Up the track!

We started on the Birdsville track mid-afternoon one day - not sure which such is the joy of our quasi and brief stint at nomadic life - just to get a little distance under our belt before night fall.  We were aiming to stop at a roadside camp site 70 or so Ks north which promised wetlands and birds but although we found the camp site (a desolate place), we didn’t discover the wetlands in spite of talking to the homesteaders who advertise the spot. So we kept going and camped south of the Cooper crossing just as the sky was turning fluorescent pink.  Spectacular!  We sat out under the stars and listened to some wonderful music thanks to a new toy I had bought, a lovely little Bluetooth speaker which belts out a wallop of sound). Life doesn’t get much better than that.

The landscape changed quite a lot as we drove – from scrubby bush, grass and gnarled trees, dry river beds, lush lagoons, dunes and gibber plains and back again. And we fell in love with the outback all over again. We lunched AKA gorged ourselves sick on humungous hamburgers, at Mungerannie pub which is about halfway up the track.  There we found amazing wetlands created by hot water spirting from a bore; our first encounter with the local bird life was tracking, albeit only with binoculars, a pair of brolgas lazily strutting along the grassy banks of the lagoon.  We discovered a number of such oases along the track and each time were surprised and delighted anew at the contrast with the surrounding desert landscape. The second night we pulled up just 90 Ks from Birdsville.  It was one of those fatal decision moments – do we keep going and arrive after dark or stop and arrive a little fresher in the morning?  You guessed it, we stopped to wring one more night out of the desert sky. It was pretty sandy, but we found some hard packed wheel tracks headed in a couple 100m and turned our rig around to park just a tiny bit off that little track and …. double groan, the wheels started spinning in the sand.  Not a good feeling when your rig weighs over 5 tonne!  Help was not at hand … gulp. But we were well prepared for such things, equipment wise at least – lovely new recovery equipment and a sat phone.  In the morning after a night of nightmarish scenarios keeping us from proper rest, we unhooked the van and dug the car out, which was not too hard but a bit nerve racking. The hard, slow part was winching the van inch by inch closer to the wheel tracks so we could hook up to the car.  It took us over 3 hours of digging, hauling a little, digging some more etc etc BUT we made it!  [Note to self – do some strength training when we get back home]. And oh boy the next day, muscles we had forgotten existed, ached and groaned and I discovered overripe bananas where my legs should have been – florid bruises smudged back and front, top to bottom, almost.

Welcome to the desert! We were well and truly in the desert somewhere between the Simpson, Tirari and Sturt’s Stony deserts and for quite some time, drove between large N-S aligned dunes. These have some international notoriety as the largest number of parallel dunes in the world at 1000 plus.  Then Birdsville popped up on the horizon!

Birdsville was interesting but it was hard to imagine what it would be like when the famous races are on and thousands descend on the place.   We spent a few days there making a few repairs to water inlet and outlets as well as brake wires etc but also drove out on every road for a look see.  That included a trip out to Big Red which we climbed – the dune is bright red der! and they say it is the biggest in the thousand odd dunes lined up across the Simpson Desert.   And of course we had a few cold ones and a meal in the famous Birdsville pub.

The town’s water supply is a combination of systems - river water and artesian water which jets out of the ground at over 170 PSI wow! and has to be cooled from 45-50 degrees before being pumped up to storage tanks to reticulate aroud the town.  Quite fascinating to see steam rising off the water as it gushed out – particularly as the ambient temp was over 30 degrees!   

Water is a fascinating phenomenon out in this vast desert system with mighty rivers/creeks such as the Diamantina and Cooper flooding regularly.  The end result is lagoons and wetlands and billabongs along the way. Incidentally the road from BV to Bedourie is called Bilby Way as these little rabbit-like creatures are endemic to the region – we didn’t see any. Bedourie is a levy town like Burke, surrounded by high embankments to protect it from the regularly flooding Eyre creek. Creeks are such a misnomer – most of what they call creeks are huge rivers systems which at certain times of year flood for 10s of Ks across the countryside.  Hence the need for levies even so water and remoteness mean that access is a frequent problem. There are some notable characters who have made this special corner of the world more liveable – Tom Kruse who kept the mail and supplies up to homesteads and stations along the Birdsville track. And way further north on the Cape, ‘Toots’ Holzheimer, mother of eight, who like Tom, hauled general freight, groceries, mining equipment and other necessities on dirt track that most men would never contemplate.  Adventurers or …. ?