A previous blog (No. 144, Another Postcard – a Wee Mishap) has covered the events in between leaving Camooweal and returning to Mt. Isa. Briefly, we set off via dirt road for Adels Grove in the Lawn Hill National Park, but some way along a caravan spring broke, Dave did a marvellous jury rig job… Read more

Another place I couldn’t wait to visit. Nowadays it is considered a sort of outer suburb of Mt. Isa (!) But it has a total different character; it’s the OUTBACK. The 189 km of Barkly Highway between Mt. Isa and Camooweal (“Tojo’s Highway”) with its varied scenery and thousands of red anthills, was broken at one point… Read more

(Posted from Normanton in the Gulf … only a few more blogs to catch up on). Sometimes the places we are ambivalent about visiting turn out to be some of the best, or at least they have a few special places-within-the-main-place. And so it was with Mt. Isa. Like Broken Hill, Mt. Isa is a… Read more

The  Cloncurry Visitors’ Centre has a magnificent display of minerals and some interesting local history, where I managed to find out a little more about Kuridala. There is also a section devoted to the explorers Burke and Wills. I like this painting by Patricia d’Arcy (no relation) entitled the Final Journey. Of even more interest… Read more

I couldn’t wait to reach Cloncurry, the area of my mother’s birth. Her  father was managing Chatsworth Station at the time. The birth was registered at Friesland, a mining town which later changed its name to Kuridala due to sensibilities about Germans during the war. It is still on most maps although the mining town is long abandoned. We… Read more

We camped for the night at a free camp just off the road to the Dinosaur Museum (this photo was mistakenly included in the Longreach blog) …. …. then next morning paid a visit to what remains of the Banjo Patterson Museum in Winton. Part of it was destroyed by fire in early 2016, but… Read more