Leaving Birdsville early in the morning, I passed the racecourse. During the race weekend, the population of Birdsville grows from around 120 permanent residents to over 7000, as it’s an iconic outback event. Quiet today, though.
Heading east, there’s a whole lot of nothing – until you hit an indigenous art installation built into the side of a hill, visible from several kilometres away.
The next town east is the vast metropolis of Betoota, population zero. No joke, that’s what the sign says. The roadhouse and general store that is the entire town closed in 1997, but the town is still gazetted and appears on maps. Interesting place.
Still moving east, the road rises over a range of hills that have a lookout over the vast empty plains at the top.
The land started to look a little more fertile, covered in low grasses with occasional lines of trees where the creeks run. This land hasn’t been cleared, they’re natural grasslands that make reasonable grazing pasture.
I refueled in Windorah, a small town with around 100 residents and one major claim to fame – they’re the first town in Australia to be wholly solar powered. The power station on the edge of town makes for interesting viewing.
Pushing ever east, I ended up passing through the Welford National Park. This character was sunning himself on the road. Bigger than you’d think, too – he would have been a metre long!
Then I reached the Barcoo River, made famous by Banjo Patterson. During droughts it becomes a series of patchy waterholes and billabongs lined with coolabah trees, but when the rains come it links in a huge network of feeder streams and creeks, flooding and cutting off wide swathes of land.
Livestock on the road was a constant issue – there’s far too much of the road network to fence off every paddock, so the stock wander onto the road, then stand there dumbly as you approach, until you honk the horn or rev the engine to scare them off.
My stop for the night was in a tiny town called Yaraka, population 12, once the final station on the rail network. The campground behind the pub happened to have a dozen or so Vietnam veterans who had come to the town for Anzac Day the day before, so the pub was alive and kicking that night, as many old war stories were told.
-s
