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Paradise a remote crossroad a long way from a pretty resort

3/24/2015

Cheryl and Fenn Miller at Cameron's Corner, where New Year's Eve happens three times in an hour.

A yellowed dog carcass hanging on the world’s longest fence adds a curt footnote to the sign that warns you can be fined $1000 if you don’t shut the gate. They are pretty serious about trying to control wild dogs in this part of the world.

Cameron Corner, that iconic outback post where the corner of NSW and Queensland abut South Australia, is about half way along the 5614km of the Dingo Fence and is a hell of a lot better place to live than flashy Port Douglas, say Fenn and Cheryl Miller.

They left their home in Port Douglas when the ritzy crowd moved in and headed west to find the real Australia again. Port Douglas grew in popularity with the glamour crowd after Christopher Skase built a Mirage resort there.

“We didn’t like the way it changed,” said Fenn. “Too flashy. No sense of community anymore. Everyone started getting greedy.”

After a spell up in the Kimberley they bought the Cameron Corner Store six years ago and get to celebrate New Year’s Eve three times a year.

“We stand around the post and start in the NSW corner,” says Cheryl as Tony and I settled in at the bar for what proved an enjoyable afternoon stretching well into the evening. “Half an hour later it’s midnight in South Australia and half an hour after that in Queensland.”

Queensland is not on daylight saving so it’s last.

She and Fenn love their life, even though it has its challenges and long hours. Days start at 7.30am and can end about 1.30pm to cater for the thousands of people each year passing through the dusty roads to and from three states. Some come on postie bikes, tractors or ride-on mowers. A shearer came from NSW pushing a shopping trolley. A French couple walked by to follow the footsteps of Burke and Wills 150 years after that ill-fated expedition.

A miner barrelled through on a motorbike to set the record for crossing Australia at the east and west extremities of the mainland. He went from Steep Point to Byron Bay in three and a quarter days, made all the more impressive because he first rode 500km to the start at Steep Point.

“We’ve got a mountain bike rally coming through in May,” said Fenn. “Some nights during the season the whole camping area on the hill is lit up, the caravan park is full and all our accommodation units are full. The next night we might have two people staying here.”

Fenn has worked in the building trade and Cheryl’s background is mainly hospitality. They both try to keep the spirit of outback hospitality alive but Fenn’s patience gets tested when the city boys roar in in a cloud of dust. “Sometimes I meet them at the door with a broom and tell them they caused it (the drifted-in dust) and they can sweep it up.”

The Corner Store sits in the Sunshine State corner. Fenn and Cheryl like that. It means they are still Queenslanders, even if just by a few metres.

It’s a bit mixed up, authority wise. They come under the South Australian Regional Tourism Authority and NSW controls the dog fence. They have a NSW postal code and a South Australian phone number.

“I’ve had two phone calls from Google asking where we are,” said Cheryl. Saying “halfway along the longest fence in the world” doesn’t quite answer the question.

The Dingo Fence started out in the 1880s as a futile attempt to control the rabbit plague with a series of fences. They fell into disrepair until 1914 when they were repaired to keep dingoes from sheep stations. In the 1940s the fences were joined together to form a continuous 8614km line, shortened by 3000km in 1980.

It is maintained by the NSW Wild Dog Destruction Board, which employs boundary riders, each responsible for up to 60km of the fence.

Fenn and Cheryl’s busiest year at the Corner Store was 2009 when Lake Eyre filled up and word went out it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to see the lake with water in it. It wasn’t – it still has water – but throngs of Australians headed inland.

That year Cameron Corner nearly ran out of water. “We had three weeks of drinking water left in November then the heavens opened up,” said Cheryl.

“We had 11 years’ worth of rain in two months. It was beautiful. Baby ducks came out and were walking on the veranda. Birds’ eggs were everywhere – if you left the car windows down they would be building nests in it.

“Larry from the Dog Fence left his washing on the line and the finches had nests in the pockets and in the rolled up sleeves. So then we had the mice plague. We were catching 300 a night.”

As the afternoon faded, Ken Ogilvie and his son Andrew rolled up from nearby Lindon Station. Their 3000 Herefords on a million-plus hectares are certified organic.

So are quite a few of the big cattle stations of the inland. It’s always been that way – no chemicals or pollutants. “We really just had to do the paper work,” said Andrew.

