Wednesday Wanderings with ARR authors

When Getting There Is Half The Fun
by Cathryn Hein

As many of you know, I was born and bred in South Australia’s lush lower south-east. It’s glorious country, rich and fertile and blessed with an overabundance of natural assets. My other half though, is from country north Queensland, and a place that couldn’t be more different.

Cathryn Hein. Romance author and rural fiction favourite.

(This blog post was originally published on CathrynHein.com)

The first time I visited Jim’s family in Collinsville, many years ago now, it was like venturing into an alien land. It was hot, dry and dusty. The vegetation was strange, so were the cattle. The colours were muted and the sun didn’t linger in twilight but dipped fast, like a blink. There were cane toads and frighteningly huge bugs and everyone spoke with a strange drawl, and pronounced words like castle wrong.

It didn’t take long to fall in love with the area though. It’s fascinating, possesses its own rugged beauty, the people are kind and generous, there’s history galore, and it’s great fun. Oh, and the steaks are fantastic, as you’d expect in cattle country!

Even though it involves a good few days’ travel, mostly we drive when we visit. The journey is half the pleasure and we take different routes depending on how much of a hurry we’re in and which roads are open (because we tend to travel at Christmas, which is the wet season, often some routes are closed). From where we’re living at the moment, at the bottom of the Blue Mountains on Sydney’s outer western fringe, the round trip is somewhere in the vicinity of 4,000km. That’s a lot of country but every bit of it, even the vast plains, have something interesting to discover.

One of the best trips we did was one Christmas a few years ago, when we travelled the Castlereagh Highway via Lightning Ridge and up the Carnarvon then Dawson Highways to Emerald, and on to Charters Towers via the Gregory Developmental Road.

Here are some photos. Enjoy!

Cathryn

We had a lightning trip to Lightning Ridge on the way up. I wanted to buy myself a black opal. Champagne tastes on beer money, unfortunately! This is the big welcome sign on the Castlereagh Highway. You have to turn off and drive 5kms or so to reach the town. It’s worth doing. Everyone was very friendly and the opals are beautiful.

After driving 2,000 kms what does Jim decide to do the following day? Go for another drive, of course, out to Strathmore Station and the Bowen River pub. I’ve done it a few times and it never seems to get old. Even a flat tyre didn’t put a dampener on the adventure. But I can say that because it wasn’t me who took care of it!

My parents-in-law own a livestock transport company. Here’s me tooling around with one of their cattle trucks. They have lots of these. This truck is only a B-double but they run up to triple road trains which are 53 metres long.

These two pulled up in the drive on Christmas Eve. I was so excited. Thought I was being brought a horse for Christmas!

A family friend invited me to join him while he dropped hay to his cattle. Naturally I said yes. These are Brahman-Droughtmaster crosses. Aren’t the little ones cute?

Spotted this little fellow on a garden tap.

We always pack our golf clubs while travelling. You never know when you’ll sneak a game in. This is one of the holes at Collinsville Golf Club. As you can see, things are a bit less formal out in the country.

I have a thing for curlews. Their call is wonderfully eerie and sometimes they stand stock-still and use their camouflage to do a Jedi mind trick. We are not the curlews you are looking for…

Some country humour. The street sign is from the Australian hotel in Townsville (we adore Townsville and always take the extra 275km run north to visit). The Brandon Tavern’s “crashed” plane’s tail reads: Fly On In For A Coldie. Brandon is south of Townsville on the Bruce Highway.

We saw quite a lot of cattle being driven on the stock routes on the way up and back. Although the photos don’t show it, there was a shocking drought in parts of Queensland and NSW at the time with farmers in terrible straits (in some areas this is still the case, sadly). There were places that hadn’t seen rain for over two years. To maintain valuable breeders, station owners sent them to graze the stock routes. (Apologies for the poor quality photos. Our windscreen was a tad bug-splattered!)

We experienced a few Dorothea Mackellar moments on the drive home. Hit a dust storm between St George and Dirranbandi only to encounter flogging rain 5 kilometres later.

I really adore it when a country town teams together to create something special. Gulargambone on the Castlereagh River in central NSW (population 500 but “flying ahead”) has played with their name to create a galah theme. There are murals and smile-inducing galah artwork in and outside town. Love it.

Where have you enjoyed an Aussie country adventure?

Read more about Cathryn and her books on Meet Cathryn Hein here on ARR
Or find Cathryn on her website CathrynHein.com
And visit Cathryn on Facebook Cathryn Hein on Facebook

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