Avalook at Australia News
Issue Number 18, 23 October 2000
ISSN 1443-0797
Editors: Eric Lindsay and Jean Weber
info@avalook.com.au
In this issue...
Outback Queensland trip (Part two)
Bladensburg National Park
Winton
Kynuna
McKinlay
Cloncurry
Burke and Wills Roadhouse
Gregory River
Lawn Hill National Park and Adel's
Grove
Doomadgee
Computer and modem use in Australia
Correction to Sydney airport train information
Information on accessibility for disabled travellers
Advertisement: eKit's Travel Vault
The Avalook Shopping Centre
Subscription information
Outback Queensland trip (Part two)
In the first installment of this trip, we had got as far as Longreach, Queensland, and were heading northwest. We still haven't got a map of our trip, so we hope you can follow it on a map of your own, or use one of the others on the Web. Here's one that includes a map maker and trip planner: http://www.travelmate.com.au/
We have been working on organising and uploading the photos. This site doesn't have space for lots of photos, so we've put them on Photopoint. (January 2002 note: Photopoint has disappeared with no warning. Fortunately we have copies of all our photos, so we just have to find a new home for them.)
We've done some other travelling since this trip, and Jean's finished writing a book (on another topic, not travel or Australia), so finding time for the Avalook newsletter and Web site has turned out to be somewhat more of a challenge than we expected.
A map of the trip is here: 
Enough! We hope you enjoy this very belated issue and find it interesting. P.S. We have added some photos to the first installment. - Jean and Eric
Bladensburg National Park
From Longreach we drove northwest along the Lansborough Highway (also known as the Matilda Highway) through gently rolling grassland to Winton, then turned south on a dirt road into Bladensburg National Park.
Despite being confused by a lot of 4WD tracks running in all directions, we found the ranger's office (unattended) and filled out a camping permit form. Leaving there, we drove awhile on the wrong unmarked track, then found the correct track and finally got to the camping area at Bough Shed Hole.
Surprisingly,
no one else was there. It was a very pleasant spot, with one clean pit toilet,
but you needed to bring everything else, including water. The campsite was
by a rather muddy waterhole, and we could hear the occasional moo and baa
in the underbrush, but we saw no wildlife except for quite a few birds (and
flies). It was such a nice, quiet spot that we stayed for two nights, despite
the lack of a shower. During the day three vehicles came by but no one else
stayed overnight.
In dry weather, you could get through to the camping areas and other sights in this park without a 4WD vehicle (though high ground clearance would be useful in places), but the depth of some of the ruts indicated that a bit of rain would turn many of the tracks into serious mud.
For more information, you can contact The Ranger, Bladensburg National Park, Winton, Qld 4735, phone (07) 4657 1192.
On
the second day, as we drove back to Winton, we stopped to looked at two other
waterholes in the area, one in a gorge. We decided against taking the dirt
track to Lark's Quarry to see the dinosaur stampede tracks, although the brochure
made them sound well worth a visit.
Winton
The
Winton district was settled in 1873 when rural properties, including Bladensburg,
were founded. Originally known as Pelican Waterhole (guess why), the town
claims that Banjo Paterson's Waltzing Matilda had its first public performance
on 6 April 1895 in the North Gregory Hotel (which has burnt down and been
rebuilt at least twice since then). The first board meeting of Qantas was
also held in the town, in 1921. The Bronze Swagman Bush Poetry competition
has been held there since 1972.
One
of the stranger sights in Winton is Arno's Wall, made of metal, plastic, ceramic
and other junk from the tip (dump) held together with concrete. Among other
cast-off materials are two motorcycles, artistically arranged.
We
visited the hotel and lunched at the Matilda Centre Qantilda museum, but felt
museumed out and didn't enter. The museum includes an early Qantas display,
pioneering displays, historic modes of transport, early medical equipment,
a bottle collection, an Aboriginal section, and more. http://www.matildacentre.com.au
Kynuna
We
stopped for the day at the tiny town of Kynuna (population between 12 and
18) and stayed at the Jolly SwagVan caravan park run by the historic Blue
Heeler Hotel, which had a good-looking area with a few trees separating the
half dozen powered sites. The interesting fireplace in the pub was funded
by R.M. Williams, whose contributions turned up in several country towns.
Phone (07) 4746 8650, fax (07) 4946 8643 for Blue Heeler Hotel.
We could have also used the Never Never Caravan Park next to the nearby roadhouse, but that was a very open parking lot and it looked to us as if the trucks might be parking there and making lots of noise. We could even have camped by Magoffin's Matilda Expo for free, down by their pretty billabong.
