Photos to follow
The day dawned brighter than yesterday although it had rained in the night. We made a tolerable breakfast and hit the road at about 0900. Our first stop is to be Wilcannia which is about 250kms up the Barrier Highway. At Wilcannia we take the road (called the Opal Miners Road) to White Cliffs which is another 100km or so.
Cobar is not a bad sort of town and we enjoyed our brief stay there. The people were friendly and the streets were wide. I read that genuine Cobar people refer to each other as “iron ringers”. Like many places in the world it seems to take a long time to be fully accepted as a native. It was the same in Cornwall, as I recall, where you had to have lived in Cornwall for at least 7 years before you could be regarded as anything other than a newcomer.
The Barrier Highway between Cobar is long and straight and mainly flat, but it is not uninteresting. For the first 80 or 100 kms the countryside (or I should say bush) looked a bit like a country park. There has been a lot of rain so the grass is unusually green. The trees stand perhaps 3 or 4 metres high with some intermittent scrub. There is a fair amount of grass in between. The soil is a bright red-orange colour. This is caused because the soils have a high iron content that oxidises. I hadn’t seen it before (because I have been a humble city dweller) but it is surprisingly red and not unattractive.
We saw many goats which we assumed to be feral. These were of many colours and there were many of them. The G said that she had seen an advertisement for people to catch the goats. She mentioned a 15% royalty but we weren’t sure on what sum the 15% would have been calculated. These goats did at least seem to have the common sense to stay on the verge chewing the cud (or whatever goats do). A little after I wrote this I saw a news item describing how goats on Pelorus Island (off the coast of Queensland) had eaten most of the understory to the vegetation on the island. They are about to dealt with through the release of dingoes implanted with a time-activated poison.
There are emus as well. We saw a few single emus and one herd or flock (or whatever the collective noun is for emus). We should have stopped to get a picture because after that we only saw then singly. I have been close to an emu before; they have yellow eyes. They can put in a fair turn of speed; apparently they can do 80kph in top gear on the flat. We had expected to see sheep but saw none until we were quite close to Wilcannia. We were interested to note that there was a wire fence along both sides of the road, about 20 or 30 metres back, running the entire length of the journey.
The landscape varies from the parklike to fairly wooded and back again. The trees are eucalypts with an understory of mulga. Mulga is a hardwood that has a dark interior and a light, almost yellow, outer part. It is much favoured by Terry and he had bought a saw in Cobar (as you do) the better to liberate portions of mulga to take them home to be worked into something or other. I helped saw through a branch about 2 inches in diameter and, let me tell you, it is hard wood. There was a dressed piece in the heritage Centre at Cobar and it was stunningly beautiful when dressed and polished.
The road is straight and well made. We overtook a couple of cars towing vans but apart from that nothing seemed to be going our way. Coming the other way was a large number of road trains. I learned that there are different legal lengths for these beasts with 56.5 meters being the longest. I am not sure why we saw none going in our direction: we cruised along at 110kph (which is the speed limit); perhaps the tricks were doing the same speed so we never caught them. The G hatched a theory that they drove one way on a Thursday and the other on a Wednesday. Thursday (today) is their day for driving eastwards. Well, it’s a theory!
We noticed large areas of white flowers at the roadside. Eventually we stopped and took a picture and a sample. They seemed to be semi-succulent. There was also a covering of a bright green-leafed with a yellow flower. We also saw a plant with red berries that also seemed to be semi-succulent. There is a cash prize for any reader that can identify these.
The world is filled with strange people who have nothing better to do than to leave their mark on the landscape. The G and I are possibly two such people. Between Nyngan and Cobar, in the middle of nowhere, someone had so been encouraged by his faith that he (or possibly she) had nailed boards to trees that proclaimed the second coming (bear in mind that this is in the middle of nowhere). Between Cobar and Wilcannia we noticed some interestingly decorated trees, again in the middle of nowhere. One tree had plastic bottles stuck onto its branches. Another had saucepans hanging from its branches. Yet another was a monument to the television. The G says there was one with underpants bestrewn on its foliage.
A hundred kilometres before Wilcannia you reach Emmdale Roadhouse. We stopped there. The G had noticed from TripAdviser that they served a mean bread and butter pudding so we determined to try one. The Army has been on exercise (an exercise called Hamel which is named after a battle in WW1 where Gen. Sir John Monash (eventually Commander, Australian Expeditionary Force) played a key role) and a number of Army vehicles had parked up. Weary soldiers, who said they had been on exercise since May, were refreshing themselves. They were on their way back to Brisbane. We read in some paper (it may have been the improbably named Barrier Daily Truth) that 8,000 personnel had been involved.
