The Maranoa

Major Mitchell was one of the explorers we all are told about when we learn about Australian history in primary school. He wandered through the place where current day St. George stands on St. George’s day, and found a natural bridge over the river here. He suggested that an outpost be founded here, and it was. The natural bridge is still there - more of a ford - and I visited it and the walking trees this morning (the trees look like they’re walking because this section of the river floods regularly and the soil from around the roots gets washed away.

Soon after leaving St. George, I saw a sign that I was entering the Maranoa - yet another area often referred to in droving songs, often coupled with the word “swampy”. I find it hard to think of this area of the world as swampy, or even wetland, because for most of the time it’s not very wet. All the places I’ve been going through do get floods, but more often they get droughts. There’s recently been a lot of rain throughout the whole of Queensland that I’m going through, but the roads I’m using are no longer flooded, and the rivers are at normal levels even though there’s wet ground everywhere, and the grass is all green. However every dip in the road seems to be named something swamp - paradise swamp, green swamp… But they’re all dry at the moment.

Towns are becoming sparse and I only passed one today on my way to Roma. Surat has a museum in the old Cobb and Co changing station. This was the place where the last Cobb and Co carriage service left in 1924. The museum was well worth visiting. I wandered along the Balonne River there. It also has a nice walk along the river, and some interesting cultural places being built.

I arrived in Roma and visited The Big Rigg. This is a tribute to the oil and gas industry, which started in Roma in Australia. Roma only gets 600mm of rain a year (probably similar to the amount of rain that every town I’ve been through gets), and it’s very sporadic. They don’t have a river, only a small creek, so water catchment is out. That leaves drilling a bore. So that’s what they did. 

After several unsuccessful attempts, suddenly a bore struck gas and some unusable water which jetted high into the air. They decided to make a good thing out of their bad luck (they WERE drilling for water), and stored the gas and plumbed the town for gas lighting. With great fanfare, the lights were turned on, only to go off ten nights later.

The search for water continued. Someone also decided to search for oil and gas. They struck gas with another bore, which was unfortunately too close to a steam boiler. The gas caught fire, the boiler exploded and for seven weeks 18 meter gas flames gushed from the bore. The railway ran tour trains from Brisbane for people keen to see the flames.

After that, Roma became the centre of the Australian oil and gas industry. They did eventually drill bores that delivered only water. The Big Rigg is a fantastic exhibition, and I got in for half price since it’s half price until August.

Roma’s other claim to fame is the bottle trees. These are endemic to Queensland and are not related to boabs. There are two types, and the town has planted them as street trees, so they’re everywhere.

Remember that they’re on a tiny creek? It flooded three times in two years in 2010 - 2012. The floods were over 8 metres and damaged 400 houses in Roma.

The Lower Balonne Floodplain

The great artesian basin is the world’s largest and deepest freshwater aquifer. Some of the water that comes from it is estimated to be 4 million years old. It’s the only way Australia has settlements in many places since we have so much desert. Unfortunately, Europeans created a lot of uncapped bores which have been gradually reducing the amount of fresh water stored.

Lightning Ridge has an artisan bore pool that anyone can use anytime - as long as it’s not when it’s being cleaned between 10am and 12 noon every day. This morning I went to the bore pool before 6am when it was pitch dark (remember, it’s winter solstice here) and watched dawn break. It was only 7C, but the bore is about 41C, so it was really nice in the pool, gazing up at the stars. The pool was like Dante’s inferno with the lights shining through the huge clouds of steam rising from the pool. It was a great experience.

After that I visited the Chambers of the Black Hand sculptures. There are over 900 sculptures decorating the walls of a historic opal mine. It’s pretty good. It’s very derivative and includes the last supper, superman and other comic heros, various Egyptian figures, Snow White and the seven dwarves on a dinosaur… think madam Trudeau in sandstone rather than wax. It has awe inspiring quantity even if the quanlity isn’t quite as good.

