Cobar to Bourke

Off again this morning.  We managed to head off as other people were stopping for their morning tea!

205 km to Cobar, and dead kangaroos on the road everywhere.  All those trucks driving through the night, stopping for breaks at our camping spot!

 

We stopped for lunch in Cobar. Cobar mines copper and gold.  Katie enjoyed the 'Ode to Cobar" printed in their information brochure.  It was written some time in the 1890s by an unknown author...

The sport of fate, one summer's day
My wandering footsteps led astray
And landed me, I'm sad to say
In Cobar

There is no mountain dale or valley
No babbling brooks make sudden sally
Just sandhills fringed with stunted mallee,
That's Cobar.

Midst sulphur fumes and dynamite
The miners work from noon till night
and this I think the saddest sight,
In Cobar

It's very hard to write in ink
the many things which I could think
all tend to drive a saint to drink,
in Cobar.

The water's bad, the food is worse
We've blight, Barcoo and typhoid curse
And many a man takes to a hearse,
In Cobar.

I have not any hesitation
in giving forth my condemnation
it is the dead end of creation,
Is Cobar.

That's just a bit of it!  I don't think the author liked Cobar much.  I think it's quite nice now!  It's been very green everywhere, at least.

We have been reading "A Fortunate Life" by AB Facey, in the car.  It's very interesting. He lived and travelled around a lot of the places we have been to in Western Australia, so it makes it easier to picture it.

We drove on north 160 km to Bourke, the entry point to the outback north and west of here.  The darling river runs through the town and at the moment it is flooded.  The first thing the couple in the caravan park said when they saw us was "we don't have a pool". 

We must have looked hot and bedraggled, because they gave us each a cold can of soft drink and sent us off to the river where it is not flowing and we went for a swim.  The water was bath temperature and brown.  Joseph and Dom thought it was great fun to disappear under the water and pop up somewhere else where we didn't expect them.

There once were paddle boats on the Darling River, running wool and wheat down to ports further south.  The Darling River system is the largest in Australia, 1700 miles from it's source, and together with it's tributaries drains 250,000 miles in two states. (can you tell I copied that from a guide book?)

Fred hollows is buried here in the cemetery.  Henry Lawson spent six months here getting the feel of the bush and drying out from alcohol.  Camel trains used to come through here.  With the increased use of roads, the river became less used for transport.  Bourke is right on the edge of the Great Artesian Basin, 640,000 square miles of underground water that keeps a multi-million dollar sheep industry thriving in the area.

 

Tonight we have discovered that a river in flood breeds a lot of mosquitoes.  Millions.  And they all want to get into our caravan.
-----
Vicki