Tag: queensland

Day 6 – #straya

Day 6 – #straya

by Jupiter and Sons ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Fauce popped his head out of his swag this morning, his hair all frazzled up like a bottlebrush, and, with a tone that reminded me of somebody figuring out one of those 3D, sail boat, blurry eye posters for the first time, exclaimed; “oooooh, hey Jupes – we’re on a pub crawl”.

It’s shocking that it took us 5 whole days and more than 3000km of driving to figure it out, given all we do is drive and stop at pubs, and the occasional nice looking silo, but he’s right. We are 5/7ths of the way through a very elaborate pub crawl. Everybody else seems completely aware of this fact.

I want to talk a little more about the Coopers Cowmen. They are driving this tiny Corolla with no clutch, but also with no boot space, and most of the boot is full of sub-woofer. Last night that sub-woofer was playing the low frequency bits of The Prodigy until almost sunrise, and not the mainstream Prodigy favourites but most of the B side tracks from the Jilted Generation, which lend themselves very nicely to a sound-system made entirely of sub-woofer, because the B side is mostly low frequency experimentation. Anyway, our makeshift tent city seemed entirely unperturbed by this late-night expression of musical creativity, except for one chap who said he would put a hammer through the front windscreen of the Cowmen’s Corolla if it happened again. Seemed an extreme response but I am confident if they can drive a car through the outback without a clutch, then a lack of windscreen would not necessarily rule them out.

But the sub-woofer has me digressing. My point is, they have no space at all and they seem to be getting on just fine. We have this giant CRV and zero subwoofers, and yet every morning we are shoe-horning our many possessions into every nook and cranny we can find; it is the car version of sitting on your suitcase while your partner carefully and steadily pulls the straining zips together. Needless to say, our mattress situation remains unresolved.

This morning our comfortable car finally caught up with us. Fauce and I were required to stand up on a trailer and hoola hoop in front of 500 people. I was disappointed at how bad I was at this; my hips didn’t cooperate at all. Fauce was quite good and mocked me with his eyes and talent, which I found indelicate.

Today our pub crawl took us from the South-West Queensland outback town of Bedourie, through some wild, empty Queensland countryside, just across the border into the Northern Territory, and onward to a small hobby farm called Tobermorey Station, which is a mere snip of a thing at 1,480,000 acres. The maximum carrying capacity of Tobermorey Station is 15,000 head of cattle, which means conditions are quite squishy for those poor bovines. They only get about 100 acres each, and they are mustered by helicopter.. #straya.

Fauce and I spent the first few hours of our journey today wondering and debating whether our 15 year old selves would think we were cool. We had no resolution on this question, and were unsure whether our very presence on this rally would add or detract from that equation. But it did make me wonder what we have been talking about for the last 50 hours of driving. This journey does have a way of twisting, bending and distorting time and conversation… and spinal alignment.

A highlight from today was seeing 5 wedgetail eagles, with their broad chests and fuck-you confidence, devouring a giant red kangaroo on the side of the road; I say again… #straya.

We also popped $50 into a donation tin at one of the pub crawl stops in deep Western Queensland, for a group of school kids from that town to go skiing next year. It struck us as an evocative and wonderful concept, and we figured it would feel as adventurous and exciting to those kids as wedgetail eagles feel to us.

We made it to Tobermorey in the daylight, which was a wonderful development. I bought a key ring for $10 which was just an ear-tag from one of the cows. Not modified at all, just an ear-tag. I will never use it but I felt good about the purchase. I could also tell I was back in the Territory because everybody was chatty, and friendly, and in no hurry whatsoever.

We had a nice evening with sizeable but not ostentatious fires, lots of whip cracking (add to list of things we can’t do) and an incredible spread of gluten-free options for dinner, without hyperbole perhaps the best I have ever seen. Such an array of gluten-free delights is probably not what one might expect on a 6,000km2 cattle farm as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get, but perhaps I need to say again… #straya.

Apparently there was also a blindfolded dance competition after dark, but I had already snuck off for my favourite part of the day – cozying down into my sleeping bag like a plump mummy, opening the zip of my swag just a sliver so the ants don’t find you straight away, and looking straight up at the brightest soup of shimmering stars I have ever seen.

