Mt Isa to NT

17 June - Mt Isa

The Kalkadoon are the traditional owners of the lands around Mt Isa. They have walked these lands for thousands of years and they still do today. It is almost as though the city, mines, roads and all the other trappings of western civilization don’t exist for many of the indigenous people of Mt Isa. Groups of kids (not in school), families, old couples and assorted combinations of all of the above, drift across the urban landscape as though it’s still just the same scrubby, rocky and dusty world their ancestors knew.

The non-indigenous community, on the other hand, is well connected with all the trappings of their modern city. Supermarkets, fast food franchises and the usual array of government and private offices are all here and operate as they do in any other Australian town or city.

Two worlds, two peoples, living in the same environment and never really connecting. Mostly they don’t even seem to see each other at all! Parallel universes?

Sure, there are a few indigenous families that have crossed that divide, but most of these, from our observations, seem to be ‘outsiders’ themselves. They are Coastal People or Islanders who have moved here for work, just like everybody else.

The mine dominates the city. Physically and economically, it is the biggest thing around, the very reason for Mt Isa’s existence. Copper, lead, silver and zinc have been mined here since the 1920s. ‘The Isa” is Queensland’s largest inland city and one of Australia’s most isolated. Unlike Birdsville, though, another isolated area, where we paid $2 for two potatoes!!!!, the cost of food and fuel supplied by the major chains isn’t too bad. Sadly, booze is outrageous! $56 for a carton of Tooheys stubbies at one place today. Even dedicated beer drinkers such as ourselves baulked at that.

One of our nieces (our favourite of course!) is the Deputy Principal of one of the Stare Schools here, so we have had another great couple of days catching up with family whom we don’t see all that often. - Thanks Nicole!


18 June - Barkly Highway, 120 km west of Avon Downs, NT

Crossing the Northern Territory border 12km west of Camooweal today, we belted off across the alarmingly flat plains of the Barkly Tablelands. The speed limit on the NT side of the border is 130 km per hr. We cruised along at our usual 95 kph.

Camooweal is nothing more than a pub and a petrol station between Mt Isa and the junction of the Barkly Highway and the Stuart Highway, 460 kms west, known as the Three Ways. From there, you can go south to Alice Springs and Adelaide, north to Darwin or east to Mt Isa and, eventually, Townsville.

The mile posts on the NT side of the border had us stumped for a while. SH 460 km? Then we got it. Stuart Highway 460 km. Nothing in between!

So here we are. Just short of the Three Ways. Only a “short” 200 kms of nothingness to go.

Sunset here is just as spectacular as the western sunsets from the Gulf. Here, the bush is the ocean and it goes on just as far. The red glow of the post-sunset is our favourite time. The glow silhouettes the few trees that string out on the horizon and the many vans and tents of our fellow campers become way more attractive in this after-glow than in the harsh light of the late afternoon. Aside from some spectacular flatness, today’s travels were fairly uneventful. It could then be a good time to describe the ‘grey nomad’ bush camp.

In the tradition of the drovers when cattle was king and the swaggies of the depression, modern nomads gather every night at some of the same creek crossings or bore holes in bush camps. All types of vehicles, from beat-up little Toyota and Nissan vans, young (non-nomad) travellers sleeping in cars, to enormous townhouses on wheels, are pulled up around us tonight amongst the low scrub and seasonally plentiful grasses of the Barkly Tablelands. This is a big rest area. Thirty to forty campers at present and more are pulling in as we speak.

There is an etiquette in these camps which makes them safe and generally pleasant places to stay. Noise is kept to a minimum, even in those camps where there are children - yes children! A campers few have generators humming. These folk are frowned upon by us purists who live off open fires, our batteries or solar panels.

On arrival, one must greet one’s neighbours and, in some cases, share a beer or two. The more gregarious of the group actually do a ‘meet and greet’ around the whole camp in an almost proprietorial manner.

‘Lights out’ is generally an hour or so after sunset. By that time, the kids have run out of energy and the older folk have nodded off. We are, however, the exception. After ‘lights out’, we are just starting our cooking, prior to watching a movie or two from our extensive DVD library.

By the time we get going in the morning, however, we are generally the only van still in camp! So, we guess, it all pans out.


19 June - Newcastle Waters

Our first full day of travelling in the NT has been a bit of an eye-opener in a couple of ways.

Distances are epic! Distance markers are often in the hundreds of kms, to destinations that may be just a highway junction or a deserted Roadhouse. Locations rather than towns. We have driven through western Queensland and western New South Wales, where towns may be 100 kms apart, but not much more. Here, the horizon is so far off we are sure we can see the curvature of the earth! Roads are excellent and the light traffic makes for safe travel, even with the speed limit at 130 kph. (Not that we travel at that speed, as the van begins to sway alarmingly over 100kph!)

The state of some of the towns and communities has been the second eye-opener. The most charitable thing that can be said for Tennant Creek is that it has a toilet dump point where we could empty our porta-potti. The least charitable is that we have seen far cleaner towns in the poorest areas of Morocco! A couple of hundred kms up the highway, the small community of Elliott was even worse. We had flirted with the idea of camping there for the night. Slowing down even seemed risky! The few houses that weren’t totally wrecked were enclosed in secure compounds with barbed wire-topped fences.

It’s been very windy the last couple of days. Lucky we were driving with the wind. At $1.70 a litre for fuel, courtesy of Camooweal, a strong headwind could have cost us a fortune! Most other years, we would have been enveloped in a serious dust storm by now, but after two good seasons, the country is knee-deep in grass and, as we go further north, the gold of the dry savannah grasses has started to take on the tropical green hue that we left back on the North Queensland coast.