Mustering is a bit different from the old days though. Andrew uses a gyrocopter to find the cattle a radio down to the ringers on bikes.

Ken and Andrew had arrived with shovels. They pitched in with Fenn to dig holes and mix concrete, putting up posts for a broad sign that will be going up to announce a celebration for the 25th anniversary of the Cameron Corner Store at the end of May.

It’s going to be a decent affair. Andrew is keen to organise a bit of a sports day, with horse events and outback challenges. He wouldn’t mind if it became an annual event.

It’s going to be a bit of a hike back, but we wouldn’t mind if we swung back that way again to see how the inaugural event pans out.

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Grumpy gas man and dangling bones on the old Strzelecki

3/21/2015

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The southern part of the Old Strzelecki Track looked blocked - but there was a fine road leading off to the left. It also led to a gas field and a hairy, head-shaking gas man.

Take the Old Strezlecki Track south from Innamincka, they told us. The main Strzelecki Track is too chopped up from all the trucks.

That suited us. We were heading for Cameron Corner and the old track was a short-cut that took 36km off the journey. Seeing we were taking a 110km side trip on our way south to have a beer at Cameron Corner that was a bit inconsequential but it seemed good advice.

Ranger “Duck” Robertson at the Dig Tree told us the new Strzelecki Track was in a bad way. Trucks were busting trailers to bits on the bulldust holes. So many trucks were on the Strzelecki these days with all the mining that it should be bitumen all the way.

A lot of freight trucks were now running from Brisbane instead of Adelaide. Go the old track, “Duck” reckoned.

So did Jeff Matthews, our helpful friend at Innamincka, who warned millions of trucks plying the unsealed main road from Lyndhurst to Innamincka had battered it.

Off we toodled down the Old Strzelecki, named after Polish explorer Pawel (Paul) Strzelecki, who shot through from Poland after he was spurned as a suitor and accused of theft by a boss. Strzelecki was a self-proclaimed count, a self-taught geologist and a self-announced explorer who was the first to find copper in Canada and named our highest mountain Mt Kosciuszko after the Polish king.

A sign at the start of the old track warned it was an unmaintained road but it wasn’t too bad – narrow, rocky, a bit washed out but easily traversed without needing 4WD.

Halfway down a broad, unsealed, unnamed road cut east from the Strzelecki Track into Queensland. It looked to be used by a lot of mining traffic. Oil and gas was the go out here.

We doglegged it on to the southern stretch of the Old Strzelecki and about a kilometre down came across a wall of dirt piled across the track. Three flags were stuck in it. No one had said anything about the track being closed.

A fine wide gravel road ran off to the left but no arrow indicated it was a detour. We debated what it all meant and elected to follow the nice new road east, hoping it was a detour that would take us south again.

Turn south it did after a few kilometres. It ran through a gas field with signs right and left pointing to “Mudera No. 3”, “Mudera No. 6” etc. Our doubts grew. Eventually all roads pointed to Mudera.

We spied a truck over at one of the points, headed for it and were confronted with a large high vis man with a bearded, fly-netted head. He was shaking his head.

“You’re lost aren’t you?” We nodded happily.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said sternly. “This is a gas field. It’s dangerous. You need to get out of here. They’re venting all the time.”

He vented a little more as we tried to explain. “We’re trying to get to Cameron Corner on the Old Strzelecki but it had dirt piled across it back there. We thought this was a detour.”

“It isn’t. It’s a gas field. The Old Strzelecki is washed out. You have to go all the way around on the other Strzelecki.” He vented a bit more but we pointed out no one had told us the old track was closed. No signs indicated it was closed and no signs said we couldn’t come along the road that looked like a detour.

“That’s because you are too early,” he said in a more friendly fashion. “We’re not expecting you yet.”

By “you” he apparently meant some of the 30,000 travellers who explore the Strzelecki, Birdsville and Oodnadatta tracks region every year in the cooler months.

We thanked him, drove back to the flagged dirt piled on the Old Stzelecki, examined the obstacle and ignored his instructions. Behind the dirt was a big mudhole that had dried up. Tracks went around it and the dirt mound. So did we.

A couple more sections were a bit tricky but no problem. Soon the track turned into a well-maintained gravel road serving another gas field.

