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.
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