bobmcgee

Farina …

The Flinders was as dry as a chip. We took the scenic route through the Parachilna Gorge – not as scenic as Glass Gorge but gentler on the trailer. Then north up the Outback Highway. There was some green pick after Leigh Creek, then some surface water and by the time we pulled into Farina actual grass and even some mud. And by all accounts there’s a lot more of that ahead of us.

This route north brings you face to face with history, John McDouall Stuart followed by the Overland Telegraph, then the Ghan, the birth and death of little towns like Farina. How could you not love this country?

A number of things had conspired to draw people north from Adelaide. As dry as it is, cattle and sheep can be grazed in the hinterland. The railway provided a good way to transport them to market. The telegraph and the railway provided employment. And of course, at the time it was thought that the rain would follow the plough. Plant your crops and the rain would come, a theory promoted by scientists of the day such as the noted American climatologist Cyrus Thomas. The settlement here was founded in 1878 as Government Gums. Its name was changed to Farina to reflect the intention to grow wheat. It grew to reach a peak population of approximately 600 in the late 1800s. It was the rail head for a time. In its heyday, the town had two hotels (the Transcontinental and the Exchange) and an underground bakery, a bank, two breweries, a general store, an Anglican church, five blacksmiths, a school and a brothel. Wild oats were sewn but no wheat was grown. All that remains today are the ruins and the cemetery.

It’s a great camp site and an excellent spot for birding. Inflation has hit, the fee is now $10 per person per night, a 100% increase in 9 years. The bakery has been restored and is in action during the winter months when the camp is busy. At the moment we have it almost to ourselves.

Flinders Ranges …

A few days ago We saw in the day on a friends property in the Victorian Goldfields …

and then headed west passing through Horsham which has grown some silo art since we were last there …

After a couple of nights in the west of Victoria it was on to South Australia and the Flinders Ranges. Matthew Flinders was the first to circumnavigate Australia and was also influential in having the name Australia adopted for good old New Holland. He sailed up into Spencer Gulf in March of 1802 and landed a party that were the first Europeans to encounter the rather spectacular mountain range now named after him.

This little party, two Australians and a Fox Terrior, have spent the day touring around spectacular landscapes and fighting off some spectacular birds. Wilpena Pound is perhaps the most famous spot in the range but we can thoroughly recommend the Glass Gorge route from Blinman to Parachilna and the Morelana Scenic Drive.

Along the way we stopped at the tree where Harold Cazneaux took a photo in 1937 that he titled Spirit of Endurance. It won him numerous prizes in photographic competitions. Unless you are prepared to climb a fence you can no longer stand down in the creek bed where Harold took his photo but I had a go at reproducing the shot. Here is my homage to Cazza …

Tomorrow we head north. Modifications are needed to plan A but according to a very helpful man at the William Creek Hotel we will probably be able to negotiate the southern section of the Oodnadatta Track but will have to divert to Coober Pedy at William Creek. The problem is not so much the flooding but the damage caused by people driving on it when it was wet and plastic.

The Todd River at Alice Springs actually has water in it – it does happen occasionally. While the Tanami is under water! Further modifications to our plan will need to be made in due course.

You Must Be Joking …

Oh the Irony …

Tomorrow the journey home begins in earnest. Australia is the driest inhabited continent, about 35% is full-on desert. I’m sitting in Victoria which is parched (although none of it really desert). The proposed route home …

… about half of the route is closed due to flooding.

It takes in the Oodnadatta Track and the Tanami Desert. It would be the shortest but certainly not the quickest way home. Much of the journey would be on unsealed roads. It would probably count as the route less traveled in the guide books and in my view is the route most interesting.

I have prepared two other routes. Decision time will be in the Flinders Ranges four or five days hence.

Braeside Park …

It was the 2nd of April 1989, opening day of the new metropolitan park. It was extremely busy. In I drove through the northern gate. I followed the road which ringed the picnic area. Traffic was nose to tail, moving at a snail’s pace. Each of the carparks were full and having completed the circuit I was decanted back onto Lower Dandenong Road. I found a carpark at the second attempt.