A large skeleton with a dislodged mining cap swung in the breeze on the side of the road. It had been carefully built from old cow bones – clever but vaguely ominous given the sometime terse relationship between inland travellers and the mining industries.

We turned east on to the Cameron Corner road and began undulating over hundreds of sand dunes. That beer at the beckoning bar of the Corner Store was looking good.

A welcoming piece of art work - or was that a warning?

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Innamincka Jeff just keeps building stuff

3/13/2015

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Maybe it’s the rhythmic name. Maybe it’s the remoteness. Maybe it’s just that it’s a tiny speck on the edge of the Strzelecki desert.

Whatever it is, Innamincka has a folklore fascination. A bitumen road now stretches west from Brisbane for all but the last 60 km. In outback terms that probably means it’s not really remote any more even if it is almost 400km west of Thargomindah.

At Thargomindah I had been looking forward to seeing “CONDUIT between above and below”, the celebrated sculpture hailing that life force of the inland - the Great Artesian Basin. Sculptor Frederick White created a field of 52 poles spearing into the ground, one for each week of the year the outback depends on water coming from beneath the ground.

Flow from a bore created a bottomless effect in the pooling water around the cylinders. Or so I read. “CONDUIT” isn’t there anymore.

Experts are worried that the Great Artesian Basin isn’t infinite and the outback’s enthusiastic spearing, releasing water from about 4700 bores at an average depth of 500m, is drying nature’s subterranean reservoir up faster than it can be replaced.

Ground water apparently can take 20,000 years to drip into the great underground basin so authorities have been busily capping bores that had been left to spurt freely, evaporating without storage.

The bore creating the Thargomindah sculpture on the outskirts of town did just that so it was capped and the sculpture taken away. No one we spoke to in town seemed too sure where “CONDUIT” was now or what it going to happen next.

Innamincka, just across the South Australian border, doesn’t have a sculpture but it does have an eye-catcher of a building as you drive into town, a grand, graceful two-storeyed ... what was it? Old or new? Residence or headquarters?

As we peered for a sign a ute pulled up and we again encountered that extraordinary outback hospitality that begins where the coastal green and greed ends.

“Need any help?” asked Jeff Matthews. Just having a look around, we said. “Are you stopping?” No, just visiting and looking for a bite for lunch and topping up with fuel and if possible water.

“No water in Innamincka,” said Jeff, “but we just had three and half inches of rain so I’ve got plenty at my place. Follow me and I’ll top you up.”

He pointed happily at Cooper Creek gurgling across the town causeway and told us the building we were examining was the old Inland Mission, restored thanks to Australia’s electronics billionaire Dick Smith.

“He didn’t do it all with his own money, of course, but he’s pretty good at getting other people to part with theirs.”

We followed the ute past the town’s clutter of mining paraphernalia to a garage where he topped up our water, showed us the solar powered boat he’d built, the motorhome he’s built (above) and offered us a cup of tea in the surprisingly comfortable air-conditioned quarters he had renovated on the corner of the building.

The guy has built a lot of stuff, including the impressive rustic Cooper Creek Homestay accommodation.

He arrived in Innamincka in the late 1990s with his wife Julie and daughters Miranda and Ali. They had roamed around Australia most of their married life. “We rammed a fair bit into our lives.” The girls had never been to school. Julie, with a Bachelor of Education, had home-schooled them.

I peered at a family photo on the wall. Miranda had married a German microbiologist and gained her masters degree in political science at Heidelberg university. Ali and her partner ran the Cooper Creek Homestay, which can seat 30 in the spacious kitchen.

Innamincka has a permanent population of about 17. Only four, including Jeff and Julie, are freehold landowners.

“Everyone else is either a manager or staff here,” said Jeff. “I suppose there’s also the National Parks but we don’t really count them. They’re something different.”

We drove down to inspect the cool and welcoming Homestay with a variety of bed arrangements in self-contained rooms. Business had been flat out last year but had slowed down a little with the ease-down in mining. Tourists would start to trickle in as the temperatures dropped.

At the Innamincka Trading Post we paid $1.90 a litre for fuel and had an ice cream for lunch. No take-away food was on sale. “You’re early in the season,” we were told once again. “We don’t do food during summer.”

Jeff was waiting to escort us out of town to make sure we didn’t miss the turn-off south to the Old Strzelecki Track. One day we are going back to see what else Jeff has built at Innamincka and rest our heads in what is considered outback luxury at the Cooper Creek Homestay.

