Emu Park, is a pretty beach side town on Queensland’s Capricorn Coast. We chat to a woman who is exercising her horse on the beach. She reckons he loves the water so much that he’d swim to Great Keppel island if she let him have his way. That’d give the fishermen a surprise wouldn’t it? Continue reading A Keen Swimmer
I’ve recently learned, thanks to you dear readers that Rockhampton in Queensland is the Home of Beef Cattle. How this knowledge had escaped me is anyone’s guess as the town has six life-sized statues of bulls and my favourite, this mural. Now that is a lot of bull. Continue reading Rockhampton and all that bull
A few kilometres out of Toowoomba, Qld in the pleasant suburb of Highfields a narrow road drops down the escarpment in a sharp 21% descent into the Lockyer Valley. Tucked into the hillside directly below Highfields is the Spring Bluff … Continue reading Spring Bluff
I was writing a piece on the high incidence of gold discovery in Australian towns when friends invited us to visit the Tarnagulla Strictly Vintage Fair. I was keen to take part in the celebrations as this is such an interesting and lesser known town in the Victorian Goldfields. Our mate ‘R’ who was born and bred in Tarnagulla organised dinner at the only pub, The Golden Age, for a few mates who are Old Tarnagullans and who now all live in Melbourne, though some like ‘R’ have smallholdings in the goldfields. …The front bar is crowded and a guitarist … Continue reading A Dinner Worth its Weight in Gold
The Venus gold battery is a few minutes out of Charters Towers. It commenced crushing gold in 1872 and only stopped operating in 1971. It is the best preserved battery of its kind left. Although it rains throughout our tour … Continue reading Charters Towers, Venus Battery
In Australia we have a strange passion for building large objects beside highways that we tend to refer to as ‘Big Things’. The Big Banana at Coffs Harbour, that seems to get smaller as I get older. The Big Prawn in Exmouth. The Big Lobster in Kingston and so on. I think you get my drift now. This fellow is the Big Galah at Kimba in South Australia. He’s been guarding the highway for a long time and that pink paint is fading but we still can’t help but say “Ooh, there’s The Big Galah!” Continue reading The Big Galah
Now I’ve seen everything, I just passed a woman walking out of the amenities block wearing nothing but wet feet, a towel and clutching a bottle of shampoo. I didn’t dare say g’day for fear that she would drop the towel! Continue reading G’day?
Seeing that we had the car checked over in Perth, I drop into the Broome clinic for my own checkup, oldies must be mindful of these things. So why is she writing about that you say? Well it was fascinating. I fill out the form and it asks for my ethnicity. I think, well that’s unusual at home they normally only need to know whether one is Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander or Other. So I give it a bit of thought then squeeze Anglo Saxon into the small space and hope that it is sufficient. Which leaves me thinking that … Continue reading Who do you think you are?
To my mind Karijini National Park is the best National Park that I’ve visited. Like nothing else, it is a world of contrasts. Dales Gorge campground is in a dry climate area. There are ant mounds, Spinifex grass, red soil and a gentle wind whispers through the trees. If you didn’t follow the signs you would not know that a gaping chasm is a short walk away. The earth looks to have been ripped open by giant hands exposing an ‘other worldly’ environment hundreds of metres below. There are many of these gorges each quite different, some like Dales gorge … Continue reading Karijini National Park, WA
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