Judy & Brian Tour Oz: Cloncurry Qld

Out of van park, turn right, drive west: 247 km to Julia Creek. Few bouts of road works at the 70km mark. OK it was one lollipop zone and 5 traffic light zones over 12km, but who’s counting. But hey, as John Williamson says, ‘we’re further out, in Julia Creek’ Now this is a nice little town, has a nice friendly feel to its one street and almost no shops, not even a proper cafe, which closed 3 years ago. We went into the info centre, which is perhaps the nicest one we've seen, mainly to cop a look at the endangered Dunnart, of which only 11 exist. They were thought to be extinct until rediscovered here at Julia Creek in 1991. They have a special display area and enclosure behind glass (it’s only tiny, like a mouse) but we saw nothing. It was suggested that it had just had a bellyful of flies and had scurried into its hideaway to sleep it off.

We forwent the coffee and continued on the 140km to Cloncurry, or as one truckie to another called it, the curry. Now i’m pretty sure i’ve said some harsh things about the curry in past trips, but we pulled into the Oasis van park anyway. It’s pretty huge, but the other park, a Discovery, is rumoured to be exclusively for the itinerant workers, of whom there are thousands. Once we got set up, we revisited our ‘favourite’ bakery in town. It’s not really our favourite, but being the only one, and knowing that they run out of pies etc at lunchtime we scooted on over there. We managed to get the last mushroom pie (sorry plain and potato sold out early) and a pastie. They are pretty good pies mind you, but the place was packed and they had zippo to sell, just like they did the last two times and it was only 1pm!

We filled up the rig with diesel at some exotic price and went down the road to the museum, which was pretty good, full of Bourke and Wills stuff (they wandered right by here, dont know how they missed the place) and a few relics from the Mary Kathleen mine, which is out toward the Isa and where they dug uranium out of the ground for years and years before it got its yellow card, excuse the pun (a dad joke, i am unrepentant)

At the museum you get two for one, so we took the option and went to the the John Flynn museum as well, which is pretty damn good i reckon. The bloke, his church that fully supported him and all his mates are the true legends of pioneer Australia.

Anyhow, its happy-o’clock and we have been instructed to attend the charity snag sizzle, so we’d better go, eh?