Today was a relaxing day after the big one yesterday.
Hot and humid seems to be the norm, now. It really makes one want to laze around camp, rather than do much that is active.
I did the washing. Had a swim. Did embroidery.
John played the computer game for much of the day.
After tea – rissoles and salad – he went to bowls, from 7pm to 10.30pm. It does make more sense to play in the cool of the evening, with the weather as it is.
I worked on the Xmas letter.
Today we drove to Ravenswood, another former gold mining town, but this one largely derelict. It is 90 kms east from Charters Towers and predated it, having been established when gold was found there in 1868. When four prospectors discovered signs of gold at what was to become Charters Towers, it was to Ravenswood that they rode to register their claim.
On the way, we stopped at Macrossan, where the highway and railway both cross the Burdekin River. Both bridges are high, in deference to the flood scale of which this river is capable. The railway bridge, built at the end of the 1800’s, is a massive structure. Next to it, and only visible from certain angles, is the new bridge that replaced this in the 1960’s. On the western side of the river is a signpost that shows previous flood heights; some were not far below the railway bridge decking! The Burdekin has a very large catchment area, and one that can be affected greatly by cyclones, as they move inland.
Burdekin River and the railway bridges, seen from road bridge at Macrossan
We drove to near the base of the rail bridge, on the eastern side, where there is a rough picnic area. John reckons the steel work of the old bridge would not have been strong enough for today’s trains.
The old and new railway bridges over the Burdekin
Leichardt camped near here, too, in 1845. It was he who named the Burdekin River.
Ravenswood is brilliant! There are lots of old mine remains and mill stacks. Old machinery lies around. Some buildings are being restored. There is now (since 1995) a Mt Isa Mines/Carpentaria Gold mine working again, so the town has revitalized somewhat. It was really picturesque and we spent much of the day wandering about.
View over part of Ravenswood with the grand Imperial Hotel prominent
Stamping Battery relics
I was really taken with the set of steps, that is all that remains of the Browns Hotel. They stand in splendid isolation, going nowhere. Judging from the steps, the hotel must have been a fairly grand building.
The former front steps of Browns Hotel. Thorp Buildings behind.
Drove out to the feature called the White Blow, about 5kms from the town. This is a large white quartz outcrop, unusual because quartz is usually in veins and this looked more like a hill of the stuff – could have maybe been the junction of two big veins?
The White Blow quartz outcrop
Then John just had to take on the challenge of driving down the signposted “Very Steep Descent” on the Ayr road, which we did easily. Of course, we had to turn around and come back UP the very steep descent! This challenged Truck only slightly more.
Went to the Ravenswood Cemetery and had our usual explore of headstones and markers.
A miner’s hut at Ravenswood, with smelter stacks in background
The remains of the Mabel Mill and stamping battery relics
In our wanders, managed to identify two new birds – a babbler and a pippit – as well as see excellent “old” ones, including lots of koels. These migrate in from South East Asia in spring, to breed here over summer, and they have a distinctive call. The babblers get around in sociable, quite noisy groups, a bit like apostle birds. The pipit was a solitary fellow; he twitches his tail up and down. Technically, he is a Richard’s Pipit.
Mining relics lying about all over the place at Ravenswood
On the drive back to Charters Towers, we went through a heavy shower of rain. In all, we drove 224kms today.
Made a zucchini sauce to go with pasta, for tea. I used spiral pasta, which was a good choice with the rather creamy sauce.
We were both really tired after the day’s excursion, in the heat, so it was early to bed.
It is the first day of summer. Up here that is, officially, the start of the cyclone season.
We visited the Tourist Information Centre, where I added to the information I’d picked up previously, in other places, about this area and places further south we might go.
Then we walked and looked at some of the superb old buildings. John went and browsed in the Mining Museum; I wandered about, window shopping and put in a film for processing. Picked it up after an hour and was satisfied with the photos.
