Blackall to Caloundra

July 23 to July 30

We stopped at the Blackall Caravan Park on Sunday night, where they have an authentic campfire roast and damper dinner on offer each night, with live entertainment. The owners start getting the fire ready around lunchtime so the coals are just right to cook on in the evening. Seems like a lot of work, but the results were excellent and very entertaining (the cooking and the singer).

Blackall Caravan Park, entertainment before the camp oven dinner

Blackall is also the official home of the “black stump”, an actual tree stump used for surveying the Western Queensland in the 1800’s, and officially anything further west was “beyond the black stump”.

The original Black Stump, Blackall

Travelling south we stayed in Tambo and camped on the Barcoo River, evoking memories of Banjo Patterson or Henry Lawson poems. This is classic Western Queensland landscape.

The mighty (dry) Barcoo River

The bushwalk along the Barcoo River also leads to the only QANTAS plane crash site. Contrary to beliefs that QANTAS has never has a fatal plane crash, three lives we lost there in 1927.

Tambo. Plaque marking the historical plane crash site.

Further south is Augathella, another classic country town and nicely set up for travelling tourists.

Augathella Meat Ant sculpture.
Their local footy team are the "Meat Ants" very cool mascot!

We visited Charleville, which has a very good Royal Flying Doctor Service museum, but didn’t have much else that interested us. From Charleville we turned east and followed the Warrego Highway. This area of Western Queensland is on the higher plains, and is renowned for cold nights and warm days in winter.

Morven Historical Museum - A "house" made our of used kerosene tins,
the depression made people inventive. 

All the towns along the Warrego Highway were very inviting, we particularly liked Mitchell (how could you not), Roma and Chinchilla.

Roma's Largest Bottle Tree

Our last week on the road and we found some of the best free camps, the Chinchilla Weir (where they offer some free powered spots, one of which we fluked) and Bowenville near Dalby were real standouts. Although the days were clear, sunny and 25⁰C, the near zero degree nights weren’t really exciting us.

Chinchilla Weir - the actual weir wall, not where we parked

Saturday night we stopped at Mitchell’s (our son, not the town this time) in North Lakes. We had a good catch up and an easy drive back to the Sunny Coast on Sunday morning.