Donohue

The Mayor of Boulia Shire has been grabbing some airtime of late posturing that he will close the Donohue Highway in July unless the state government takes over the funding of the road maintenance. He says the road is an essential economic link for the state and beyond the means of the 500 residents of the shire and is in a poor state of repair. Well, clearly he is just grandstanding. Perhaps he doesn’t have the money for maintenance, but in no way is the road dangerous or in a parlous state.

We find ourselves in the recently reopened Tobermorey Station. I haven’t found out the details, but having closed in about 2006 to visitors, it has reopened with much fanfare and is available for overnight campers and fuel. The welcoming committee consisted of a donkey and a very old Irish Wolfhound. Our stop down the road to collect firewood was unnecessary as that is all part of the service.

The aim was to get in, get the fire going and see about this mutton roast that has been in the queue for a couple of days. If anything, the combustibility of mutton fat and the dry explosiveness of desert timber had us underway rather more rapidly than I might have planned. It was all good though and the succulent mutton did its thing with the vegies and gave us the perfect birthday dinner for Isabel.

The plan had been for a night on the Georgina River not quite so far down the road. As it turns out, the Georgina was largely dry, with the sandy riverbed being down steep slopes and the flies being thick up top. The hastily convened meeting of the accommodation committee decreed that anywhere else would be better than there, so off we went.

The early Middleton morning gave us a brief shower, amplified by the tin roof of the “community hall”. Not even enough to settle the dust, any discussion about whether it would make a difference to the road later was entirely unwarranted.

The road into Boulia was surprisingly dramatic in places, especially considering the majority of the land out here is vastly flat and open. Being an ancient inland seabed filled slowly over millions of years has led to mostly flat land with the occasional hard crust which resisted erosion, forming the characteristic “jump ups” typical of this area.

Boulia is a neat little town and provided us with some last minute grocery topups and diesel at 175.9 which should hopefully get us to Alice Springs. The turnoff onto the Donohue saw the amount of traffic drop away to the point where we have probably only seen a dozen cars in 250km.  While being rather less than I might have expected, you still really don’t yet get the feeling of being remote or isolated.

The cloud cover continues  to keep the night times warmish, so no more frosts, which is welcome. No expanses of stars however. Still some time to go though.