19 July 2016 – Straight as an arrow, flat as a pancake

We awoke to a glorious sunset across the faux-savannah. We did not, however, have time to enjoy it. We had to be up at 0630 to be ready to depart at 0700 on a trip to Feed The Animals. This, as you would know, interested me not in the slightest but I went along with it. We set off with our trusty guide Jake with the promise of seeing no less than five exciting things. Here are the five exciting things that we saw:

Giraffes: there were five of these creatures and each person on the tour was provided with a couple of carrots. These carrots were to be fed to giraffes. I did not take any carrots and I did not feed any giraffes. The G did so and was very satisfied with her efforts and did not appear to notice that the tongue of a giraffe looks like a blue tongued lizard with a hang-over. The G had a second go at this feeding exercise and, I may say, was very successful. At least the giraffe went away well satisfied

The G feeding a giant and wild beast

Ring-tailed lemurs: fellow tour members cried “oh, how cute” at the sight of these beasts. They sort of look like monkeys. Apparently, the long tail cannot be used as (according to Jake) a prehensile limb (that means they cannot hang from it)

White Rhinoceros: This fellow was a bit of a boy. Apparently, he weighs four tons and can move at 40kph so you wouldn’t want to be in the way. But apart from that we watched him eat hay. Mind you he'd be a cool pet 

Bongo: this is not one of those drums that make a nice sound but a long-horned and stripey four-legged thing. It has a tongue like a giraffe’s. People fed it carrots. Great horns

Feeding a Bongo: I had never heard of these before so I learned something. Apparently, we are going to do a trivia night later in our trip and I am expecting a question like "what sort of drum is also an animal?" I shall be home and hosed! 

Elephants: Again. Interesting animals as they appear to be quite bright. They do painting. I am sure it’s hard to teach them to do stuff but the best thing for me was the huge piles of elephant dung lying around

After the tour ended there was breakfast. We packed up and hit the road after breakfast for the drive to Cobar. We had noticed that on the way to Cobar there was a place called Warren just 20 kms off the highway and in honour of our erstwhile Tanwarra host we decided we would call in.

There were some serious trucks mucking about as we pulled out of Dubbo onto the Mitchell Highway. These were owned and operated by Rod Pilon. Rod Pilon is clearly the Eddie Stobart of Dubbo. Very impressive We were soon hurtling down the highway toward Narrowmine whose name derives from an Aboriginal word for “honey person”. The town is known for gliding and citrus fruits (or so I am told).

Australia's answer to Eddie Stobart perhaps

We have these little walkie-talkies that Terry has given us so we can communicate between our cars. They are quite useful except for when (a) you get too far away or (b) the batteries ran out. The latter happened so we stopped at the next town along the way. This was Trangie and so impressive is this town that its Wikipedia entry merits no more than four lines. It does however have an IGA and we acquired replacement batteries. Its main street looked spectacularly dull but I suppose that few main streets look exciting in a light winter drizzle. We gave Trangie the benefit of the doubt and left as soon as possible.

Trangie: home to those who live there

The Mitchell Highway is a fine road. It’s 1,105 km long and has been a highway since 1928. We drove along only that part of it that joins Dubbo and Nyngan, about 100 miles. It is straight, straight as an arrow and flat as a pancake. If ever proof were needed that the Romans came to Australia, then the Mitchell Highway is it. I am told that the Hay Plain is another spot of proof about the Romans. But the Roman road builders would have been proud of the Mitchell Highway. There are road trains on this road and they tank along at a furious rate. In the rain those coming the other way chucked up fearsome volumes of spray. Overtaking one of these leviathans of the highway requires some extreme planning: you need a kilometre of clear road to do it. Of course, the road is straight and there’s not a lot of traffic but nonetheless it’s a bit of a thing.

About 120 km out of Dubbo you reach Nevertire. I do not know why it’s called Nevertire but it is home to the right turning that promised Warren. We turned right. A few kilometres down we saw a cemetery about 100m from the roadside and resolved to investigate in our return. You see these cemeteries from time to time. There they are with no visible sign of any place of worship nearby. One assumes either that any nearby church fell down long ago or that people wandered for miles in funeral procession to the burial ground.

The road to Warren runs alongside cotton fields. I understand that cotton requires copious quantities of water and I am a trifle intrigued about how this sits with Australian environmental concerns. The cotton fields look to the untrained eye (and my eye is untrained matters of cotton) to be like desert. Vast, flat and brown. Warren welcomes its visitors with a massive sign that you cannot miss and an agricultural equipment sales yard. The G had checked up on Wikipedia (there is reception at Warren) about Warren’s history. It seems to have been settled by 1830 with a post office arriving in the 1860s. She said that the place had suffered a major fire in 1899 but I could not find that on Wikipedia.

