Judy & Brian Tour Oz: Gulargambone NSW 16th July 2019

Gulargambone NSW

Ran up from Forbes after a 'leisurely' start at 10am. The plan was to look around Gilgandra for ghosts of the Mortimer family, starting with noteing, but not stopping at Balladoran or the gate to Warawillah, the ancestral home of Mervyn Mortimer.

We went into the Info place and Coo-ee march memorial on the outskirts of 'Gil', as Merv called it, but somehow it was disappointing this time and we moved on to town itself. As it was 1.30pm we stopped in the Main Street and found a choke-and-puke where we had instant pizza and not so instant, instant coffee.

Gilgandra seems obsessed with the Coo-ee march, when 25 volunteers set out to march the 500km to Sydney to enlist to fight in the Great War. A few of the artefacts:

Just as a bit of a laugh, we called up the van park at Gulargambone to tell them we were coming, only to be told that they were fully booked and bad-luck, really. Not having been in this situation very often, if at all, we were considering the few not so attractive van parks in town when they called back and said that they could indeed fit us in. So off we went and soon enough turned into the van park. Now, Gulargambone is the proverbial flea-bite on the backside of an elephant, but it is here where 'our' park is what we discovered almost deserted in 2014, and today it is a seething mass of parked up vans and old folk who appear to have been here since time began. It's true, 'they' have all found this place and are all happy to just sit and wait for something exciting to happen, at $25 a day, for months at a time. We won't be back, I don't need reminding every day that I'm not getting any younger, and I certainly don't need to sit and wait for the call!

I did something these folks would never do, went for a walk for an hour and a half and saw all there was to see of the town. Just in the last month they have painted the row of shop fronts in the Main Street, and plastered murals and art works all over the place. It very quiet and clean, has a post office, a police station and a SPAR grocers. It has various other coffee shops and things but they are open at random and as it takes their fancy, but not on a Tuesday.