2002/11 Australia trip - Mount Isa |
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Saturday October 12th
We made an early start as we were looking at a 1500-mile trip to our main destination, the Top End. Australia is full of poetic names like “Top End”.
We headed west on the Capricorn Highway and had breakfast at an overlook in the Drummond Range. 
There are few people and few towns here. We saw the occasional kangaroo or emu. There were more cattle and sheep than native animals. We saw a few small flocks of galahs, grey and pink cockatoos.
West of the Drummonds, the country is flat bush, with few trees. It’s a bit like South Dakota, with the little towns doing their best to drag you in to look at their attractions. Longreach has the Stockman’s Hall of Fame, and Winton has combined the Qantas Museum and the Waltzing Matilda memorial into the Quantilda Centre, another poetic name. Qantas started here as the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service, and Banjo Patersen wrote Waltzing Matilda near here. We postponed these gems for another day as we still had a couple of hundred miles between us and Mount Isa.
The road was quite good but very bouncy, and the campervan fed most of the bounce back through the steering wheel, so driving was getting tiring. We were now on what was called both the Matilda Highway and the Outback Highway. It passed through some desolate areas, with no trees or bushes between us and the horizon. These deserts are probably due to overgrazing, as there always seemed to be cattle and sheep about. A hundred miles on, the only attractions in tiny Kynuna (pop. 30) were its billabong, supposedly the one featured in Waltzing Matilda, its pub, and its free “powered campsites”. Presumably they were hoping that the campers would drink enough beer for them to make a profit.
Fifty miles on we came to the even smaller town of McKinlay, whose only claim to fame is that its pub, now renamed Walkabout Creek, was used in the Crocodile Dundee movie. Unfortunately for McKinlay, the rest of the movie’s gorgeous scenery is nearly a thousand miles away in Kakadu, so they haven’t exactly had a tourist boom. We didn’t stop.
As we neared Cloncurry, the scenery began to change, hillier and with redder soil. We also saw our first termite mounds, enough of them that some of the fields looked like graveyards. It also became apparent that we weren’t going to get any further than Cloncurry before dark. Nobody likes driving after dark in the countryside because of the danger of hitting kangaroos, but here the main danger was cows, dozens of them wandering all over the road. We had a couple of panic stops in the gloom, and it was dark by the time we rolled into Cloncurry.
We had trouble finding the Oasis Campground as there was just an unlit sign and the campground was behind a row of trees. “Coming in late aren’t you?” was the welcome. It was almost 7 pm. “Don’t leave anything outside or it’ll be stolen by morning.” This was a complete contrast to Takarakka where people left all their stuff out while they were off hiking for the day.
Sunday October 13th
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Road to Mount Isa (14.38) |
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The city of Mount Isa is famous for its mines and big smelter plant. Mount Isa Mines used to be a Unisys customer, so I took a picture of the “Welcome” sign, with smelter and smoke in the background, for the guys at Unisys, and we moved on.