of watching the other punters - fellow grey nomads, families and foreign tourists.
Once washed, you tipped the contents of your sieve out onto a muddy carpet square on a bench and looked for “pieces of glass” to identify any gems that had sunk to the bottom because they are heavier.
We were still myopically gazing at our glistening pile of rocks when the owner walked past and said, “there’s one just there...” Rhys picked up a small twinkling rock with the plastic tweezers, held it up to the sun and lo and behold - it was good. He had found our first sapphire and simultaneously caught the bucket bug.
We found quite a few more that day, mostly zircons of assorted colours, not to be confused with cubic zirconium - the manufactured diamond. These were bona fide precious gemstones, dug from the same dirt 4m underground that the owners were mining in their commercial operation.
Shall we do some more buckets
Welcome to Bogan Shire
they're very blatant about it here in Oz tomorrow? Rhys asked. If you like, I replied. Three buckets later the next day we had a total haul of 13 stones worth polishing (keeping their natural shape), 7 worth cutting or faceting and over 200 small sapphires and zircons of various colours which we can send off to Thailand to be cut at a far cheaper rate than here.
We’ve arranged for the polishing and cutting to be done in Sapphire, but are keeping the smaller ones uncut at the moment - it doesn’t seem the right time to send anything over to Bangkok.
And we’ll be collecting the stones on our way back down to the Sunshine Coast... Rhys says we might do a few more buckets while we’re there...
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Lawry & Sue
non-member comment
Very good
now you now why we have not gone to Burke and other 1 horse towns. Cairns is lovely, and at least has some civilization. Shops are open 7 days a week and has lots of restaurants.