And finally, here it is, folklore flowing from its name.

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Ranger "Duck" gives low-down on Burke

3/2/2015

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"That Burke should never have left Melbourne."

Dig Tree Ranger “Duck” was a little uneasy when he drove up to our camp beside Cooper Creek. It looked like the Bulloo Shire Council might be taking over the running of the historic precinct around the famed Burke and Wills coolibah tree and he didn’t know what that might mean for him.

The big camp ground around the legendary Dig Tree is on private land, part of the sprawling Nappa Merrie Station. Owned by the Kidman company, it was sold to Santos a while ago for $8 million and leased back. Now there's a new lessee and that means changes for 77-year-old Donald “Duck” Robertson. He wasn’t sure where he would fit into the new plan.

“Kidmans have looked after this place pretty well,” he said, waving away the flies. Tourists wanting to see the Dig Tree pay $11 at the honesty box to cover the upkeep of the modest facilities and the services of “Duck”, who has accommodation at the homestead.

Now Santos and the lessee want the council to look after the outback mecca on the edge of the Queensland border, about 70 rough kilometres from Innamincka.

As we waved at each other to brush away the flies, “Duck” explained that Santos had been buying a few properties around the Strzelecki region. The Kidmans had shifted all the cattle from Nappa Merrie and the new lessee was off buying about 8000 head to build a herd and pay off the $700,000 annual lease.

We had camped alone at the Dig Tree the day before, confronting the summer flies and heat that keeps most tourists away until around Easter. Then they come in their thousands, says “Duck”.

This year there will be a group of 40 veteran army vehicles, “Willys jeeps and stuff”, stopping over on their way to Birdsville.

Some campers stay a month, watching the Cooper go dry as the monsoonal rains in the north disappear. When the creek bed appears you can take a short cut across it to Innamincka.

“It’s been pretty dry around here,” said “Duck”. “They had four inches in Innamincka a month ago but we only had one. Breaks your heart.”

On a happier note Cooper Creek was now flowing strongly. The water had appeared a week ago. Probably come down the Thomson, he reckoned.

The permanent waterhole upstream at Nappa Merrie homestead would have 80 feet in it by now. “Where you see a homestead, you can be pretty sure there’s a permanent waterhole close to it.”

We were to learn later that everyone from Innamincka to Cameron Corner knew Donald “Duck” Robertson but not many knew he had been given his nickname when, at 12 months, he became the first baby to go on a mercy flight on the NSW Royal Flying Doctor.

Flown out from his home at Tibooburra, east of Cameron Corner, the doctor had asked the name of the sickly child. Told it was Donald, he had written “Donald Duck” on the wristband. For three quarters of a century the name had stuck.

“Duck” clearly enjoys the ranger job he has done for three years. He’s studied the story of Burke and Wills and, brushing away flies, reckons Burke was the problem.

“That expedition should never have left Melbourne. There wasn’t an explorer amongst them. Burke was the problem. An Irish cop. He gave Gray a flogging on the way back from the Gulf and he died three days later. If Wills had been in charge it would have been a different story. At least he was a surveyor.”

When we left the Dig Tree, “Duck” was on his way back with what looked like a couple of council workers in his ute. We hoped it was all going to work out OK. He pulled over to say goodbye, assuring us we would not stay long in Innamincka.

“The flies are really bad there.”

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Sitting and sipping on the Cooper wondering why....why....

3/1/2015

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The celebrated Dig Tree ... well, not really it seems.

Coolibah trees edging Cooper Creek were starkly silhouetted by the moon. Soupy and silent, the river flowed swiftly past as we soaked up the solitude and a cold beer a hundred metres from the legendary Dig Tree on our right.

We wondered why the sun had set in the east and why Australia’s most fruitless, foolish expedition was also the most famous.

Three gaunt, exhausted men and two knackered camels appeared in the moonlight to our left. Or they did 154 years ago.

Burke, Wills and King staggered past us to the coolibah tree that was to become etched into a nation’s folklore and testament to forbearance and folly. Despair engulfed them as they saw the camp and stockade had been abandoned by William Brahe and the three men they had left there three months earlier.