In the early days I coordinated bird counts in the park and I was involved in a long running banding project. The bird list grew apace. A walk around the park’s 310ha (770 acres) would yield about 50 species in about 3 hours at a bird watcherly pace. According to eBird the list now stands at 188 species.

Braeside Park is one of the first places I head to when back in Melbourne. The number of bird watchers is up, the number of bird species is down. Many of the birdos are carrying cameras with very long lenses. It seems that the advances in photography have attracted many more people to the hobby.

The decline in species is probably due to a number of causes. There has been considerable development surrounding the park. Previously raptors such as Swamp Harrier could range over the park and extensive grasslands outside the fence. Now they just have the park which may not be enough for full time habitation. In addition Melbourne has had a very dry summer which may have caused some species to go looking elsewhere. And it’s autumn, the summer migrants have gone.

Nonetheless the park remains an outstanding place to watch birds.

Melbourne …

A simplified map of the road trip so far looks like this …

There is a considerable discrepancy between the distance shown on the map and the trip metre in the car which stands at more than 15,000km. Simplification does that sort of thing. We have been exploring!

Marvelous Melbourne is where I spent the largest part of my working life, it’s where my small family lives and it’s also en route to becoming the most populous city in Australia and bankrupt. Each to his or her own, I can see many advantages to living in Broome, beautiful beaches, little traffic, warm winters but of course there’s a but. Medical facilities are very limited. Getting to see a doctor takes ages and you’re unlikely to see the same doctor twice. Anything sophisticated is a 2000km journey to Perth. Melbourne continues to be where I take care of the routine side of my medical care. I’ll be here until my new glasses are ready.

Meanwhile it’s great to catch up with my family and my friends and to go birding in old haunts such as Braeside Park and Phillip Island. The year list is up to 274 species (safe until October 1 in the calendar game but finding new birds is getting much harder).

Statistics …

As I recall Statistics is something you can do with independent observations taken at random and assembled into a sufficiently large sample. It’s a dark art, lies, damn lies and statistics etc. Bird watching stretches it even further into the kingdom of the devil. Bird watchers choose their sites to generate large lists, large list are more fun. Will we turn left or right? Depends where the Red Goshawk’s nest is or the owl’s roost. It’s called bias. Bird watching and citizen science make for a turbulent marriage

The year list is coming along very nicely, thank you for asking. Bird watchers tend to disparage introduced species, the plastics, but we do make sure to get them on our lists. If numbers give you an inner glow then they all count. I have my Goldfinch for the year. Port Fairy is very good for Goldfinch. But where is my Greenfinch? If I don’t get it here I am unlikely to get it this year.

Port Fairy is also a very good place to find the Striated Fieldwren. They live in rank vegetation and low scrub. In spring the males get up on rocks or taller plants and sing their little hearts out. The rest of the time they are a challenge. It’s not spring but this visit they have been very cooperative. I even have photographs! (Notice they all face to the left, n=2, the sample size is too small, p is nowhere near significant).

That thing they do with their tail is very endearing. Shame the one in the better light didn’t do it.

Port Fairy is not only famous for Fieldwrens it is also home of the Port Fairy Folk Festival. Secombe Park has been transformed into a reasonable facsimile of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The town benefits greatly from the revenue raised. Fortunately I will have left before the festivities reach full swing.

Just over a day to find the furtive finch. I haven’t connected with the snipe either, it may be too late in the season for them. I may have to come back in the spring. But the birding has been excellent …

Flitting About …

Yesterday we arrived in Port Fairy on Victoria’s south west coast and here we shall pause for a week . We will taking bracing walks in what passes for the summer heat and look for goldfinch and greenfinch to bolster our year list! Here is a simplified map of progress since Wilcannia. Simplified because since crossing the Victorian border we have been flitting about like flies on a cow pat visiting favourite places, favourite people and a caravan repair yard for a bit of plumbing work.

