2006/06 Australia trip - Daly Waters |
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Sunday June 18th
We were headed north again, towards Tennant Creek, the only real town in about 600 miles, and bought some fuses there. Our previous experience was that Tennant Creek seems to have two societies living in the same town but barely touching, the whites working inside the air conditioned stores and the aborigines walking the streets and clustered around the government buildings. This time, on a Sunday morning, the town was quiet, and mostly closed.
There was no Internet café open. We’d had an e-mail earlier from Karen saying that her labour would be started off on the Thursday if nothing had happened by that time. We’d been trying to reach Stewart but his cell phone was turned off, presumably because he was inside the maternity unit.
We finally found an Internet connection at Renner Springs, a somewhat tatty roadhouse we’d camped at in 2002. It looked to have been cleaned up. We found a message from Stewart that Graeme Alan had arrived on June 16th. He’d had to be delivered by Caesarian but otherwise all was well.
North of Renner, the highway was lined with yellow flowers, and there was even some water in the creeks, very different from our last trip.
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Stuart Highway (3.09) |
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We stayed at the Daly Waters Pub, just a couple of miles off the highway. Daly Waters used to be an airfield, used by Qantas and then by the Allies in WW2. Even after the wartime airfield was closed, there was the famous occasion when a Qantas airliner had to make an emergency landing there and the stranded passengers drank the pub dry. There is no danger of that now as they regularly serve hundreds of people. The pub is miles from anywhere but it’s a favourite for travelers on the Stuart Highway. It’s been spruced up since our last visit and now has a new roof, one that you can’t see the sky through, but otherwise it seemed to be much the same.
We opted to camp there, amongst a big crowd under the trees. It is a bit like the traditional British pub campgrounds: they were never full as there was always room for one more caravan or tent. That’s not true in Britain any more because of regulations but they obviously don’t have any of those regulations at Daly Waters!
We also opted for a barbecue dinner, to celebrate the arrival of Graeme Alan McLeod. This was served in a shed adjoining the
pub, and featured their local entertainer, Frank Turton, who is a strange cross between Johnny Cash and Benny Hill, giving a mixture of outback poetry, country music, and a few jokes well told. He has made the news pages for sailing a couple of guitars down the Murray, with his pet chook (chicken), and for having a wedding ceremony for two of his chooks. He sang some of the songs with a pair of “juvenile wedge-tailed eagles” (also chooks) on his head.
Monday June 19th
We made a slow start on a warm sunny morning, and we were almost the last to set off from the campground. One of our reasons for stopping at this campground was the advertised water supply, as we were running low. “Town water” said the gatekeeper to the campground. What town, we thought? The water was drinkable in an emergency, but the smell of sulphur might put you off even then. We used it for washing but didn’t take any with us.