Today we’ve made it into Queensland! And this evening we’ve arrived in Mount Isa, which is the traditional lands of the Kalkadoon people. We acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.
Aside from that little tyre hiccup back down in Victoria, we’ve had a great run with our VW Tiguan, Estelle, on this trip! That was, until this afternoon. But more on that soon…
We headed off from Barkly Homestead at about 9am – not as much of a rush today, as it’s only 450km into Mount Isa. The kids had a great morning hanging out with the birds in the aviary at Barkly, making friends with some corellas and galahs. That made life easier for us as we packed up the few things and got ready to head off. But it was nice to pause for a moment and be thankful that the kids are really enjoying engaging with things around them – there was an initial ask to watch TV this morning, but it was only brief, and then they moved on quickly and had such a great time outside with the birds.
The first stop of the day was Avon Downs Rest Area, just opposite the Avon Downs Police Station. I wanted to stop here partly because it was a bit under two hours on from Barkly, but also because I’d read a heap of information about Avon Downs Police Station when I spotted it on Google Maps as I was planning our trip many months ago. It’s a very isolated police station, with a few buildings on the site as residences for the officers. Obviously, it’s similar to so many other remote NT police stations, but I found it really fascinating that this one is just so isolated from anything else – not even a roadhouse is nearby.
We headed on towards the Queensland border, which was only another 50km or so on – and we made sure we got photos with not only the Welcome to Queensland sign, but also the Queensland Outback sign, given that’s going to make up a huge part of our adventures over the next few weeks.
We pulled into Camooweal ready for some lunch, and decided to make our way to the Droving Heritage Centre. It has been set up to hold onto the incredible memories and information about horseback droving across Australia, and I’m really glad we dropped in. Danny talked us through some incredible stories about droving – that is, men & women on horseback, moving thousands of heads of cattle across the northern parts of Australia (say, from Top Springs in the middle of the NT, down to a rail head at Mt Isa – some 1000km). It’s something I think I vaguely knew about, but I had no idea how important and significant it was – and I definitely had no idea of the incredible effort involved. Danny passionately talkted to us for a good 90 minutes about droving! The kids were really patient given how long it went for. I know they did find it interesting – but 90 mins is a lot to expect them to sit and listen, and there wasn’t a lot of interaction for them.
One very fun moment was when Alexander got to light a carbide lamp! There is apparently very little, if any, calcium carbide left in Australia – other than what they manage to still have in their little tin at the Droving Heritage Centre. So it was apparently a very unique exercise for Alexander to be able to say he’s lit a carbide lamp!
We finally got back on the road at about 3pm and started heading along the final stretch into Mount Isa.
But about 70km out, as a road train passed us on the other side of the road, a small rock (I think) has kicked up and hit the top of our windscreen, ricocheted into the underside of the roof pod, and then down onto our glass sunroof – and shattered it. Thankfully, the fabric mesh that sits under the sunroof is pretty strong as it turns out, and it caught all the glass, so none came into the cabin at all. It all happened so quickly, and made a really decent explosion sound in the car – and with the wind of passing the road train at the same time, I initially was fairly panicked and thought the roof pod had given way and somehow been ripped open or something like that! I caught my breath, and heart rate, and pulled the car over to have a proper look at what had happened.
I was initially not sure whether we could keep going at all – I really wasn’t sure how it would go with wind rushing in under the new hole in our sunroof, and how strong the rest of it was. It took a bit of time for me to think and look through how it was sitting and realise that it was probably fine to keep going – but knowing full well that the wind noise would be pretty full on.
But before we drove on, I also knew that I needed to try and make a few calls – it was 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon, and if I wanted any hope at all of trying to work out how this could get fixed, then I probably needed to start now. The end result was that it’s going to need to be fixed by Volkswagen themselves – and frustratingly, their nearest service centre is Townsville, or Cairns. Unfortunately, a bit of back and forth and working out how it could get fixed, and getting the insurance claim started, meant I missed the Volkswagen Service Centre by about 1 or 2 minutes at 5pm! So any idea of when it could get fixed will now need to wait until Monday.
We made it into Mount Isa by about 6pm, and after grabbing some groceries from Woolies, we arrived here at the Sunset Tourist Park, just in the north of Mount Isa. We made some dinner, and then I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking through what happens from here – and that’s always really difficult when you just don’t know. Of course the obvious response is that I just need to wait and see and take it a day at a time, and I can’t control anything else right now – but I’m inevitably working through a bunch of scenarios and how things might work! The other complexity is that there is a big maintenance thing happening at the mines in Mount Isa at the moment – I remember being told this months ago when I was trying to book accomodation and finding it difficult. So consequently, there are zero hire cars around, and also pretty much zero accomodation!
Where I think I’ve landed is that perhaps I can get the area taped up enough to make it safe for us to press on – even driving at slightly lower speeds (as painful as I will find that!). That will at least make the car weatherproof again as well. So as well as still seeing a couple of things tomorrow, there might be a bit of a Bunnings and Repco trip involved to see what can be sorted out.