Rainfall in the interior of Australia and much of the west coast is unpredictable and usually sparse. For the north and east coastal fringes, north of Brisbane, summer rainfall is the norm. From Brisbane south and around the south coast and for a triangle in the south of Western Australia winter rainfall predominates. This pattern has held up on this trip, indeed it may be somewhat exaggerated this year. Since leaving Queensland the country has been as dry as a chip.

In Wilcannia the bird watcher should stay at Warrawong on the Darling. The camp ground is adjacent to a couple of billabongs. These are usually productive but on this occasion one had little water and the other was dry. The river Darling itself had plenty. There are some 4WD tracks across open plains to patches of River Red Gum woodlands along the banks and if clean toilets and warm showers are of any interest it even has those.

From there it was on to the banks of the mighty Murray not far from Mildura and then various much loved locations in the Victorian Goldfields. And now Port Fairy which is unique in Victoria in very nearly being quaint. The surrounding countryside, the Western District of Victoria, is brown and dry, drier than we have ever seen it.

There is a Short-tailed Shearwater colony in Port Fairy and I’ve just got back from watching the Shearwater parents returning to feed their chicks. They come in just after dark, land near their burrows and then run to the waiting chicks. It is a wonderful experience to sit in the colony and have them flying in around you.

Outback …

With our freshly serviced van we headed from Coloundra to Nindigully. By the time we got there the pull out fridge was firmly stuck in place. A phone call to AOR and the exercise of a little leverage under instruction and out it came. A cold beer was back on the menu.

The Nindigully Pub is a favorite and we had the free campground pretty much to ourselves. It was founded in 1864 and for a while it was a coach stop. Despite the fact that it’s in the middle of nowhere it continues to thrive. The food may have something to do with it, it’s great, but it’s also to do with the ambience, the Moonie River and the free camping. There is a good article on it <HERE> and you can find a blog of mine from a previous visit <HERE>.

A little over 30km away is the wheat belt town of Thallon with some painted silos.

Our intentions for the next three nights involved following the Darling River down some black soil roads. They are just impassable after rain so we put in a big day through Bourke, the back of which is the proverbial outback, to spend the night just out of Cobar. And that’s where we discovered a leak under the van. Facetime with AOR, flat on my back under the van. I was talked through the process of isolating the affected plumbing. For the moment there is no water to the tap on the drawbar but everything else is working. It’s a brand new van, this series of irritations should not be happening. But the response from AOR has been very supportive.

Then it was the Barrier Highway to Wilcannia. Once again on the Darling River but on a sealed road – not trying to teach a caravan to skate. There were some very big loads on the move. Once again the radio came in handy and the standard of pilotage was high. The instruction “One at 6 metres. Take a spot” means get right off the road and wait until it passes. We passed half a dozen at 6m and one at 8.

Along the way we crossed the border into NSW. Back in my Melbourne days we occasionally saw cars with NSW number plates. It was obvious from the way they were driven that NSW stood for No Sense Whatever. Out here in the far west of New South Wales the locals tell me that it stands for Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong which is where the state government focuses all its attention.

The last hamlet in Queensland was Hebel, home to another classic outback pub.

The birding around Wilcannia is excellent although paradoxically the billabongs don’t have a lot of water in them.

Back home in Western Australia the coast just north of Port Hedland has been battered by Cyclone Zelia. Homes have been lost, livelihoods have been wiped out, stock are swimming for their lives. We are told that Broome got off lightly but the road in is closed. The supermarket shelves will soon be bare. If you’re flying there take a sandwich or two and a roll of toilet paper.

The Shakedown Tour …

… is complete. The AOR Quantum plus has had its first trial and its first service. Tomorrow we cut the umbilical cord and head into the outback.

The tour took in a circuit of south east Queensland, covered just over 2000km of towing over two weeks and looked something like this …

The Quantum plus passed with flying colours. Minor teething troubles have been fixed. The three burner stove was fixed before leaving Caloundra. A stabiliser leg needed minor attention and a shock absorber was replaced on our return. I have tried to avoid a millimetre by millimetre account of the rainfall but the weather has been dreadful. The Quantum+ does not leak and the awning can withstand some hefty gusts.