The Stock Exchange Arcade and other grand buildings
We inspected the old Stock Exchange Arcade, which is superb. Yes – Charters Towers was so important because of its rich gold mining that it had its own stock exchange, from 1890 to 1916. This facilitated the trading of shares in the various mining companies, on the world stage. The arcade has an intricately tiled floor, and there is a barreled vault roof and stained glass use. There are little shops tucked in behind columns, inside. Maybe these were once stock brokers’ offices?
Inside the Stock Exchange Arcade
After lunch we did the tourist drive, as outlined in some of the gumpf I collected. This took us out to the weir on the nearby Burdekin River. There was a lot of water pounding over this – quite awesome to look at. It would be tremendous in a flood time.
The Town Weir on the Burdekin River
Burdekin River downstream from the Town Weir
The rest of the drive was just so-so.
There was a lot of lightning happening, within the clouds to the SE, later in the afternoon.
After tea of steak, salad and mushrooms, we drove to the Rotary Lookout to try – unsuccessfully – to take photos of the lightning.
I really like that this town is preserving and maintaining so many of its grand old buildings.
It was a hot and humid day.
After breakfast, John worked on printing “our” Xmas cards – on paper, rather than card.
I drove to the centre of town and collected our mail from the Post Office. The PO building is one of the grand old ones, opening in 1893, with a tall clock tower that is quite a landmark, although it was added to the original building in 1898.
The ornate Post Office building, dating from the 1890’s. Note the unusual metal “lacework” on the near building.
I also bought a few groceries.
There were two big packs of mail, a parcel that contained the KKND computer game that John ordered to send to K for his Xmas present, and a letter from my brother.
Back at the van, I sorted the mail. It has been a while. Apart from my brother’s letter there was a nice haul of personal mail for me – one from each of P and K, and three from former work colleagues. But there were also bills – for water and shire rates, subscription renewal for the 4WD radio network, LandRover Assist premium for Truck. The Telstra bill is still too high! I wrote cheques as required and got them ready for mailing.
After all that work, I had a swim and relaxed in the cool inside the van for the rest of the day.
Tea was sausages and salad.
After tea, J phoned R for a chat.
It was a hot morning. I got up at 6.30am; John slept till 9am.
After breakfast, we set up the scanner on the bench in the van, and worked on scanning some photos we could use to make our own Xmas card, based on this year’s travels. We have so much material, it seems a shame not to use it in some way.
Left at 12.45 to go to bowls. We played on a grass green which I found very hard to adjust to, after the synthetic green of Atherton. My bowls were all over the place. John did better. It was very humid, and cloud built up during the day.
I made a Chinese recipe book meal for tea – beef, baby bok choy (instead of the water spinach specified by the recipe) and Szechuan pepper. With rice, it was an excellent meal.
I phoned home and spoke to P. K was out. Let her know we’d moved on.
It was spitting rain by 9pm, with much sheet lightning in the distance. But there was no heavy rain to clear the air and it stayed a bit too hot for comfort through the night.
We were up early and away by 8am. Still being hitched up made departure much quicker. We refuelled in Greenvale – 76cpl.
The road was mostly the single width strip again.
There were a few drops of rain as we left Greenvale, but apart from that it was dry – and hot.
The country we drove through today was more interesting than that of yesterday – there were some more hills and low ranges appearing. The road ran almost parallel to the coastal range. There was really green grass, a couple of feet tall. Most of the creek channels had some water in them. It is good to see the country at this time of the year, when it is going green.
Reached Charters Towers – the size of which rather surprised me – just before 11am. Went straight to the Post Office in the centre of town, but it was closed. Could tell by just driving past, so did not have to worry about trying to park the rig. John then got me to navigate him to the Bowls Club, so he could check that out. There were no games happening there, as we drove past.
