Route of our Birdsville trip in 2013
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| Birdsville trip 2013 |
Gibber, grass and gas fields
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 ...
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