I visited the giant emu (Stanley) for the last time and went northward, crossing into Queensland. My destination was St. George, and I went through Hebel and Dirranbandi on the way. Hebel is at an T intersection, and I felt like I was in outback Australia. The pub was on one side of the road, the general store on the other, and the accomodation on the top of the T was dongas. The road was very wide and all these huge cars with enormous caravans were parked in several lines. The general store makes good pies. I don’t think there was anything else in Hebel. The road had grids at every property boundary (there aren’t many), and there were signs that there was no fencing along the road so animals could stray onto them (when did they start putting up signs about this?), so I was definitely beginning to be in the outback.

I had been looking forward to Dirranbandi, and it met my expectations. Many years ago someone was perusing the Queensland Railway Timetable, and wrote a song based on the information in it. As I understand it, everything in the song actually came from the timetable, including information behind the line “passengers have died of hunger during halts at Garradunga”, but it may be apocryphal. Anyway, “iron rations come in handy on the way to Dirranbandi” is another line from the same song, so I knew that Dirranbandi must have had a railway station at some stage. Most of the railway lines and the accompanying stations have disappeared, so I wasn’t expecting a working railway.

I was also informed that Dirranbandi has a Russian baker at the bakery who bakes a fantastic array of sweet cakes. I can report that there is a second cafe at Dirranbandi, and that the park next to the bakery has a variety of information about the area. I was interested that there are several types of vegetation communities in the area. I’d noticed this as I travelled. The coolibah/ black box woodland is dominated by these eucalypts. Then there are poplar box/leopardwood woodlands which are quite different, and definitely not eucalyptus trees. The other vegetation community is ironbark (another eucalypt) stony ridges. Then there are grasslands and sand ridges. The reason for so many different vegetation communities is that this area is the lower Balonne floodplain, where the Balonne river divides into over 1500 km of channels and tributaries, forming 3 million hectares of wetland - the largest in the Murray-darling basin. The giant Cubbie cotton farm is at Dirranbandi, and there’s a lot of cotton grown in the area - you can see tufts of it that have fallen off trucks all along the sides of the road. The area has very intermittent rainfall so most farming is by irrigation.

After Dirranbandi I diverged from my route to visit Thallon where there are some painted grain silos. There were also huge piles of wheat under blue tarpaulins which I photographed. Unfortunately I’m having some problems with my photos, so there aren’t any here yet.

St. George was a pleasant surprise. It’s a beautiful town beside a long wide stretch of the Balonne River. The river has paths and a park along its length. I walked around the heritage trail in town, admiring the churches, hospitals, hotels and other features mentioned by the walking guide I found in my hotel room. Unfortunately the artesian baths open between 11 and 4, but not on Mondays, so I missed out on a warm soak.

Journey to Lightning Ridge

Today I travelled from Dubbo to Lightning Ridge. It started being quite foggy, but after a while the fog cleared. By this time I was definitely going through the western plains. Not a hill to be seen, and I was in sheep and wheat country.

One of the reasons I’m taking the route I am is to see places I’ve heard of through folk music over the years. Australia has lots of songs about drovers and shearers moving from place to place. The western plains figured in several, as did Gilgandra, which I came across soon after leaving Dubbo. It’s very flat.

I came across Gulargambone shortly after leaving Gilgandra. For many years there has been a radio program called Australia All Over (also known as Maccas on a Sunday morning). The host rocked up to a country town that no one bar the inhabitants has ever heard of, and they all line up to talk to him, or tell stories or play music… People also ring in from all around Australia to report on strange stuff, like leaches. I was in Narrandera one weekend for their annual parade. Everyone in the town and for miles around seemed to be in the parade - the primary schools, the sports teams, the police, fire brigade, … That was on the Saturday. Then, bright and early on Sunday morning, when everyone should have been bleary eyed from everything on Saturday, there was macca on stage in the park with this enormous queue of people waiting to talk to him for a few seconds. This started before 7am (the show goes live at 7:30am). It was a tremendously popular show.

You may wonder what this has to do with Gulargumbone. Somehow, the town featured more often than you’d expect on the show when I used to listen to it. It also came first in NSW in the tidy towns competition in 2004.