We
had a pretty good dinner from Hector and Nicole at the Blue Heeler historic
pub, where the last brawl of the Shearer's Strike of 1891 was settled, after
the burning of the Dogwood shearing shed and the seige. We paused to check
the neon blue heeler (dog) with the flashing red neon tongue on top of the
pub.
Eric
attended a performance by Richard Magoffin, OAM, at his Matilda Expo museum
that evening. This showman and historian puts on a great show at 7:30 each
evening, for $12. After a dramatic entrance, he tells the real story of Waltzing
Matilda, in one of the towns where the song started, placing it in the social
and political context of the day. He even gets the audience to sing along
as he plays the variations from the 18th Century that lead to the final tune.
His own ballads and songs are pretty good too. Phone (07) 4746 8401
We were one week too early for the annual surf carnival, in aid of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, where lifeboats parade the street, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest surf.
McKinlay
After
Kynuna we drove to McKinlay, notable only because it has the Walkabout Creek
hotel used in the Crocodile Dundee movies. Naturally we had to stop and have
a drink there. There was virtually nothing else in the town. Phone (07) 4746
8424, fax (07) 4746 8768.
Cloncurry
On to Cloncurry, on the main road west from Townsville to Mt Isa and the Northern Territory. Although it's not a large town (around 4,000 people), it's the biggest we'll see for a couple of weeks, so we stocked up on food and fuel. Local sights include a Flying Doctor Museum, an art gallery, a cultural centre, an outdoor theatre, and the Mary Kathleen Museum (containing memorabilia from the closed MK uranium mine).
Burke and Wills Roadhouse
We
continued on north, stopping at the Quamby pub for a soft drink, and then
on to the Burke and Wills Roadhouse, where we stayed overnight at their caravan
park. They had a few large powered sites with concrete pads sheltered by a
large high roof providing some shade. It was a much better site than many
we've seen. We had a really nice lamb chop dinner (and a few beers) on their
verandah.
The
road north of Cloncurry is a typical Queensland outback road, with one lane
of bitumen (blacktop, asphalt) down the middle and half a lane of gravel or
dirt on each side. You drive on the bitumen until you get within a few hundred
metres of a vehicle coming in the opposite direction, then both vehicles dodge
off onto the sides of the road (usually keeping their right tyres on the bitumen)
until they've passed each other. Unless, of course, one vehicle is a road
train -- in this case, it's prudent for the other vehicle to get completely
off the road and let the truck have the bitumen to itself.
Although our truck isn't as big as a road train, we did notice a tendency for most smaller vehicles to get off the road when they saw us coming -- possibly to avoid being hit by any stones we might kick up.
Gregory River
From
Burke and Wills, we headed west, still on a paved road (as described above),
crossing the Leichhardt River on a fairly new, high-level bridge, from which
we could look down on the old causeway across the river. As with most rivers
in outback Queensland, the water level is low in the middle of the dry season,
but you can easily see how high the water gets during the wet, quickly making
the causeway impassable.
Eventually
we reached the Gregory River, where there was Billy Hanger's general store
and canoe hire (phone 07 47485540), and the Gregory Downs Hotel (phone 07
47485566, fax 47485501), which had the most broken down toilets we've ever
seen. The new Council toilets and showers across the road were in somewhat
better condition, though a bit primitive. This is not a complaint, just an
observation. You get used to corrugated iron sheds after awhile, and it's
part of the outback experience. At least the shower water was hot, the toilet
flushed, the place was clean, and there was a bench on which to put your clean
clothes; what more do you need?
We'd
been told from people who'd stayed there last year that the river bed at the
Gregory River (a few hundred yards from the Hotel) was a very nice place to
camp, so we stayed there overnight and almost got bogged in deep sand. Unfortunately,
this year a new bridge is under construction, and half the camping area is
occupied by earth-moving machines making lots of noise. Despite this, there
were over a dozen caravans, tents and motorhomes already camped there, taking
all the good spots by the river.
We walked along the river for awhile, and it did look very pleasant, with nice swimming holes (and no crocodiles). We checked the pub for dinner, and found they were doing a $10 all-you-can-eat barbeque, with really great serves of salad, plus fish, steak, hamburger and snags (sausages). I guess having a road- building crew resident in the hotel helped encourage them to put on a big feed.