The bread and butter pudding was satisfactory and the apple pie that Terry and Enid wrapped themselves around was gargantuan. The coffee left something to be desired but, overall, my first visit to an Australian roadhouse was a good one.
We reached Wilcannia at about 1300. It is on the Darling River which was flowing muddy brown coloured at a reasonable pace beneath the bridge. Wilcannia was apparently once the third largest inland port in Australia. I am not sure quite what that means but there is no sign of it now. There are the remains of a wonderful late 19th century iron bridge that used to be raised to allow boats to pass. One wondered how they managed to bring the ironwork to Wilcannia. It took 8 years to build. There is a report of its opening in the Sydney Morning Herald of 1896.
The town itself is a sad shadow of its former self. There is some lovely early 20th century architecture. We looked for the Courthouse Café which, we had read, served a handsome ploughman’s lunch. Such proved to be the case and indeed the whole luncheon experience was lovely. We walked in to a large area whose floor was covered with small rugs. There were small tables scattered around on which were books about the outback. There was a small gallery to the side. Of particular interest was a magazine called The Dura which was printed on large paper (newspaper size) and which appeared to be a mixture odd articles and left-of-centre political comment. I shall be subscribing I think.
We decided to take on fuel at the BP station at Wilcannia. There are two petrol stations (or servos as the Australians call them) in Wilcannia. One is a traditional looking servo selling Liberty fuel. The other is a magnificent outback sort of affair. I should have taken a photo. There is a single pump standing in what, to all intents and purposes, is a field. A man fills your tank. There are swarms of dogs everywhere and the whole thing was what I think we had come for.
It’s just less than 100kms from Wilcannia to White Cliffs. Terry and Enid had been there before but only for a visit of a few hours. This time we were due to spend 2 nights at the underground motel. The road to White Cliffs is, surprise, surprise, straight and flat. There are dire warnings about avoiding black cattle (many of which we saw). We also so cattle that were not black and I wasn’t sure if we should avoid them. There were also sheep and an emu or two and the customary goats. The day was fairly bright but overcast and the red of the earth was quite impressive.
As we approach White Cliffs we crossed Bunker Creek where there is a marvellous old wooden bridge now in a state of disrepair.
White Cliffs appears as a shambolic collection of houses and tin huts interspersed with rusting vehicles. It is there because opals are there. At its heyday at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the population was 2,000. Now it is 200 and some of them are still opal miners. It gets pretty hot there so people dig their homes into the soft rock of the hillside where the underground burrows are cool. There is very little rainfall (about 8 inches a year) but the town boasts Australia’s first solar power station.
We found the Underground Motel and with its discovery began an experience which would certainly be unique and almost as certainly be character forming. To say that the place has seen better days would be perhaps generous. We checked in and then parked our vehicles, which could easily have become bogged in the car park. The red dirt forms a very slippery mud when wet, and it was wet.
Our rooms were caves dug into the rock. Our room was small and smelly and I discovered during the night that I am vaguely claustrophobic. At least, I was not 100% comfortable with the underground sleeping experience.
Our room did not have an en suite and the bathroom (an interesting accommodation in itself) was some way away. Terry and Enid did have an en suite (there is only one such room in the entire establishment and we decided that their greater age entitled them to the luxury). They were good enough to allow us to perform our ablutions in their facilities. Terry was good enough to point out that the tap marked “C” was in fact the hot tap.
You, gentle reader, will appreciate that with a population of 200 to draw upon the finding of staff is a problem. One such member of staff was a girl from Carlisle in the UK who had found the job on Facebook. I cannot even begin to describe the differences between White Cliffs and Carlisle but she will have memories for life! You will also appreciate that a village with a population of 200 does not offer much in the way of dining. The Underground Motel has a captive audience. Dinner, if such it could be called, was a fascinating affair. It is unusual for me to leave food on my plate; my Mother brought me up better than that, but on this occasion I made an exception.
While Terry and I were attempting to come to terms with what was on our plates, The G and Enid (who were sitting opposite us) were treated to a spectacle involved two women, a microwave oven and a bowl of custard. Quite what was happening I cannot say but I did think that The G was about to rise to her feet to give these people the benefit of all her years of catering.
The Underground Motel is like a maze. On giving up on dinner we found the outer door to our rooms locked. We returned to the Carlisle girl who provided us with a map of the underground maze that is the motel. With a great deal of skill Terry and I navigated our way back through the labyrinth of tunnels to rescue The G and Enid. We decided that we could not take another night at the Underground Motel so I called the place where we staying at Broken Hill and, luckily, they were able to take us for our next night.
As it happened we slept reasonably well, except for my claustrophobic episode in the night.
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