Welcome to Warren

In the dull grey of a wet winter’s day the high street looked like Trangie’s; wide, deserted and uninteresting. We parked, and in a fit of enthusiasm decided that we would take coffee at the promisingly named The Coffee House. As it turned out The G was very impressed with the coffee (which sported a magnificent crema) and with the home-made cakes. Thus fortified we took a stroll up the high street where we found nothing other than a building painted to look like an emu.

Warren - the High Street

A building painted to look like an emu

We stopped off at the afore-mentioned cemetery as we headed back to Nevertire. There were, in fact, two cemeteries. Usually, this means that one is Anglican and one Catholic for of course the faithful of each religion cannot be mixed up. That would never do. We picked one of the two. If the other was the Catholic cemetery, then we picked the Anglican (or the other way round). A few meters away there lay separately from each cemetery and single sandy-coloured grave. We could not get to it because there was some flooding but we wondered why it would be there and apart from the others. Possibly its occupant was of yet another religion that was unwilling to join its faithful with other flocks in the afterlife.

Cemeteries can tell you about the early settlers of a place. In this case the earliest grave was 1894 and many of Nevertide’s great and good were resting there. The Dowtons were clearly a family of note with several large and expensive memorials dated between the early 1900s and the 2000s. A large number of the gravestones (dating from the early 1900s) were the work of W Larcomb of Dubbo. This busy chappy operates today and you can find his website. I found the obituary of the original Mr W Larcomb who was born about 1874 and seems to have died in 1954. He had 16 children. He was buried at Dubbo; the obituary notes that “the funeral ... [moved] … to the Roman Catholic portion of the Dubbo Cemetery”. Good businessman he no doubt was and I expect he made stones for persons of any faith.

We set off to back to the Mitchell Highway and on to Nyngan. The road continues straight and flat. A couple of signs at the side of the road proclaimed the area to be Shorthorn Country. We passed Kirribilli a few miles out of Nevertire – the other one, not the Sydney one of course. I wonder which name came first; this remote one or the Prime Minster’s Sydney residence. The road runs parallel to the railway line (as it does all the way to Cobar). Every now and then the road inexplicably crosses the railway (which involves either road or rail making a bend). We drove into Nyngan which is in the interestingly named Bogan Shire and which proclaims itself to be the gateway to the outback. (For my overseas readers, and I know there are many of you, the word bogan in Australian means, roughly, yokel.)

A shorthorn

The Bogan River runs through Nyngan which has a population of about 2,000. It sports one of those high streets that is wide and deserted. We parked opposite the old station. Terry thought that trains to Alice Springs and, therefore, Adelaide and Darwin might still run through. Otherwise the railway is for transporting grain. The station advertised a museum but our attentions were drawn to the window of Mart’s Café which advertised a variety of interesting looking comestibles. I was drawn to the “lamb-burgergini” and we entered. We enjoyed a satisfactory repast: The G and I shared a “lamb-burgergini” while Terry and Enid took a bowl each of bacon bone soup (which looked like pea and ham soup without the peas and ham – they professed it good but not in the Long Arm Café league of soups).

The drive to Cobar from Nyngan follows the Barrier Highway. This highway runs for 1,000kms from Nyngan all the way to the Clare Valley. Wikipedia tells me that “the name of the highway is derived from the Barrier Ranges, an area of moderately high ground in the far west of New South Wales, which the highway traverses”. Whatever, it’s straight as an arrow and … you get the picture. Homesteads are few and far between. The fields, many of which seemed to be lying fallow, are vast. The road passes through Hermidale (which sported an interesting looking hotel) and nothing else until it gets to Cobar.

The highway hits Cobar at a place called Cornish which must be named after the mining activity. One is greeted by a massive brown edifice across which the name Cobar is emblazoned. You certainly can’t miss it. Terry tells us (interesting factoid #341) that some years ago there were no trees within 16km of Cobar because they had all been take for pit props. Not many people know that.

You cannot miss the fact that you are entering Cobar

We had managed to lose Terry and Enid (or they had lost us) and our walkie-talkies failed to make contact. We found the motel and checked in (it’s a typical country motel, clean and moderately comfortable). Eventually I called Terry from the mobile. Terry and Enid do have a mobile but technology is not perhaps their forte (though Terry is a dab hand on the Mac since I persuaded him that windows-based machines were passé). On this occasion his mobile was on and we were reunited.

There are two places apparently to eat in Cobar: the Thai and The Empire Hotel. We chose the Thai and very good it was. Tomorrow the Empire. And, of course, Cobar. The G tells me that the region digs out vast quantities of copper (after which Cobar is named), silver, zinc, lead and all sorts of other goodies. All will be revealed tomorrow.