Sunday, 6 October 2024
We are in Queensland, and we didn’t think last night’s change to Daylight Saving Time in NSW and Victoria would affect us at all. Wrong! With it being a travelling day the alarm on my phone woke me at 6.55am. I clambered out of bed and had my shower. Despite us aiming for an 8.30am departure Bernie was slow out of bed and to have his shower, but I figured he would catch up because he’s always quicker in the mornings than me. We ate some breakfast, and I was hopping around waiting to get our dishes washed and packed. Bernie was leisurely reading the paper.
Finally, I snapped and said we really needed to get a move on it was 8.20am! No, it’s not, says Bernie, it’s 7.20am. What?! You’re kidding me, my watch says it’s 8.23am, we need to get moving to have any chance of leaving in ten minutes time. Bernie was adamant, it’s only just coming up 7.30am we have plenty of time. So, for some reason that Bernie cannot adequately explain to me, last night at 2.30am when they rolled out the Eastern DST update to force phones forward an hour in NSW and Victoria mine decide to go forward an hour despite being located in Queensland. Aaaarrrgghhh! I could have slept for another hour! Needless to say, this made me a bit grumpy.
Since we were up early and the Gatts were ready too we were on the road at 8.00am rather than 8.30am. On the way out of town we stopped across the road from the Post Office to post a card due in Victoria later in the month. With it being a public holiday in Queensland this weekend it won’t be going anywhere until 3.30pm Tuesday. It will still have 12 days to make it in time. Surely that will be enough??
As we were driving, I spotted a cattle station whose sign announced that it was running
Simbrahs. Being from the country, albeit dairy country, we both thought that was a breed we’d never heard of. Later when we had some signal, I was able to Google to learn that Simbrahs are a cross breed between Simmentals and Brahmans. Talk about cattle nerds. Or is it just that outback driving is a little bit boring??
Just before Augathella the Matilda Way left its Mitchell Highway section and merged onto the Landsborough Highway heading north-west. There was a sign welcoming us to Meat Ant Country. Doesn’t that sound lovely?! We stopped for our first leg stretch in Augathella and found the town’s painted water tower. The tower, painted by Blender Studios in 2020, features: a bullock team, a boundary rider, sheep, a windmill, a couple of pink galahs and old man emu. It was at this junction that bullock teams camped on the Warrego River long before there was a settlement. In 1880 the town/junction was surveyed and called Ellangowa before being officially gazetted as Augathella in 1883.
Back in the vehicles we continued to Tambo. The town is lucky to have a remarkable number of beautiful old wooden buildings that are very well preserved. It seems that the town has been spared the litany of build, burn down, rebuild, burn down with each iteration of the building having fewer period features that the one before. We photographed the current and former post offices, the Town Hall, the Library, the Butcher and the infamous Royal Carrangarra Hotel where they hold chicken races every night at 5.00pm.
Continuing north we passed signs for the Cooper Creek Catchment area that is one of several catchment areas that eventually flow into Lake Eyre in South Australia. During the rainy season, rivers in outback south-west and central Queensland flow towards Lake Eyre through the Channel Country. The amount of water from the monsoon determines whether water will reach the lake and, if it does, how deep the lake with get.
We arrived in Blackall just in time for lunch at the Woolshed Baa & Grill. That is not a misspelling, but a play on words! After eating we took a short walk along Shamrock Street finding the Australian Labour Federation memorial that commemorates the first meeting of the first shearers union, with this entity later becoming the Australian Labor Party and the Sir Thomas Mitchell Memorial Clocktower. Mitchell of course travelled through these parts during his expedition of 1845-46.
We then drove out to the Blackall Woolscour for the 1.30pm tour. Our guide, Jeff, took us on a fascinating tour of the last remaining steam operated woolscour in Australia and the only woolscour co-located with a shearing shed. We have visited old wool sheds before, but we have never seen what happens next. It was fascinating to learn that the wool at this site went from the sheep’s back to the wool classer and then into a bale to be weighed. After weighing the fleeces would be unpacked to go into the scourer which would wash all the dirt and impurities out of the fleece before they went into a dryer. After drying the fleeces would be re-packed ready to be despatched on a rail truck. Community volunteers have done a fantastic job to preserve and restore this amazing piece of rural engineering history. With Australia’s early prosperity so closely linked to wool it’s important to keep the memory alive.
Driving back to the Oasis Motor Inn to check-in we spotted the Black Stump Memorial on Thistle Street behind the Blackall State School. Legend has it that a group of surveyors arrived on Astro Station near Blackall in 1887 and used a blackened tree stump as the base for their measuring equipment. The surveyors were tasked with taking latitudinal and longitudinal observations that would enable the accurate mapping of inland Australia that would then make it possible to fix the position of the all the major towns of southern Queensland. Before long people considered anything west of Blackall to be ‘Beyond the Black Stump’. The original stump was burnt out and replaced with a piece of petrified wood as a project to commemorate the bicentenary of Australia in 1988. A large mural painted by Bob Wilson was added to the memorial in 1993.
We finally went for a swim in some artesian water this afternoon. With the temperature reaching 35°C today, we decided to check out the Blackall Aquatic Centre as some Google research had revealed that this pool is priced for the everyday person rather than it being a luxury spa experience! Although the Olympic-size, artesian water-fed pool is around 29-30°C it was still cooler than the air temperature. Despite it being the Sunday of a long weekend, the pool was not at all busy. The locals probably think that it’s still not hot enough to consider swimming?? And the best part – it was a mere $2.00/each to enter.
We returned to our rooms to freshen up (?) before dinner. The question mark is because we came back to the motel to shower in artesian water that smells very strongly of sulphur! I guess there were signs up at the aquatic centre saying that it was closed yesterday for a superchlorination treatment so we may have showered in water that smelled like rotten egg gas, but at least it washed the chlorine off our skin!!
Across the street to the Barcoo Hotel for dinner … on NRL Grand Final night!! I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that it was a Sydney vs Melbourne final. The locals seemed to be pro-Storm. We’re guessing that Queenslanders cannot bring themselves to barrack for a NSW team?! Rather sadly the Penrith Panthers made it four in a row.