Lawn Hill National Park and Adel's Grove
Unimpressed with the bridge constuction, we declined to stay another day at Gregory River, so we drove the 100 km of dirt road to Lawn Hill National Park. The condition of this road varied from fairly smooth to bone-jarringly rough, so we drove very slowly and took nearly 3 hours to get there. People in smaller vehicles with better suspension were making better time.
We
could only visit Lawn Hill as day vsitors, as the camping area there was full.
(They always advise booking ahead.) We took a few nice walks through forest
to the Cascades and to Indarri Falls, but we didn't have the ambition to walk
as far as the Upper Gorge or take a canoe through the Middle and Upper Gorges,
but everyone said that was the best way to see the area. You can bring your
own canoe or hire one there for quite reasonable rates.
We
stayed overnight about 10 km away, at Adel's Grove, a spacious and nicely
laid out camping area in wonderful grounds. They have good showers and toilets
but no mains electricity (using a generator for power) or drinking water (bring
your own or boil their river water). Fortunately they turn the generator off
at 9 p.m., so it wasn't noisy at night. Early in the morning, as we boiled
the billy, an agile wallaby visited us.
Phone (07) 4748 5502; postal address PMB 2, Mt Isa Q 4825. This was such a pleasant place, and so few people were there, that we would have stayed another day or two, but we had people to meet at our next stop, so we went on the next day.
Doomadgee
After driving back over that dirt road to Gregory Downs, we continued north on on a much better dirt road. When we met the Great Top Road (25 km west of Burketown), we turned west. A few km along, we passed the Tirranna Roadhouse, which closed a few years ago when the owners just walked away one day, and is now a deserted ruin with no facilities.
The Great Top Road is considered 4WD only, and definitely would be in wet weather (if you could get through at all), but despite being fairly rough it was no problem at the time we visited. When we got to the Doomadgee turnoff, the road became much worse. We reached the town in late afternoon and sought directions to the hospital, where we were greeted by our friends, a doctor and nurse. We stayed with them for several days, collecting our e-mail, washing clothes, and visiting.
Doomadgee has an Aboriginal population of around 1500. It is on Aboriginal land, under the control of an Aboriginal council, and we had to apply to them for permission to stay. Sale of alcohol is banned in the town, so we were discreet about our supplies. The place was run-down and depressing, but the store had good stocks of fresh food, and our friends introduced us to some of the resident Aboriginal people who are trying to improve the town. There's little employment available locally, though some of the men work at the Pasminco Century zinc mine near Lawn Hill.
The hospital is well-supplied and well-run, and has some of the video conferencing gear that is being supplied to all Queensland regional hospitals. Our doctor friend uses this equipment to keep his patients (who have been transferred to larger hospitals in Townsville and other places) in touch with their extended families. This is good for everyone's morale. He also uses it for conferences with specialist doctors, as an aid in diagnosis and treatment.
---------------------
The final leg of this trip will be described in the next issue of this newsletter. We visited Burketown, Normanton, Karumba, the Undara lava tubes, and Charters Towers. Along the way we took a short trip on the Gulflander train out of Normanton.
Computer and modem use in Australia
We'll be writing more about our research in Australia, but for overseas travellers not sure where to start, a good explanation is here: http://www.walkabouttravelgear.com/modem.htm
That article will get you started and sufficiently equipped to cope with situations where you can easily connect to a phone line. If you travel in the more populated parts of the country, and stay in better motels or hotels, you won't have any problems.
Unfortunately, those conditions don't include much of outback Australia, where the biggest problem is finding a phone line to which you can connect a computer. (Public phones are common, but none has a data port.)
Meanwhile we're looking into acoustic couplers (remember them?) and PocketMail, and wishing we could consider the expense of a Globalstar satellite phone (which still isn't advertising the availability of data services in Australia, but says that's coming soon). More on all this another time!
Correction to Sydney airport train information
In issue 13 we mentioned the (then) newly opened railway line from downtown Sydney to the airport. A correspondent (who works for CityRail) writes:
The airport line is *not* light rail - it's heavy rail and uses regular CityRail trains. The $9 charge is the "access fee" which the Airport LInk Company charges to use the two airport terminal stations. The regular CityRail fare is still payable in addition to this access fee.
You should also have a link to CityRail's Web site which has complete timetable data online now. The address is http://www.cityrail.nsw.gov.au
We'll correct the archived newsletter issue.
Information on accessibility for disabled travellers
A good Web site with access information for the use of people with special needs, their families, friends and carers, including users of wheelchairs: http://www.accessibility.com.au
© Copyright 2000 Eric Lindsay and Jean Weber. All rights reserved.
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