This century quite a few towns have been painting pictures on their silos. I passed my first one for this trip at Coonamble and I didn’t see any others, although many properties had silos, and there were the massive piles of wheat covered with blue tarpaulins that you see in wheatbelts at this time of year all around Australia.

I also passed a memorial to John Oxley’s 1818 expedition. But the best thing I passed was the giant emu near Lightning Ridge. It’s astoundingly tall and is made out of several satellite dishes and two Volkswagens amongst other pieces of metal.

Then I arrived in Lightning Ridge. They mine black opals. I think it’s the only place in the world that has black opals, which are more impressive than any other opals. Way back when I was a child, in the middle of summer, my grandparents took me from Melbourne to Brisbane, and we visited Lightning Ridge. I had never seen a place so poor. It would have been very hot - probably over 40C. People were living in hessian tents. Someone had made their home from beer bottles. Everyone lived among mullock heaps. The roads meandered between the dwellings which were all on claims, so there were lots of holes in the ground.

Today Lightning Ridge is a proper town, with houses with fences and gardens. There are all sorts of facilities. There are some outstanding tourist attractions (one of which was voted the second best tourist attraction in Australia). It’s better than either of the other opal mining towns I’ve visited. Unfortunately, the mines here have to be braced with timbers. In Cooper Pedy the rock doesn’t need to be braced and they have lots of underground buildings, including a hotel, so the people can avoid hot summer weather. I went around the workings, and saw the Lunatic Hill open cut, which shows the rock strata and where the opals are found.

Dubbo

Today I started my epic adventure. I went to Dubbo, which I’ve been to a number of times before although I haven’t seen any of its well known attractions, and I’m not going to this time either. I’ve also been to most of the places I passed on the way.

I went to Cowra, which has incredible Japanese connections since it had a POW camp that included a Japanese section. One night the Japanese rioted and escaped, overwhelming the Australians manning the gun emplacements, and killing several with baseball bats and knives. Over 200 Japanese died, over 100 were wounded and over 300 escaped. A war cemetery was built for them, and every Japanese soldier who died in Australia (including those shot down in Darwin) is buried there. Cowra is the site of the first Australian peace bell and they have the best Japanese garden in Australia. 

I’ve visited all these on previous occasions, but I’ve never been to the visitors centre before. It has a hologram of the POW camp which was very interesting. It mentioned that there was also a contingent of Indonesian POWs who the Dutch had convinced Australia to intern. At some stage (before the riot) Australia decided that they weren’t POWs but were political prisoners, so they were released. There were also Germans and Italians at the POW camp.

Outside the visitors centre is the Cowra rose garden.

As I arrived in Boorowa I noticed that the sign said they were home to the best merinos in Australia. Since Australian merinos are the best in the world, I don’t know why they didn’t say that they were the best anywhere. Anyway, I thought that was a pretty tall order, so I stopped at the visitors centre and asked why they were the best. I was told that the family that started merinos in Boorowa started them in Australia (wasn’t that the McArthurs I said - well they took over from the McArthurs) and still, to this day they win prizes every year for their fine merinos. Which probably means that they ARE the best in the world.

Parkes was also on my way to Dubbo. Usually I go to Canowindra and visit the age of fishes museum and marvel at the Devonian rocks there. So this time I went a different way, via Parkes. As I was on my way there, I wondered how it got its name. It was obviously named after Henry Parkes (generally credited with being the father of Australian federation after he gave the Tenterfield address). However, Parkes would have existed before Henry Parkes was famous. Evidently the town decided to name itself Parkes after Henry visited it in 1873. It was called Bushman before that.