Went into the Charters Towers Caravan Park, on the southern outskirts of town. In order to get a spot with some shade, we had to take an en-suite site, but it was only an extra $2 a night, at $16 a night, with the seventh night free, so we booked in for a week. Our site is quite pleasant and it is a little luxury to have our own adjacent bathroom.
It was pretty hot, setting up in the middle of the day – mid 30’s, and there were stinging midgy type things about.
After set up, we drove back to the centre of town and bought the papers. John checked out the RSL Bowls Club and booked us in for a game tomorrow.
After lunch, I had a swim in the pool – pleasant.
We put the air-con on in the van – lovely and cool.
When it started to get cooler outside – about 5pm – we went for a walk for a couple of kms around the nearby streets. Being on the outskirts, the area is a bit of a mixture of older and newer houses, vacant land, some light industrial type uses.
Charters Towers looks to be a really interesting town. We have passed a huge cemetery. Perhaps that reflects, in part, the privations of its early days as a mining town. Gold was found here in the 1870’s and there is still some mining today. Charters Towers was, for a while, the second largest town in Queensland – only Brisbane was bigger. There is evidence of this in the scale and grandeur of some of the buildings in the city centre. We only glimpsed these, driving through, but they look very impressively upkept or restored.
Had our Friday fish and chip dinner a day late.
It stayed hot through the night and was not a very comfortable night for sleeping.
We were up at 7.15 and away at 9am. After five weeks, we are leaving Atherton! This is the longest time we have stayed anywhere, to date, on this trip.
We got the mailing address for L and J, the sisters from WA with whom we have become friends, and will write and see how their bowling goes. They have our address and say they will miss us. I hope they will be secure here, over summer.
Between Atherton and Ravenshoe there was mist and fog, and a few short rain showers just after Ravenshoe. As we moved further inland, and it got later, so it also got hotter.
Once south of Ravenshoe, we were really into the savannah scrub and woodland country of the inland.
We stopped for a cup of coffee at the parking area at Forty Mile Scrub, where I was fascinated by a lot of little butterflies – yellow, pale blue and white – settled on the ground where there had been puddles and was still moisture. They were different from the usual butterflies.
Unusual little butterflies on a moist area at the Forty Mile Scrub
Once south of the Highway 1 junction and the road west through Mount Surprise, we were on new ground. The country didn’t change much, though. There were occasional low hills to break up the monotony of the dry grass and scrubland.
We hit a pale headed rosella that flew across the road, right into us. I hoped it somehow survived.
The road for much of today, the Kennedy Development Road, was a single sealed strip, as it seems most such roads are. There was not much traffic, so we did not have to pull over onto the unsealed shoulder of the road very much.
We stopped to eat our packed lunches at a road making area about 20kms north of Greenvale. The rosella we hit was still caught on the roof – it had a broken neck. We were both upset. It is a reality of this sort of travel that we will sometimes, inadvertently, injure or kill wildlife – but it does not make it any easier to deal with.
We would have to pull into Greenvale for fuel, and decided that would do to stay the night. We had both had enough travel for the day and did not feel like pushing on to Charters Towers and having to set up late in the day.
Booked into the Greenvale Caravan Park – $12. We were able to stay hitched up – hardly anyone else in the place.
Greenvale was, we thought, a strange little place. It was built in the early 1970’s, to house workers in the new nickel mine nearby. This became the largest nickel mine in the southern hemisphere, for a time. There was a railway built from here to near Townsville, to transport the ore. Then the mine closed a few years ago and the workers went elsewhere. But the town has been bought by a developer, who is selling – quite cheaply – rather nice houses and flats there. But I suspect there is not the local or surrounding population to sustain the town. It has an Olympic sized swimming pool and good sports facilities, hotel, supermarket, bakery, butcher. The caravan park is also a hardware store and plant nursery. Despite all that, it is hard to see why one would want to live here.
We went for a little walk around some of the town. There are lots of apostle birds around – called Happy Families in these parts, because of the way they cluster together, I guess.
