We are driving west along the Capricorn Highway, across the Queensland Central Highlands on our way to Mt Isa for the rodeo. Highway is an aspirational term, as one lane in each direction really only constitutes a basic road, especially when it seems to narrow alarmingly when a huge truck is coming towards you. I don’t blink till I see the whites of their eyes. Yes, I am towing the caravan – no applause please.
Our first stop is an overnight at a blip on the map – Duaringa. You understand how small a blip when the Post Office cum General Store is also where you pay bills, do banking, buy books and lottery tickets, and it is closed between 10.30am and 2.30pm. The one horse has left town. We park out the back of the Duaringa Hotel, which allows caravans and campers to park up for free. It seems rude not to eat at the pub, so we do. As anticipated, the menu indicates the deep fryer gets no rest. I go off piste and opt for the lamb shank and enjoy really good mash and veg. Yay for country cooking.
The train tracks pass near the pub and we spend more time than is strictly necessary watching the trains – they head inland empty, and back out to Gladstone Port laden with coal. We are agog at the magnitude and the implications for the amount of coal they carry: there are about 20 trains a day each with 102 wagons. Gladstone is a massive port handing about 120 million tonnes of export goods a year, 80% of which is coal.
The towns we pass through are the remnants of larger settlements created as service centres for work crews laying the Central Western Railway line. The towns would swell up to thousands with plenty of pubs to go round, then as the rail head moved on, so did the town. These days most have a service station (servo in Australian) with a bit of a grocery store attached, a pub, and maybe a roadhouse or motel.
I love it when we get to Dingo. Of course we stop to get a photo of the life sized bronze. Sadly it’s too early for lunch or the obvious choice at the roadhouse would be the Dingo Trap Burger, which comes with lashings of chilli sauce to give it some bite. At least it’s not called the Lindy burger.
Blackwater – ironically not the mercenaries – announces itself as the Coal Capital of Australia, and after watching the trains and visiting the International Coal Centre we are in no position to argue. For $5 entry fee, (coal companies aren’t making enough already) we go into the coal mining museum and find out more about how coal is formed, mined and used. My favourite story is the old guy reminiscing about working down the pits (before open cast) in the 1940s. They all used to work naked except for their boots, because their clothes caused chafing with the build up of sweat and coal dust. Second fun fact: I did not know that the CO2 in soda water is a byproduct of the manufacture of coke. And I don’t mean coca cola. The area we are standing on is part of the Bowen Basin which has 25,000 million tonnes of coal reserves, so I do not see Australia running our of soda water any time soon.
The Sapphire gemfields are somewhat confusingly located around a town called Emerald. Encompassing 900 square kms, they date back to 1875 when a Railway Surveyor found the first gem. Enthusiasts still trample the dusty acres fossicking away, but it doesn’t appeal to us. We hear that tourists turn up for a fossick and never leave, so it must be as addictive as methamphetamine.
The gem we find is the world’s biggest sunflower painting. I’m not making this up. Apparently all part of a concept by Cameron Cross to have seven sunflower sculptures in seven countries representing Van Gogh’s seven different sunflower paintings. Emerald got lucky as it is a major sunflower growing area.
We are on a mission so it’s another one nighter, this time by an old railway station in the charmingly named Bogantungan, which is a disused railway station and nothing more. Yet it is famous for all the wrong reasons: in 1960 a rail disaster killed seven and injured 43 when the bridge collapsed after the creek flooded in torrential rain. It happened at 2.30am so the driver didn’t see the bridge was out. When we look at the creek now, it is a harmless dry bed.
You may fear, dear reader, that we are becoming train spotters. I assure you this is not the case: no anoraks were worn in the writing of this blog.