We are in Cue, an old gold mining town 659 kms north east of Perth, and once again find there are interesting things in the middle of nowhere.  Today the population is a couple of hundred, but in its hey day, the 1890s, 10,000 people made the town their home.  Now the shops are deserted and you could fire the proverbial cannon down the street and not hit anyone.  Some most impressive buildings stand empty and indicate the proclivities of the old town: the Gentleman’s Club, the Old Gaol, Government buildings, and the Masonic Lodge. Sadly they are closed up and so we do not see what must be beautiful pressed tin interiors. Yet there’s enough in the surrounding area to keep us here for a couple of days. 

We start by driving 40kms west to the genuine ghost town of Big Bell, which between 1937 and 1951 produced 726,298 oz of gold. It was a thriving community with a school and hospital.  There is still a mine out that way, but Big Bell is a ruin with scraps of corrugated iron and broken concrete the only testament to a former life.  There is one standing ruin, the old hotel, which must’ve been most impressive in its day. The remains show triple brick walls, a cellar, and a multitude of rooms.  Now it stands sad and abandoned by all but the ghosts.  We know this as we meet an old timer later who tells tales of going out there when it was still open he said it had a “bad feel” and you didn’t want to be there for too long. Proof positive of a haunting I’d say. 

We carry on to Walga Rock which, after Uluru, is the biggest monolith in Australia: 5 kilometres in diameter, 1.5 kilometres long and 500 metres high.  Unlike Uluru, there are only a dozen people there and most of them are road crew on a lunch break. It also has a couple of hundred metres of Aboriginal art under the overhang on the western wall.

Mysteriously, we are over 300 km from the sea and there is a painting of a white, square-rigged sailing ship with two masts and square portholes. While the origin of the painting is unknown, and there is no accurate dating of the ship, it is believed to have been done before 1900; one theory is that it was done by a Dutch sailor shipwrecked on the coast who was looked after by Aborigines, another theory is that it was done by an Afghan camel guide. Several rows of text under the ship look faintly Arabic, so the latter seems a possibility.

The next excursion, at the behest of Scott, is to the Dalgaranga Crater, a meteorite strike site found in 1921 by an Aboriginal stockman. This is a potentially exciting and interesting trip. Guess what. It’s not. Unless you count seeing the smallest meteorite crater in Australia – 24 metres in diameter and three metres deep – exciting and interesting. Surprisingly, not even the fact this crater is unique as the only one known to have been produced by a mesosiderite projectile, or asymmetries in the crater structure and the ejecta blanket imply that the projectile impacted at low angle from the south-southeast can rouse my interest.

And a final word of advice. When peeing in the outback, always look for ants before dropping your pants.