This is Australia calling

Our route this trip 

We met up with our Outback convoy in Toowoomba on the first Monday in May. There are four vehicles with nine of us travelling. Our loose plan has been to overnight mostly by waterholes or riverside camps as we travel through Mitchell to Blackall to Winton, then on to the Alice and surrounds. We break camp most mornings about 8.30am and space morning tea and picnic lunch breaks for shade and comfort as we drive fast through these early roads which we’re all familiar with.

For a few days travel is a fuzzy blur, shrugging off the disorienting fast pace of city life, adjusting to life on the road: to rustic country loos with their wonky rolls of toilet paper dangling from crudely built coat-hanger wire holders, jutting out of rusty nails banged into corrugated iron walls, shabby cotton cultivations with road verges thick with ragged tufts of white cotton spill, stately pairs of Emus dancing their long-legged ballet over shimmering flat fields, and wild big-horned goats slinking furtively through shadowy brigalow stands.

And there were spiders

Far ahead, and to the left on the horizon, are Namatjira-pink-and-purple hills. Kites are wheeling overhead searching for breakfast: not too much has died here in the last little while as there is so much water to keep small things alive. There are puddles, ponds and creeks in every crack, crevice and hollow. You can see where the rain is carving the land, washing raw edges off the road into jagged decaying scallops. Council workers have piled new gravel into mounds, just this morning, ready to flatten and repair – attempting to restrain nature.


We turn west after Winton, on Thursday, and smile. The urge comes to play John Williamson’s True Blue raucously loud across the flat plains.

The Kennedy Developmental Road is long to the horizon, straight and singularly narrow, smoothed off with shiny black patches of new bitumen and pocked, occasionally, with cattle grids. There is a glint of water in deeply rutted ditches on the sides of the road. We’ll make deep ruts, too, if we have to get off for a roadtrain.

Beyond the hills, just a few dozen kilometres to the left, on a station called Opalton, my great-great grandfather, William John Burt, laboured. An educated, green-country, Dorset-born-and-bred man, he basked here like a lone lizard, under this vast bleached blue sky, swatting slow, sticky flies.


We eat our picnic lunch at the Hilton, opposite the Middleton Hotel, halfway between Winton and Boulia, the only building within cooee, other than a lone station property. A hundred years ago Middleton was one of nine Cobb & Co changing stations on this sparsely populated inland route. Every thirty miles horses had to be changed and all over Australia in a network of amazing ‘roads’ Cobb & Co coaches travelled 28,000 miles a week, larger distances than anywhere else in the world. Before that, teamsters and mail carriers used Middleton as a way station.

A reminder of when Cobb and Co stopped here

Today, Middleton has beer on ice, not on tap: the landlady is tired and looking to sell. She would like to live some place where she doesn’t have to depend on a generator for power, she said. The Hilton picnic space, opposite, is a corrugated iron lean-to that has seen better days, and would be hard pressed to rate a single star by even a kindly RACQ picnic-rating Inspector, but it is free, shady, and we have two dogs from the pub for company. And the slow-moving, sticky flies.

Lunch at the Hilton 

We cross a series of waterways called the Diamantina Causeway, a low depression of land criss-crossed by a dozen or more creeks and channels that probably don’t even feature in normal drier years – days ago the water would have been across this road everywhere, flooding it. Now the channels are water-rich, fat reddish-brown: soil and vegetable stained. This is the Channel Country that we marked on maps in school days.

Gradually, the earth changes to rust, and, as we get closer, the hills become mesa-capped -- like New Mexico. The plains are clothed in buffel grass, a tough drought-resistant grass excellent for cattle feed, for which we probably have the Afghan traders to thank: they likely brought it to Australia in their saddle and duffle bags.

Mesas, as in New Mexico

We climb one of the dramatically-eroded mesas and look down on what once would have been the giant inland Eromanga Sea that once covered the large heart of Australia in water. Below us crocodiles would have snapped at our feet, the sea would have rippled with icthyosaurus – a large dolphin-like, air-breathing fish; the sky would have been frenetic with flying reptiles. An entirely different world

Once primitive giant sea-dragons swam freely 

The further west we go, the mesas, with crumbling clay tops, close in and surround us. The land looks more like a dry-gulch, John Wayne, western-movie set. Any minute I expect gun-totin’ cowboys to hightail it out of their bivouac in them thar hills.

One of the jewels of the desert 

That wet humid sea air is long gone. The land is stunning now in its mesa islands wearing drier clothes of rusted dirt – and fresh green green grass.

Boulia calls: the land of the Min Min lights: eerie vaporous will o’ wisps that flit and float in phosphorous incandescence like lights from another world – tho’ they did not surface for us.

Back of town we found galahs and lime budgerigars perched in an ancient skeletal Waddy tree. Waddys are rare now, and only a few are to be found here, and near Birdsville. One of the hardest woods in the world waddy was invaluable to the Aboriginals for weapons; and waddy ash was used as a mortar additive in early settlement construction – tho’ it often ruined settlers’ axes as they fought to cut it down.

A hard tree, almost extinct, rooted in its harsh landscape.  This is Australia, calling.

A remnant primitive waddy tree

oooOOOooo