Corner Country

From Pincally we proceeded further up into ‘Corner Country’, no sealed roads around these parts. We stopped for lunch at the pub at Malparinka. This is like an outback ghost town, I think the family who own the pub – with their 4 children – are about the only permanent residents. The eldest son Luke is in Lucy’s and Mrs Owens class. And you would think you may be served by some salt-of-the-earth Aussie character, however we are finding that it is often a European backpacker behind the counter. At Malparinka Pub the backpacker was from Amsterdam, has only been there 5 days straight from Sydney (for a 3 month stint) and our lunch was the first she prepared unassisted. My mind boggled as to what she could do in her spare time – she said lots of movies and reading.

In Tibooburra we stopped for a couple of days to catch up on things like washing and some repairs to the van. Cem did an excellent job in sourcing some supplies and fixing the smashed (by flying rock) water pipe under the van. One lady even, on her day trip to Broken Hill to pick up here husband after surgery, picked up a part for us, calling us from Broken Hill to make sure it was right etc. Tibooburra was quaint and friendly. Had a fabulous dinner one night at one of its two hotels. Very full of character – as you would expect an outback hotel to be.

Then we left ‘civilisation’ (ie electricity and mobile network) and headed into the outback for the next week or so. It was hard core driving with absolutely nothing but desert out the window for days.

Camerons Corner is the junction of the 3 states. In this photo Sol and Ayla are both in South Australia, Kai is in NSW and Cem is in Queensland:

This is also where we saw the ‘dog fence’ which follows the states boundaries and stretches 5500km. It was adapted from the rabbit proof fence and now separates dingos in Central Australia from livestock in SE Australlia. From the Great Australian Bight to SE Queensland, apparently it goes through 5 deserts and Camerons Corner is about half way along the whole thing.

For any teachers following, we are keeping maths mentals up (so far that’s about all). Here is our outback classroom.

More desert, rough roads. They varied actually. Sometimes you couldn’t talk for the corrugations, on other stretches they flattened out to almost as good as sealed….but never for long.

An outback camp at Montecellino Bore, on the Strzelecki Track:

Here Cem and I spent a fabulous evening speaking only German and drinking red wine with Walter and Christiane from Tasmania (originally from Frankfurt/Munster) around their campfire. They were hippies (now with 3 adult children, and about to become first time grandparents) who admitted they could now never fit back into the way of life in Germany. Again the generosity of strangers was displayed here with Walter pulling out his entire tool collection (including crowbar!) to help us adjust our shank which had bent down leaving the van looking very low at the front. The guys simply turned the shank 180 degrees and we may try and get something welded to fix it in this position.

To date the kids are travelling well. This is helped by the audiobooks I have downloaded, as well as the dvd screens we have installed on the back of our headrests. On this stretch we finally finished War Horse, long and epic but sad and I think it got most of our attention.