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Published: November 12th 2010
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Friday 5th November arrived but there doesn’t seem to be any thoughts here about lighting bonfires or letting off loads of fireworks to celebrate Guy Fawkes night (maybe not a bad thing). Today we went off in search of a fence but before that I thought that we should go to see an historic property which was in the same direction. Graham wasn’t too keen but bowed to my obvious enthusiasm and before long we arrived at Jimbour House. By the entrance was an honesty box so we put in the requested $3 each and picked up a leaflet. The public are allowed to wander round the garden but not the house. We parked by an elaborate water tower and a lovely little chapel that had been built in around1870. To get to the house we walked through a beautiful avenue of jacaranda trees that had been planted in the 1930s. The house is very grand and not normally open to the public as it is still the home of the Russell family. It was bought by W A Russell in 1923 and renovated after it fell into decline as happened to many of the grand country houses in Australia. When
the renovations were finished, in 1925, a huge formal opening took place to which over 1200 people were invited. The original Jimbour Station covered over 300,000 acres from the Bunya Mountains to the Condamine River and it was from Jimbour in 1844 that explorer Ludwig Leichhardt started his epic journey to open up inland Australia. He eventually arrived at Port Essington near Darwin some 15 months later after trekking 5000 kilometers. He returned to Sydney by ship and set off on a second expedition from Jimbour in December 1846 to find a route from the Darling Downs to Perth but had to turn back because of illness and lack of supplies. He set off again in 1848 and neither he nor his travelling companions were ever seen again. The house that stands there now was built in a French Classic style in sandstone, took two years to build and was finished in 1875. It was lovely to wander round the gardens surrounding the house and to look around the original buildings at the back. There were fascinating displays and photographs of the history surrounding the old station and we spent a long time there. Back at the car we had
a cup of tea under the cooling branches of a jacaranda tree.
We set off again in search of our fence, which meant going some way along a gravel road, and then we came to it: ‘The Dingo Fence’ - the longest man-made construction in the world - originally 5600kms long. The scheme was first proposed in 1948 after a report recommended that a dingo barrier be established around the sheep areas of Queensland and it was finally erected in the late 1950’s. By the early 1970’s some of the fence was in poor repair and it was estimated that it would cost $915,000 to bring the whole of the fence up to dog proof condition. But it was also estimated that wild dogs cost the rural communities of Queensland about $40 million every year. In 1981 a plan was devised to shorten the length of the fence to 2125 kms and create the means to maintain it. Today the maintenance of the fence is carried out by eight teams of men who patrol their section each week. The fence protects about 6 million stock. The dingo is a primitive canine related to wolves and coyote and was not
part of the ancestral fauna of Australia although where it came from, about 4000 years ago, is not certain. We carried on along the track, following the line of the fence, and then diverted off on to ‘Boiling Springs Road’ to find ‘Boiling Springs Lookout’. The ‘road’ was actually a narrow dirt track which, according to the signs, was not to be used in wet weather. We went through a gated part of the Dingo Fence but we didn’t see any dingoes or any ‘boiling springs’, just a few excitable cows. We wondered which side of the fence was the 'dingo free zone'! We had our lunch at the lookout then, with the overhead clouds beginning to look a bit ominous, went back out the way we had come in as we didn’t want to get stuck there! We made our way to Jandowae to see the two meter tall steel statue of the dingo, sculpted by Andy Scott who came from Glasgow, Scotland. We couldn’t find a café in Jandowae so went back to Dalby for our afternoon cuppa. What we thought might be just an ordinary day had turned out to be really fascinating so you just never
know what you might find.
We still had to decide where to head for next so we spent the evening mulling over the possibilities.
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