Lefty's trip

[Jovial Monk]

This is the structure that caused a bit of stir about the money being spent. I does look a bit ungainly to me. It is in Barcaldine, over the dead stump of the Tree of Knowledge under which the striking shearers met during the great strike that the shearers ultimately lost but that precipitated the formation of the Labor party.

Some jerk poisoned it a few years ago when, if I recall correctly, that it became obvious to everyone the Kevin Rudd would lead Labor to victory at the election. Complete wankers, how does destroying the symbol make any difference? Anway, they managed to make tissue-cultured clones of the tree before it died so the same tree is still alive and growing technically.

And that's it!



You will come across these blokes in caravan parks away from the metropolitan areas of the country. The name "bush poet" gives an impression of some old digger who stands there and dryly recites the verses of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson but they aren't.

They are actually professional or semi-professional entertainers who travel the country doing acts that are usually a mixture of classic Australian verse, their own poems and stand up comedy. They have their own societies and meet regularly at literary competitions.

They usually only ask for a gold coin donation (in a Billy can of course, to make it authentic). This bloke was very entertaining and we got plenty of good laughs. As long as people continue to travel in numbers around the less populated regions of their own country these blokes will be around.

[Jovial Monk]

For a small outback town, Blackall has a nice hot swimming pool. The water for the town comes from a deep artesian hot spring and reaches the surface at around 62 degrees. It is very soft, not minerally at all although it does have a bit of a sulpher smell. Nobody in the town has a hot water system - their problem is not heating water it is cooling it.

The spa was lovely and warm on a winter afternoon when a cold wind was blowing in off the desert. Getting out while the wind was blowing was a bit hard.




Much of central and south-western QLD is rich in opals. One of the best deposits in the region is supposedly in Idalia national park so of course they are off limits. Dad bought the ones pictured in the photo with the hands to give to the lady who was house sitting and dog minding while we were away (she cuts opals apparently).

There, did 3 more, rest to follow.

[Jovial Monk]

The old Blackall woolscour, built in 1908 is a piece of working history, the last functioning steam-driven woolscour in the country. It looks just like the kind of factory described in a Charles Dickens novel, the difference being that the shearers union and the early Labor party had made sure that the cruel and exploitative working conditions of Dickensian England were not repeated. It would still have been a pretty rough working life regardless.

The scour was designed to maximise the quality of the wool for export by removing the dirt and lanolin, thus fetching a premium export price. A steady stream of mulga and gidgee wood fed the boilers and artesian bores provided water for the steam engines and the scouring process.

The scour ceased commercial operations in 1978. In recent years, the locals restored the building and steam engines to working condition and opened it to the public.





This is the Thomson river. It flows (once every year or three!) a vast distance across western QLD, into Cooper creek, down into South Australia and eventually into lake Eyre.

It is usually a chain of waterholes, this one is about 10 kilometres long. Inland rivers are usually comprised of very long waterholes like this. They are often a couple of hundred yards wide and often 30-50 feet deep.

The water isn't quite as muddy as it looks but is still a bit muddy for the ladies to wash in (on a boys only trip, the battery powered shower and shower tent don't even come along for the ride. Whew, strong BO by the time you get home). We fill up several 5 gallon buckets with river water and throw in a tablespoon of cement powder or preferably alum. Half a day later with the cement and much quicker with the alum, the mud has flocculated and settled to the bottom, leaving relatively clean water which is then heated on the fire.




This statue in the town of Blackall commemorates the legendary shearer, Jack or Jackie Howe. On October 10, 1892 at Alice downs station near Blackall he shore 321 sheep in 7 hours 40 minutes using hand shears, a record that still stands.

Such statisitics are a bit of a yawn to most people nowdays but back then Australia's fortunes well and truly rode on the sheep's back so any man who could achieve a feat like that would have been more or less regarded as a national hero.

Jack was also a working class hero. He was an active unionist and one of the early members of the infant Labor party here in this region where the Australian Labor Party was born. His support eventually helped T.J Ryan become an early Labor premier of Queensland (not sure if he was the first).

He is often credited with having created the Jackie Howe singlet. Actually, it was his wife who came up with it to stop him from complaining endlessly about how sleeves and collars restricted his movement while shearing.

Jack died in 1920, aged 59. He is buried at the Blackall cemetary

[Hebe]

These are great photos Lefty.

[Jovial Monk]

The fish on the end of the line is a butter Jew, an eel-tailed catfish species (of which there are about half-a-dozen). Many inland residents supposedly prefer them to yellowbelly. They don't get a great deal bigger than this one while yellowbelly can be over 15 pounds. Like any catfish, you have to be bloody careful of the spines, especially with these ones since their slippery, eel-like bodies make them very difficult to hold. I found the flesh to be very soft when cooked but quite tasty.

The table shows the morning's catch (minus 2 butter Jew and the crayfish which were too slippery/lively/scuttley to hold still for the photo). Yellowbelly and Barcoo grunter. No really big ones, biggest fish was the 1.5 kg yellowbelly (caught by yours truly). All fillets skinned and soaked for a couple of hours in salty water, just in case of muddiness. They were bloody good and since I grew up eating coral trout and sweetlip, they were judged against fairly high standards. Of course, I spiced half of them up with lemon pepper and Portugese seasoning anyway.

All had big fat deposits behind the pectoral fins. Never seen that with saltwater fish, guess it must be a drought survival adaption.

Why didn't I put the collapsable pots in!

These crayfish are common in inland waterways and thrive even in pools too small for fish to live in. This one got tangled in the fishing line as he tried to pinch the bait.

The next camp down the river was fishing for them and appeared to be having a fair amount of success.

I had a bunch of spices, some dried coconut milk and a jar of massaman paste - a couple of dozen would have made a great feed!

They are the number one food of the largest fish in the river, yellowbelly. Yellowbelly have a huge gob relative to their size and even a relatively small one would be able to Hoover this bloke up no worries. Though I suspect with claws like that, they wouldn't go down without a fight.

[Jovial Monk]

These cast iron boats are still found slowly rusting away in the inland, particularly in the channel country. Relics of a bygone era, they were the only way the newly expanding sheep stations could get supplies in the wet when the hundreds of criss-crossing watercourses that are normally dry or are made up of pools become raging torrents rushing toward Lake Eyre.

Apparently they took 12 men to lift them, bit of a bugger if you only had 10 or 11.

Cast iron was used because acacia wood is tough but the trunks are too small for boat building and the only trees with large trunks - the coolibahs that line the watercourses - have a timber that proved to be not very durable and the boats would dry rot and fall to bits between floods.



Still more to come!