Sweet and sour pork spare ribs for tea.
We travelled from the wet, green tropics of The Tablelands through the dry savanna country inland
Today was humid and hot and not at all pleasant. I am thinking that it is good that we are now able to start heading south. But I don’t know how far south we will need to go to find pleasant conditions at this time of year.
We did a lot of packing up. Took down the annexe and packed it away, and the awning roof. Packed away the spare “bed” and bedding. I did a big wash, including quite a lot of items that had to be washed by hand, so that took a while.
John went to bowls in the afternoon.
I did more packing, then cycled to town, with the task of going to Fascinating Facets to buy geode pendants for Xmas presents for V and R. They cost $70. I cycled almost 5kms, which was quite enough in the heat. After that, I had another long and lovely swim.
For our last night’s tea on the Tablelands, I served us half an avocado each for entree, then mixed grill and salads, followed by mango. A very pleasant, tropical meal.
John wrote two performance reports: to Hayman Reece, on the performance of the hitch we have been trialling, and to his hip surgeon, on the performance of the new hip, more than a year after the surgery.
It was very humid today.
We did some grocery shopping and cleaned up the van.
I went for a swim in the park pool – have missed that for the last couple of weeks. It was wonderful and I spent well over an hour just lazing about in the water. I finished a letter to friends. John mostly relaxed at the computer. Intermittently through the day we wondered what was happening with S.
I made a pasta and mushroom stroganoff from my Quick Meals book – it was excellent.
At night, S phoned. She is back in Port Moresby. She was wait listed for a flight that left today, but at the last minute that got elevated to a firm booking. Others missed out, but S was in the company of some influential people! So, all ended well.
Lots of cane toads outside the van in the night light
We had to be up early in order to drive S to the airport at Cairns for her return flight to Port Moresby.
S got to see the countryside from Mareeba to Kuranda, and down the range, in the daylight. Again, there was the effect of entering a sauna, as we came down into Cairns.
Found the plane was delayed, due to an air traffic controller strike at Port Moresby. So we took S into Cairns where there were a few shops she decided to visit. Returned to the airport where there was now a degree of confusion at Qantas about what was likely to happen.
S was convinced the plane would go in the afternoon. She encountered some people she knew from work and decided she wanted to lunch with them. So she asked us to leave her at the airport and go. I think we were not polished enough to move in her professional circles! At least, that is what it felt like. It did seem that she did not wish to be seen with us, and I think John was rather hurt.
So we headed off to shop for ourselves: the book exchange; the good craft shop where I bought some more handanger materials; Harvey Norman. At the latter, we were recognized by a former student of mine, who now works there. He also knew John, from when he worked in our local video shop. We had a lengthy chat.
Refuelled Truck at Brinsmead – 67cpl. Dearer than up in Atherton!
Then we headed back up the range again, and out of the oppressive heat. John got me to drive, from near Mareeba – he was tired. No wonder, after the non-stop whirl of the past five days.
We found there was substantial storm damage in the rainforest between Tolga and Atherton, with some trees down. It had been a very localized storm, though, as there was no damage up our end of the town. But we had a few minutes of anxiety, wondering, before we got there.
John was not feeling well. He lay down and did not want any tea. I think it is a combination of all the driving, the tension of having S here and hoping all would go well, and the let down now she is gone.
S’s husband phoned to ask if we knew what was happening, as he had heard there were no planes flying into Moresby. Then S phoned to say she was staying in an hotel, at her own cost, as the delay was not the fault of Qantas. She was unsure when she would get to Moresby – or if she would have to buy another ticket. She said there was talk that there may be no flight until Friday. There was nothing we could do. Had she not been so insistent that we leave, we might have been able to organize something better.
I did not make any tea. I was not hungry either, and I was very tired too.
I had told the park people in advance that we would be having a guest and they charged me an extra $4 for each of the nights S was here.
We drove 242kms today.
Our explorations around Atherton
