Derelicts, dropouts and dreamers

We morning tea on the steps of one of the outbuildings of the next Telegraph Station: this one at Barrow Creek. It somehow misses out on the charm of the Tennant Creek respite. Close by, there is a graveyard where a former station manager and his offsider are buried after a massacre by a group of aboriginals. Payback, one assumes.

This is the town of the 2001 Peter Falconio murder. His body has never been found. Given the vastness of the outback it may never be.

Barrow Creek looks like Derelict Junction: a meeting place for hobos, deros and dropouts. There is a sign for a caravan park but I must have blinked, and missed it. The pub is on cracked concrete blocks that once had a lick of paint.  Inside, it is a ‘character’ pub, the walls layered thickly with pin-tacked currency from Outer Mongolia to Iceland,  guaranteeing the donor that no matter what state he’s in when he comes by again he’ll still have the price of a beer, hanging on the wall.

A character pub

Further down the track just south of Ti Tree we stop for home-made mango icecream at Red Centre produce. Here, mangoes, grapes and other produce, grow profusely in water sucked from the artesian basin. A Chinese market gardener and storekeeper is in charge today. It is wonderful to see all these acres of green produce bearing fruit out in this rain-dry land, but such a worry to realise the artesian basin is being depleted to do it. I can't help wondering how they both will survive.

And here, in the dry heartland of Australia, I upgrade my broadband access and find an internet connection instantly using my dongle. Nowhere is really that remote anymore. None of this is like it once was. This flicker of an enlightenment really gives me pause.


At Aileron, we find a pub with several Albert Namatjira originals on the walls.  Despite it being a public holiday the art gallery is opened and a local artist is sitting cross-legged on the floor dropping meticulous white dots onto her work with a long cotton bud stick. 

Artist doing fine paintwork

She is surrounded by hundreds of beautiful Utopian art pieces hanging on racks and walls: neat, careful work, reasonably priced. 

As the sun sinks low in the west we turn back for a time, east along the Plenty Highway, to Gem Tree. Off to experience the Central Australian gem fields, hoping to strike it rich, just like the early prospectors who came this way. 

Dreamers all.

Incredibly detailed artwork

oooOOOooo