Ever since ice had stopped forming on my forehead, north of Silverton, this has become a rare treat indeed.

Not where the hoop is supposed to be

Big sky at Tobermorey

Atypical mattress arranging

Day 5 – Betoota and Birdsville

Day 5 – Betoota and Birdsville

by Jupiter and Sons ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

When we awoke on day 5, some of the soiled and tattered wedding dresses from yesterday’s adventure had been affixed to a set of nearby rugby posts, billowing silently in the wind. They reminded me of the trussed-up dingoes we had seen swinging gently from trees, south of the wild dog fence. It was simultaneously captivating and unsettling.

Our car was an ochre-coloured, muddy mess, and completely drained of washer fluids, after the gravelly beating of the previous evening. Being the experienced outback adventurers that we are, we recognised fluids and some measure of windscreen visibility might be useful, so we set about rectifying the situation.

We had purchased a giant water vessel in Shepparton which we had been carrying around on our roof for almost a week, but so far had not got around to filling it up (soon we’ll be ready to start the rally). Instead, we have remained quite well hydrated via regular purchases of bottled water from outback petrol stations dotted around the place. Fauce prefers sparkling.

So, given there was no convenient tap to assist us with our task, we cleaned our windscreen, headlights, and topped up our various water reservoirs with one and a half litres of filtered, bottled water. About $7 worth. We recognise this is not text book ‘outdooring’, and hoped nobody observed our shameful act.

Our drive today was clearly designed simply as a pretext to take us past two famous pubs; Betoota and Birdsville.

I didn’t know much about Betoota before we got there. My friend told me it has a camel club and a four star hotel. Because I am a middle-class, left-leaning man who only uses the old, non-confusing social medias, my only association with Betoota is its satirical rag, the Advocate. I am not sure what I expected before we arrived; maybe that semi-famous editor-at-large guy behind the bar, or front pages of various editions plastered on the walls, or at least some suggestion there was a symbiotic relationship going on here. I left a bit confused and I am genuinely not sure the Betoota Hotel is in on the joke. Or perhaps it is all so subtle that I am the one not in on the joke. Wikipedia describes Betoota in relative terms to Birdsville, quote “Betoota is a ghost town to the east of the town of Birdsville”. Birdsville is itself not a thriving metropolis, so that gives you a pretty good idea as to what is going on in Betoota. Not much.

I had quite a long chat with a guy I thought was a security guard for the Betoota Hotel; about Betoota, and the Hotel, and whether we could buy some petrol. But it turned out he was just a guy from the rally dressed as a security guard, so that wasn’t very informative. Anyway, we drank a XXXX there dressed in our tie-dyed coveralls, which we have now cut down into tie-dyed dungarees

Gosh, I just need to digress briefly to exclaim at just how empty the outback is. I was expecting empty, yes, even very empty, but, wow, it is just flat and very, very empty. Like, really empty. Heaps of spinifex though.

Anyway, we rolled into Birdsville mid-afternoon and immediately multiplied its population by 5. Everybody drank a beer and then got back into their quasi-road-safe vehicles to drive another 300km on dirt roads in the dark.

As our buddy group was organising itself to depart, one of our teams (the Cooper’s Cowboys) casually mentioned they didn’t seem to have a clutch anymore. Firstly, why are they called cowboys? Was there some sort of child labour thing happening when people wrangling cows became famous and cool? Surely they are more accurately cowmen? Anyway, I’m going to call them cowmen henceforth.

Where was I? Yes, the clutch. So Fauce and I figured that was the end for the Cowmen, because we have no knowledge of clutches and what can and cannot be achieved without one. The Cowmen were almost suspiciously relaxed about this whole thing. We all gave them a bit of shove and off they went, once around the block and then off into the outback. So add that to the list of things Fauce and Jupiter cannot do; drive a car without a clutch, or even conceive that a car can be driven without a clutch.

We arrived in the dark again, half a dozen of us literally pushing the Cowmen into camp. Apparently that’s fine, and everything’s going to be fine. Seems unlikely.

Only 1200km to go.

Captivating and unsettling