From one extreme to another

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

We travel northward into more and more remote country. Each day is a little hotter than the last as we enter the state of Queensland. In Longreach as we’re studying the excellent exhibits of Stockman’s Hall of Fame*, a fellow visitor tells us that the little town of Winton, just a couple hundred kms up the road, is celebrating a long weekend with its bi-annual Bush Poetry Festival and concurrent Outback Festival. Eureka, we’ve struck gold! This is also the town where Banjo Paterson first performed his ditty “Waltzing Matilda” (Australia’s unofficial national anthem). The historic North Gregory Hotel, host to the poetry performances, generously opens its dusty, back parking lot to campers. They even provide showers in the hotel. Just beyond the parking area is Arno’s Wall: an ongoing project of encasing old stuff in adobe and cement.

Our Winton stay turns out to be a major trip highlight, worthy of gushing and blathering ad nauseam. Bush poetry is like the writing of Mark Twain in verse, featuring humanity’s funniest, saddest, and most poignant foibles. Poets come from all over Australia. We are entertained from 7:30 am till noon for three days. For further poetry and memorabilia we visit the Matilda Centre.

As if that’s not plenty for a town of fewer than 2,000, Winton is also the original home of QANTAS Airlines. The meaning of the name? Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service.

We devote our afternoons and evenings to the Outback Festival. When we belly up to the bar for a beer on the first eve, we encounter these Three Musketeers, emissaries of Reliance Corp, distributers of BP Petrol. In addition to buying us plenty of beer and even treating us to dinner at the local Chinese joint, they are wildly funny and full of travel tips, some of them perhaps actually useful. Troy, Steve, and Mike, it was a genuine pleasure, mates!

Throughout the festival there are assorted performances, yabbie (crayfish) races, a truck (promoting tyres) which practically catches fire over and over as it burns melting rubber skidding in circles, various “ironman” and “ironwoman” competitions, etc. Most spectacular is the “Dunny Derby.” Over two dozen homemade dunnies (outhouses) are pulled/pushed by their teams in a grand chariot race/obstacle course. To begin, the jockeys must run with underpants at their ankles to leap onto their toilets. The humor of the dunny graphics and official commentary is, well, straight from the toilet.

In case you’re seeking the strongest man in the world, your search is over. The Guinness Book of World Records will tell of Derek’s feat of pulling this very road train (truck cab and FOUR trailers weighing 80 tons) more centimetres than any other person ever.



Pushing beyond Winton into the very jaws of the inferno, we discover that our air conditioner does nothing more than deliver the outside hot air to the inside. With temperatures climbing to 40 degrees C and beyond (over 100 F), our bones are melting. When we reach the Gulf of Carpenteria we find this actual size sculpture of the largest estuarine croc ever captured in the world: 28 ft 4 in! (1957)






Desperate to cool off we book it east to the tropical rainforests of Queensland’s high, hilly Tablelands. We have our air-con repaired (ahhhhhh), then revel in the green scenery. It’s like a different planet… or at least New Zealand.



There are breathtaking waterfalls, rocky rivers, outrageous strangler fig trees, tangled jungle growth, and all of it alive with the sounds of colorful birds. It’s lush and beautiful on its own, but infinitely more so to us, having been in the dry dry dry outback for so long. What a contrast.

After several days hiking and exclaiming we brave the mythical, 4wd-only Bloomfield Track north to Cooktown on far-out Cape York Peninsula. It’s a spectacular trip, with river crossings and 33% grades on some hills.

And when we feel too hot, why, we just turn on the air!

*Throughout Australia we observe the cultural clash of the Aboriginal people and the Aussies of European descent. The Longreach historical exhibit states it well: “It was a delicate co-existence, underpinned by profound differences in the relationship of each to the land. To the European pastoralists, the land was essentially an economic resource, the key to wealth, social status and political power. Deeply entrenched in their attitudes were the core Christian values that the land should be tamed and made ‘productive.’

“To the Indigenous people, it was almost the reverse: the people belonged to the land rather than the land to the people. The land determined the identity of every person and their network of social and political relations, and was central to the construction and transmission of knowledge.”