Travelling East

Crossing the Gregory River (before the wheels went off the edge)

Statue of Frederick Walker who was one of those sent to find the Burke & Wills expedition

Camping at Burke & Wills' Camp 119

Lifesize replica of Krys, the 8.6m crocodile caught in the Normanton River in the 1970's

Daniel in the Croydon jail!

The last few days have been pretty much just about travelling East. We left Riversleigh yesterday morning and drove north to Burketown. We didn’t have much luck in the morning in that I backed into a bollard trying to hitch up the car to leave (thank god I was going slowly so no real dents) and then Nick took our right hand wheels off the edge of a causeway when crossing our first river – luckily the water wasn’t deep and the causeway wasn’t raised up very far so he could drive them back on again, no damage done, just my nerves! It was funny after being on such isolated, empty roads on the way to Lawn Hill National Park, this way out seemed to have heaps of traffic – obviously we came the wrong way in! Burketown is pretty small but we still visited the one room library (we take every opportunity to update our laptop’s audiobook library) and had a sandwich lunch in the park. We then bush camped at Camp 119 just before Normanton, which was one of Burke & Wills’ last camps before hitting the northern coast. Although there’s some information there, sadly the trees that they etched their messages on (ie dig 24ft NE) to tell their party where food or a message was buried aren’t there any more. Their expedition was in the 1860’s and although they made it in sight of the sea, almost all of them eventually died before getting back. The doctor that signed on with them initially in Melbourne seems like the smart one, he turned back at Menindee, realising that to go through the centre in the wet season was crazy!

We woke up in the night to high winds, not that they were blowing the tent around but we hadn’t put up the annex, arriving so late at night, and the wind had blown it off the top of the tent (where we leave it permanently attached and folded back if not using it) and down over our front door. Also the campsite had lots of bulldust so that was being blown everywhere. As Nick commented though, at least it’s such fine dust that you can’t see that you’re eating it in your cereal…. Conor was back into the underneath of the trailer to eat his breakfast since I wouldn’t let him eat it in the car. We drove into Normanton but didn’t end up liking it that much – the visitor’s centre is great and has lovely people, plus it’s also the library so we made good use of that, but the other shops just weren’t that friendly, with the bakery having lots of abrupt signs ‘do NOT poke the bread, this is a bakery, not a supermarket’, ‘do NOT ask for lollies all of the same colour’ etc etc. We didn’t hang around that long anyway, and after a quick lunch kept going to Croydon which had much nicer people – the lovely lady in the General Store let us fill up with water (even without buying fuel), we had some afternoon tea and walked around a few of the old buildings like the courthouse and police station etc. They had some examples of old court records, particularly some concerning local women ‘Daisy Barton arrested for being drunk, again, and using insulting language to the constabulary who picked her up from where she was lying on the main road, questioning his parentage…’ etc etc, quite a nice little town.