July 31 Cloncurry

Surprise! This report is coming to you from Cloncurry not Kynuna. We left Winton fully expecting to be spending the night at the Blue Healer Hotel at Kynuna but this was not to be. The drive out of Winton was a bit like the drive in – flat, dry and barren as we travelled across more black soil/Mitchell grass plains. The most common vegetation was Mimosa, a shrub which grows up to 2 or 3 m in height and like rabbits and cane toads is another “good” idea gone wrong. Stock will apparently eat it but it has taken over large areas and degraded the value of the country if infests. I’ll try and attach a couple of photos of it. We stopped at Combo Waterhole just before Kynuna – it’s an 8 km drive in off the main road and then a walk of 1 ½ km to reach the actual waterhole. Why did we stop there? Combo Waterhole was the place Patterson had in mind when he wrote Waltzing Matilda. It’s also on Dagworth Station which is the property where the woman who played the tune lived. After we left Combo Waterhole we stopped at Kynuna, another 15 km down the road and decided that we didn’t really want to stop there for the night. As it was only 1 o’clock we decided to set off for McKinlay, another small hamlet about an hour’s drive further on. The Walkabout Hotel is at McKinlay and it was the setting for the Crocodile Dundee movie. After a wander around and a cold drink at the pub, we decided we didn’t really want to spend the night there either. A phone call to Cloncurry informed us that we could come into our booking a day earlier and that seemed like a good plan. Just after leaving McKinlay we travelled over some horrendous bitumen road and everything in the van, including the passengers in the Prado, were all shook up. The last 100 km to Cloncurry saw us leave the black soil plains behind and pass through red-soil hilly country, more densely wooded and with millions of anthills up to a metre in height. It was a nice change. It was also obvious just how dry it is around here. Cloncurry is on Level 5 water restrictions so the situation is quite serious. We heard the mayor on ABC radio this morning and apparently a lot of the accommodation in the town is taken up by mine workers who are contributing to the usage problem but not counted as part of the permanent population. He said there are twelve mines in the area either in production or in the development stage. As it was quite late by the time we got here we haven’t really had a look at the town yet although we did find a Woolworths – a real supermarket! There’s a Mardi Gras here tomorrow night and a rodeo on the weekend.