The beautiful dawn view from the balcony of the Brewarrina Hotel disguised the storms that were brewing.
With rising morning sun shining over my shoulder, conditions were right for an early start on the 1200km ride home.
The rest area by the Bogan River in Nyngan is the perfect stop for a roadside breakfast. The decorative post showing the height of major floods that have hit Nyngan.
Painted grain silos are a well-known feature of the North Western Victoria, in the big river country, there is a water tower art trail.
It was a nice dry 700km ride to Nerrandera and a comfy room at the Historic Star Lodge. It is a beautiful historic building with many of the original features.
And a view over the township from the balcony.
The last stop on the central plains of NSW was the small Riverena town of Urana.
The diarama of sheep, shepherd, and horse at the southern end of town is a unique piece of street art.
The picnic area on the lake is the perfect place for barrista made coffee for morning tea.
Across the Murray River, I was soon in North East Victoria, on the edge of the Australian Alps, in the cool autumn air of the King and Goulburn River Valleys.
It was an easy run home through the hills to end a little 11 day tour out to the edge of the outback.
"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea,
From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me.
From “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” by Banjo Patterson.
I like stopping at the towns and villages recounted in the early Australian balads.
The flood plains of the Namoi River were full of water.
In the “land of drought and flooding rain” therehe had been a flooding monsoon north in tropical Queensland a couple of months earlier. The flood waters were slowly moving south, bringing vital water to the edge of the Outback as it travels thousands of kilometres to the Murray River, which empties into the Southern Ocean.
Wallgett was just a photo stop as my destination was Lightning Ridge, famous for its Opals.
Lightning Ridge is very much more a tourist town rather than a prospecting these days. Especially if compared to the Opel prospecting South Australia, Coober Pedy, and Blinman.
There are some good aspects to a tourist town….
The street art…
The Opal shops…
Even fine coffee with delicious apple strudel and ice cream.
Lightning Ridge sits on the Great Artesian Drive, a series of thermal baths drawing water from Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
It was hot 30c in Lightning Ridge so I enjoyed the cold water of the campground pool to the hot spa.
My next stop was Brewarrina and little detour to Goodooga for a hot bath in the cool of the morning.
I arrived at the Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Brewarrina for the last cultural tour of the day
Brewarrina sits where the northern rivers come together to form the Darling River, which funels the monsoon rains of the tropical north of Australia southward along the edge of the Outback, providing precious water to a dry land.
Drone photo by Dave Kelly
Brewarrina, which means Tall Trees, was/is a special meeting place for Aboriginal Australians. The rock fish traps pictured above were built over 10,000 years ago. And were an intrcately designed so that fish could be caught and stored in ponds.
This photograph (below) from 1870 shows aboriginal children collecting fish from the fish traps.
Photo in Aboriginal Cultural Centre.
The banks of the Darling River also contain ochre, which is used for skin care and decoration by aboriginal people.
White ochre on the river bank.
Unfortunately, the high state of the river had covered fish traps. But a river full of water is something beautiful in itself.
And on the river bank, I spied some some red tailed black cockatoos. A beautiful bird that lives along the rivers on the edge of the outback.
From Brewarrina, it was time to follow the river flow south toward home.
You really know you are back in the outback when you find emus running down the main street of the town.
I’d spent the night at the pub in Nymagee on my way to the Macquarie Marshes, a 198sqkm oasis in the dry plains of North West NSW.
The fact that you are in the Outback is reinforced when you confront a road train at a water crossing!
I set up camp in Coolabah Gum woodland opposite the woolshed at Willie Retreat about 5km from the southern end of the Macquarie Marshes.
The woodland was home to a beautiful selection of small woodland birds.
The oldest known Coolabah gum is 300+ years old. The Coolabahs in this woodland were old and gnarled with plenty of hollows to form homes for the little birds.
The next day, I woke to a beautiful outback dawn…
And headed down to marshes.
In the light of the day, the small birds were flittering around, catfish were jumping, waders were hunting, and the pelicans rode high on the thermal updrafts.
As the sun went down, the mood and colours changed.
Across the water, a crafty fox was keeping an eye on me.
The Birruma Boardwalk is 25km north od Willie Retreat and provides a way of walking through the, otherwise, impenetrable reeds and across the top of the boggy marshes.
A further 50km up.the road, at the northern end of the Marshes, is the town of Carinda famous for cotton growing and for having tge pub where David Bowie’s Lets Dance film clip was recorded.
The Murray and Darling rivers converge at Wentworth. These rivers form the Murray – Darling Basin which is an area important for both food production and environmental diversity.
The Murray starts in the Australian Alps near Mount Kosciusko fed by snow melt and Alpine rain. The Darling is fed by the monsoons of northern Australia. In the photo you can see the muddy water of the Darling in the foreground as it mergers into blue water of the Murray.
I camped 20km down stream of the rivers junction on the banks of the Murray.
Beside the Murray River as it slowly rolls south west to the Southern Ocean around 500km away.
In many ways the Murray forms the southern boundary of the Outback or at least the southern east corner of the hot dry lands that are the outback.
I had ridden up from a cultural holiday in Adelaide and this was the first stop on the edge of the outback that would lead me to Mungo National Park (my next stop) then up the Darling to Bourke (previous post).
Leaving the banks of the Murray it was onto the dirt roads to get out to Mungo National Park – A World Heritage area.
It was hot and I was happy to set up my tent under a shady tree
The Park was once sheep station and the old shearing shed a relic of those times.
Mungo National Park has both colonial and aboriginal history. The colonial history goes back a century or so. The aboriginal history is an over 46,000 years continual association with the land.
This long association was confirmed with the finding of the remains Mungo Man and Mungo Lady. These remains that have been dated as 46,000 years old. These are the oldest homosapian remains found on the Australian Continent. These are also some of the oldest examples of ritualistic burial any where in the world. If you want more information follow this link: https://learn.culturalinfusion.org.au/story-of-mungo-man-and-mungo-lady/
Another feature of Lake Mungo is the sand dunes that stretch for 135km across the horizon like the walls of China, but nature made.
Areas of dunes are called Lunettes because of the luna type landscape. But in these dunes are artefacts tens of thousands of years old.
At sunset the dunes tale on a redish hue as the sun burns the sky orange and red.
That night I slept with wonderment of the place and what a tiny spec modern humanity is on the universe while sleeping under the milky way.
In the morning I did a tour of the dunes with an aboriginal ranger. As part of the tour I help artefacts 10,000 years old and heard stories of the land, this place that had been passed down from generation to generation in the oldest continuous culture in the world. Stories and rituals that had their origin back 46,000 years ago.
As I left Lake Mungo there was a Sand Goanna on the side of the road.
I thought it was wishing me a fond farewell but, looking back, I think that it was a sign that the 350+km of dirt road I had before me to get to Bourke was going to be a difficult and sandy ride.