Robert Burke, William Wills and John King had achieved the goal of the bleak and most expensive exploration expedition in a country that was not yet a nation. They had found a route to the Gulf of Carpentaria and made it back – but only to Camp 65 in the fierce inland.

In their wake lay the corpses of mysterious Charlie Gray , four camels and poor Billy, Burke’s grey horse. When the three slumped men gathered a little strength and a few wits they found dates and signs carved into blazes on the tree. On a nearby tree was the word “Dig”.

Eighteen inches under the ground they found a camel pack with dried meat, hard meat biscuits and bitter news. Brahe and Co. had waited an extra month for their return. They had left to return to Melbourne at 10am on April 21. Burke, Wills and King arrived in the moonlight nine hours later.

In February 1915, Tony and I sat alone near the Dig Tree and wondered why. We had come to the inland before the inland tourist season on our way to the South Australian coast. Savouring solitude has its price: we reluctantly resorted to fly nets as we parked on the bank of the Cooper.

We had crossed the Cooper in the Channel Country after Thargomindah and parked for the night on its bank near the Dig Tree. Around us the land was parched but the creek was powering towards Lake Eyre with a bounty of muddy water from monsoonal rain in the north.

With cold beers in hand and fly screen on head, we idly watched the creek. “It’s running the wrong way,” I said. “It’s going north.” Tony agreed and noted the sun was setting behind us in the east. We had been heading west for a few days. Perched on the Cooper bank, we felt we should still be facing west.

We checked the map and saw how the Cooper had made a U-turn below us and we had curled around to its western bank. Relieved we flicked our thoughts into the past and examined more puzzles.

Why the Royal Society of Victoria let pride drive it to make ill-considered plans to try to achieve exulted exploration status for the colony? Why did it appoint a grand party of men, horses and camels without a single explorer in it? Why did it put an Irish cop with a dubious pedigree in charge of the grandly named Victorian Exploring Expedition?

Why did Burke split the party after two months at Menindee, leaving supplies behind with Wright? Why did Wright dawdle for so long, taking five months to catch up? Why did Burke split the party again at Cooper Creek and head off in December to make a lunge for the Gulf in summer heat?

OK, they sort of made it to the Gulf without seeing the open ocean. You could understand why they decided to turn back at that point. But why did Charlie Gray die a few days after Burke gave him a thrashing for stealing flour?

When they arrived back at the Dig Tree, the three men agreed they were too exhausted to catch up with Brahe. Two days later they had recovered enough to push on. Wills wanted to follow Brahe south; Burke foolishly decided to head to Mt Hopeless, about 150 miles away. They buried a message and left. Why didn’t they leave any mark on the tree showing they had been there?

Two weeks later Brahe, who had met up with dawdling Wright and more supplies, returned to the Dig Tree. He stayed half an hour, never checked the buried box and left without leaving any mark on the tree.

Three weeks later Wills struggled back to the tree, buried his journals and left no sign he had been there. He, Burke and King had been driven back to Cooper Creek because they couldn’t find water on their attempts to reach Mt Hopeless.

Burke and Wills died about a month later. Alfred Howitt led a search party that found King, weakened but being kept alive by the local aborigines, beside the Cooper on September. Burke and Wills, dead about two months, were buried and King given a hero’s welcome in Melbourne. Another party later fetched the remains of the most famous unsuccessful explorers in Australia and gave them Victoria’s first state funeral.

The following year Howitt returned and pitched camp downstream from the Dig Tree. A bottle with a note saying the depot was downstream was buried under the tree, which was carved with the word “Dig”, initials and an arrow pointing to the new camp.

Confusion followed. Pioneers saw the Howitt “Dig” and until a few years ago it was revered as the tree where Burke and Wills dug, instead of a tree about 7.5m away which is a more likely candidate.

So the Dig Tree isn’t really the Dig Tree. We sighed over follies and had another beer. Something kept nagging at us: no matter how hard we tried we tried to get our head around it, the sun had set in the east and the Cooper was running north.

An eerie likeness of the non-hero Robert Burke was carved 30m from the Dig Tree (which is not really the Dig Tree) by John Dick in 1898.

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Paradise a remote crossroad a long way from a pretty resort

Grumpy gas man and dangling bones on the old Strzelecki

Innamincka Jeff just keeps building stuff

Ranger "Duck" gives low-down on Burke

Sitting and sipping on the Cooper wondering why....why....

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