Anyway, Parkes is famous partly because of its telescope and the lies of a film called “The Dish”. “The Dish” is about the first human landing on the moon and the role Australian telescopes had in it. However, the Parkes telescope wasn’t the only one involved, and, in fact the actual first footsteps on the moon were recorded by the Honeysuckle Creek telescope, a few kilometres from where I live, because the astronauts decided to jump ship early, and Honeysuckle Creek was the only telescope in transmission range at the time. That’s why the first steps are so blurry. Parkes took over about five minutes later, and because it’s much bigger, the rest of the transmission isn’t as bad. I was surprised that the Parkes telescope is in a valley. All the telescopes around home are on the tops of peaks and I thought that’s where you tried to build them. The area is pretty flat, being on the edge of the western plains. Parkes itself is quite a large town and is on the top of the biggest hill in the area. The telescope is a radio telescope and is some kilometres out of town.

Okinoerabujima

Today we reached Okinoerabu Island, the second most southerly of the Amami Islands, famous for its limestone caves. 

This is a tropical coral island. I went to the Shoryudo Cave. 

I was one of the last to walk down to the cave, and at the entrance, the sight of the people ahead of me gave me a good impression of the size of the cave - it’s enormous! 

It has lots of stalactites and stalagmites, and features that are sacred to the local people. 

There’s even a Tori gate in the cave to indicate a significant part of it. 

Most of the lights were plain white, but several areas of the cave had been lit in saturated colours that changed as you looked. 

Eventually we came out of the cave.

We then visited the town, 

where they were having the Okinoerabu Agricultural Festival.

In the afternoon, we visited the limestone coast at the Fucha Blowhole, which reminded me of Christmas Island. 

There were several blowholes, but we weren’t there at the right time for them to blow. 

We then visited Japan’s most majestic banyan tree at the local school.

As we prepared to leave, the islanders danced for us.

Amami Ōshima

Today we’re at Amami Oshima which has the second largest mangrove forest in Japan. We docked this morning, and went to Oshima Tsumugimura to see traditional Tsumugi silk being made. This is a very long, labour intensive precision dying and weaving process. Firstly, silk thread is wound into bundles the width of the weft of a loom (the thread is very long, as it will be used in either the warp or weft of the final cloth). These bundles are woven into a cotton fabric. 

Starch is precisely applied to this cotton and silk fabric to act as a resist in the dying process so that exact parts of the silk thread will be undyed. 

Before the cotton and silk fabric is dyed, it is washed in a mineral rich mud for between five and twenty minutes. I think the mud acts as a mordant, and, like many mordants, it changes the colour produced by the dye. 

The dye is made from pieces of wood from this tree, 

which are then chipped and boiled for two hours 

to create a vat full of dye. 

The cotton and silk fabric is dipped repeatedly into the dye vat (between one and five times), and then dried. The dye will give it colours ranging from brown to black. The silk bundles in the pictures show how the colour varies depending on the amount of dipping.

If other colours are wanted, once the starch has been removed, areas of the silk are coloured. 

The cotton and silk fabric is then cut and the cotton is discarded, while the silk is wrapped on spools. The silk that is to be the warp is used to dress the loom. 

Then the weavers weave the weft threads which have also come from a cotton and silk fabric that’s been through the process. 

The weavers check every thread they weave to ensure its placement is correct.

The resulting pure silk fabric would have to be some of the most expensive, given the process. I was really happy that I’d been able to visit.

After we finished there, we visited the Tanaka Isson Art Museum, dedicated to the vibrant work of this renowned artist. The building was very interesting, and, although we weren’t allowed to take photos, they allowed me to take a photo of the building from inside.

I visited a museum that depicted life on the island in the afternoon. 

At night, the local people gave us a dance display wearing traditional costumes as we prepared to depart. Like most of the islands, before the Japanese took over, it was a matrilineal society, with female priestesses at the top echelon of society.

Suwanosejima

Today we visited another active volcano. Japan has over 100 of them, more than just about every other country, and accounts for more than 10% of all active volcanoes in the world. Today we sailed around one, on our way south to see more of the Japanese island chain. Suwanosejima is one of the most active, and the island has been in a near continuous state of eruption since 1949. It emits a lot of ash, so the ground isn’t very stable, and landslides occur frequently. It was interesting seeing how verdant it was, and the amount of erosion.