Travelling with Van Morrison: STDs, Rollercoaster Roads & One-horse Towns

Goodbye to Emu Park and Yeppoon and hello to a series of little towns/villages/hamlets/pubs in the middle of nowhere. And Brisbane. Talk about extremes!

The bats of Emu Park ... noisy critters! And bat shit is VERY hard to clean off your van.

I've fallen in love with the song of the butcher bird

For all of you who would like to invest in cheap real estate in a delightful little town, can I suggest Mount Morgan. It was my first stop after leaving Emu Park and was delightful! A town that was founded on gold mining, it is now a relaxed little tourist destination with a population similar to Mansfield. The buildings that date from the boom mining time are quite splendid and have been carefully maintained. There were a few shops and good coffee and I could have bought a great sounding house for $168K. OK, it might need a little bit of work but ...

A feature of many towns is the "School of Arts" which is often a heritage building that is still in use. The Australian School of Arts was based on the British Mechanics Institute with the first one in Queensland being built in Brisbane in 1849. Their aim was to provide education and services in literary, philosophic and scientific subjects and "The Arts" means manual arts or practical skill training. Many councils still use these buildings to house libraries, social services and information centres ... but all that aside, they are usually lovely buildings.

After the delights of Mount Morgan, I headed south west until I reached the Leichhardt Highway. This looked to be an interesting route and one that I hadn't travelled before so off I went. And almost immediately regretted it! The road was is very poor repair (I think it had been flooded once too often) and there were BIG potholes, water over the road, HUGE trucks but the worse thing was the undulations. It was like driving on a sine curve (just had to throw in a maths term) ... up and down, down and up. Poor Maggie was bounced off the bed a couple of times! Bad roads aside, I visited some lovely little places ... Dululu with the coffee van in the middle of nowhere, Theodore with nothing much and then Taroom. I stayed in Taroom (great op shop and pub ... I didn't win the meat tray) before heading to Bowenville (toilets, pub ... nope, that's it) where I stayed behind the pub. This will go down as one of the more memorable pub stays, mainly for the rather colourful language. "Do ya want a f@#kin' drink or your f@#kin' meal first?"

Boab trees along the main street of Taroom

This rather magnificent gum is one of the Leichhardt trees, situated in the main street of Taroom. Naughty Freddy Leichhardt was a graffiti artist of the 1800s and tended to carve his name into trees as he went along discovering those same trees. The LL 1844 that he etched into the coolibah is now gone, the bark growing over the letters. Tree ... 1, explorer ... 0.

The f@#kin' Bowenville Hotel

So then it was back to Maleny, where I had a delightful time again with Jenny and Dave and Maggie was entertained/terrorised by the two ragdoll cats in the camp next to us. Then on to Brisbane ...

The main reason for returning to Brisbane was to watch my nephew Peter in a show called Sunny Tribe District (or STD). This started out as a 10 minute show in 2018 and had been expanded into a full length show. And it was so funny! I laughed and laughed and was very proud of Peter who was superb! What a show! Hopefully this won't be the last of STD and they will take it on the road ... if you ever get the chance to see it, DO! I stayed in Brisbane for an extra couple of days ... it was lovely having time with brother Simon and Samantha ... and it gave me a chance to recover from my Covid vaccination.

So now I've left Brisbane and have headed back to my little towns and free camps. I spent a lovely couple of days at Caliguel Lagoon, on the Condamine River and now have meandered to Meandarra (sorry, a bit of a play on its name) and on to Surat. Maggie and I are quite relaxed because we have nearly two weeks before I need to be in Broken Hill. So who knows where we'll get to next!