Imported To Birdsville with bull dust

Life has never been easy out here. Even heading further east, towards home, where it has been a little more populated over the decades, where you might think it should be easier to survive, there have been times when it has been a life and death struggle. Morven Town Common, between Charleville and Mitchell, tells the tale of the Great Depression in these parts. In 1932, with the world still reeling from the Wall Street crash, over a third of all Australians were out of work. Many were on the move: swagmen, 'on the swag', with their bedrolls on their backs and their hats swinging with corks to swat away endless flies, were wandering from place to place looking for any income, any place to earn a penny, to rest their weary bones. They found kerosene tins. These were 4 gallon cans,  emptied of the fuel used in heating, lighting and cooking, that were just thrown away by those who could afford them, who had finished with them. Dumped. Many folk who had lost their h...

It is hard when you are driving in these parts not to wonder about the people who first came here. Why they came. How they survived. What drove them to consider ever living on this stone dry ground with its rare tufts of edible grass and unreliable surface water. Driving east from Birdsville heading home, our trip became illuminated by the billboard tales of two of Australia's greatest cattlemen and bushmen, Paddy Durack and John Costello, who were among the first ever to settle in these parts. These Irish brothers-in-law set out in 1867 from NSW to secure the future of their extended family on the edge of what is now the Quilpie shire: then unsettled, unsurveyed, and, in many cases, unexplored.  One generation removed from the terrible poverty in Ireland they hungered for more. They were driven men, searching for a better life. They pushed their stock north and west, out onto the edges of solitariness, into western Queensland. Here they found no one else squattin...

From Birdsville towards the setting sun, sand dunes rise up like a phalanx of red parallel ridges for two hundred thousand square kilometres in beautiful linear symmetry, marching right across the Simpson Desert -- an area the size of Spain. It is hard to comprehend that water, an enormous cachet of life-saving ancient water lies invisible and deep beneath all this sand. It has been dripping, slowly, purifyingly, into the safe natural impermeable reservoirs of this basin for millions of years. The fear now is that it could all be used up in decades in this new power-guzzling mining world we have created out here.  This great inland dune field is an erg. It contains some of the longest sand dunes in the world, some two hundred kilometres long. The dunes run south east to north west, the direction the wind blew while forming them. The largest ridge, Nattanepica, or Big Red, is a mammoth 40 metres high. It is the granddaddy of all our parallel dunes.   ...

I was not the first of my family to order a beer at the Birdsville pub. Not by a long shot. In fact, before the first stone was ever laid to build either the pub or the town, my great great uncle, E A P Burt was out riding the red dunes in the area, scouting for a location to set up his store. Ebenezer Alma Percival Burt, nicknamed Percy, was my great grandfather's brother. He was one of the founding settlers of the place that was to become Birdsville. Percy owned and operated a large corrugated iron general store, called Burt & Co, opposite the Birdsville pub. The street fronting the pub and Percy's store still bears his name: Burt Street. For a while, in no-name land, the crossing where he set up his shop was informally called 'Burtsville', possibly an easy address for the Afghan camel drivers to recall as they began regularly delivering goods there, ordered for the run holders and workers of the Mulligan, the Georgina and the Diamantina.  ...

Cattle, the lifeblood of the outback Just a few decades ago, Innamincka was virtually a ghost town, its pastoral history its only real story. Back then, after the Burke and Wills exploration, early pastoralists moved their cattle up from the more populated southern states and Innamincka and Coongie became vast cattle fattening and horse breeding populations, all bought, at the turn of the new century, by Sidney Kidman, nearly 14,000 square miles of gibber and grass with access to the occasional water that flows south into the shallow inland creek beds.  The cattle station traffic encouraged the development of the small township of Innamincka, with a hotel, a store, a saddler's shop, a Chinese eatery and a police station. Nurses set up an Inland Mission to look after the medical needs of the widespread community, but, over time, that all came to a standstill, and it was only began to be revived after oil and gas were discovered in the surrounding Cooper basin after the ...

Crossing into South Australia from Queensland The flatter it gets, the drier it looks, the less it seems likely that life can be sustained out here. Yet beneath the wheels of our vehicles lies one of the largest water basins on the planet: the Great Artesian Basin. Which behaves much like a giant sponge, soaking up water over the millennia, collecting it in impermeable underground holes and tunnels, caves and niches. Two hundred million years ago this great flat dry land was covered in water. In parts of this basin you can still dig up sea fossils from that time. Back then the northern part of Australia tipped towards the sea. Not just once, but three times. Sea water flooded in, filling up these giant inland water bowls. Rain water funnelled underground from natural 'drain pipes' high in the eastern and northern mountain ranges.  The 'piped' water behaved the way water typically behaves, gradually being pulled down and down by gravity until it fi...