Roma & our last days in Queensland
We stopped in the tiny town of Injune for the playground and laughted at being Injune in July.
Roma was our lunch, shower and supermarket stop. We enjoyed their display of iron-work sculptures and the big bottle tree. On our way out of town we pulled into the famous Roma Saleyards, Australia’s largest cattle selling centre. We found it a hive of activity late on Monday afternoon, as cattle were being unloaded and drafted ready for the Tuesday auction. Inspired to see more, we turned around and found a free camp just outside of town.
It was a busy roadside stop with no amenities and not a lot of privacy. Hugh and I shared an emergency makeshift latrine moment that I hope never to repeat. Trucks driving through at odd hours made for an unsettled night.
The nights and mornings had become so cold, we decided to get straight in the car when we woke up at 6:30am. Matthias packed the trailer down in a matter of minutes and we headed straight for the saleyards. Without airconditioning, clearing the frost and fog from the windscreen was a challenge and meant we weren’t much warmer in the car than out of it.
An hour and a half too early for the tour, we pulled out the kitchen in the carpark, made ourselves a coffee and filled up on bread and peanut butter for breakfast. The carpark quickly filled up around us, country folk with their bull bars and broad brimmed hats arriving ready for business. The yards we'd seen filling up the night before were now full of penned cattle, lotted ready for auction. We tagged along on one of the free tours and managed to absorb a few interesting facts before the kids pulled us away and it all got too noisy and busy to concentrate anyway. The actual auctioning moved very fast along the rows of pens, but the few minutes we did see were very entertaining. The energy, the body language, the characters, the noise; it was a lot of fun to watch.
When the kids had finally reached their limit, we made our way on to Surat where we stopped for lunch. We popped in to the Cobb & Co Changing Station for a look. We were all taken by the digital aquarium where you could scan in your own decorated fish to join the other fish swimming on the screen.
We passed through St George, then found a fabulous private bush camp on the banks of the Balonne River. It was so good that we decided to stay for two nights. It really felt like camping used to. Camping for the sake of being in the great outdoors, not just a place to sleep en route to somewhere else, or a base to explore from, or shared with 10-15 other rigs.
Matthias got the kayak out and went for a paddle downstream, acknowledging that he was at the start of a mighty river system that could take him all the way back to Goolwa in South Australia. The kids played on a sandbank and in the bush. We had a fire morning and night and we spotted wildlife (namely birds and a feral fox and cat but also one very cute sugar glider that visited at night).
They were to be our last nights in Queensland. We drove on through Dirranbandi (featured in our new favourite song, Slim Dusty's Cunnamulla Fella) and stopped for a quick snack in Hebel before crossing the border into NSW.
