I think I can safely say that our holiday truly began once we crossed the Queensland Border. We have been through here a couple of times before, but there was always a main destination further north, with the next couple of towns only briefly visited. This time we were going to look around a bit better.
We were now entering the Paroo Shire, whose main town is Cunnamulla.
The town was made famous by the Slim Dusty song “The Cunnamulla Fella” and there is a statue in the centre of town to celebrate the song. You can here it here if you wish.
We had a wander around town and it was decidedly sad. The town centre doesn’t just have one main street, it is kind of like a Y and the main highway north turns off before you reach it. Most of the shops are empty. We called in at the butchers and they had very slim pickings.
The town had obviously prospered back in the day, as there are some lovely old buildings with nice lead lights. The chemist still had its Christmas stickers on the front window. The pub on the corner seemed to be trading with minimal hours and the post office was trading.
Surprisingly, there was a nice mural up the side of one building.
There were a couple of incongruous things, one being the amount of work that was being done on the old picture theatre. Out the back seemed to be in the process of being completely rebuilt.
The other was the very freshly painted Memorial Fountain in a little park in the middle of the street.
Cunnamulla is on the Warrego River, so we went down to have a look. The Greater Egrets are so graceful.
Beside the river is a new thermal pool complex, which looks rather flash on the brochures, but not really our thing.
We camped the night at a caravan park a bit out of town, beside the river. It was very full.
In the late afternoon there was a fire lit down near the river and a country singer was providing entertainment.
His name is Ken Lindsay, but his nick name is “Chainsaw” and he performed a song he had written called “The Night I Saved John Wayne”, supposedly a true story about how some young blokes went to the drive-in at Berri in South Australia and were watching a cowboy and Indian movie starring John Wayne. The Indians were beating John Wayne, so one of the fellows decided to save him and took his rifle out of the ute and shot the movie screen. Well, to Chainsaw’s delight, one of the audience piped up that it is true, as it was his Dad that shot the screen.
On our way out of town the following morning we went and found the painted water tower. We had seen it before.
We also found the railway station, which is a nice old building. The train doesn’t come here any more.
Out the front is a sculpture of the Cunnamulla Band, made from found objects.
They were cleverly done, but we thought the members looked a bit creepy with silver spoons as eyes.
Back on the road the next settlement we came to was Wyandra, about 100km north. We had camped here on our last trip. This time we just went for a quick lap of the village and had our morning tea in the rest area. The pub had been closed down, but has just recently reopened, which is a good thing for the area. A feature of every town, no matter how small, is its war memorial.
Our destination for the day was Charleville. It was also one of the main places we wanted to visit. There was so much for us to see and do that I will start that in a separate post.
No comments:
Post a Comment