Cobar and Dubbo

23/07/2012
  About 450K’s west of where we are is the border between New South Wales  and South Australia, that’s as the crow (or parrot) flies. So we are in the outback of N S W at a small town called Brewarrina. There doesn’t appear to be much here but I had had enough of driving so we pulled in. Earlier we had stopped for a short while in the district town of Walgett to do some shopping and wished we had done it at Lightning Ridge. Every shop in Walgett has steel bars and shutters at the windows and the private houses are behind high fences. The town has a large Indigenous population!
 We have travelled west through mostly sheep country and not much else except for quite a lot of emus. Hope it gets a bit more interesting tomorrow as we move further west.

 24/07/2012
  Brewarrina isn’t a very exciting town except for the weir that sits across the Darling River. Here we watched hundreds of diving and wading birds hunting for fish either side of the weir. Hope the pictures turn out, it was a lovely site. There were some Aboriginal stone fish traps set in the river but the river was too high for us to make them out properly.
 Our next stop was in the town of Bourke which gets a good write up in the tourist literature but didn’t come up to expectation. The town looked run down though there were a couple of well preserved buildings. We looked around for the much thought of historical wharf which wasn’t obvious until we realised we  were stood on it! Just a wooden platform by the side of the Darling River with a board telling of the time when Bourke was a bustling inland port.
 To the side of the wharf was a fully restored vintage oil fuelled stationary diesel engine with a couple of blokes giving a demonstration and a talk. It was particularly interesting for me as the engine was made by Crossley Brothers in Manchester, an engineering company my father worked for in the late 1950s.  I have to add, the engine was made long before his time.
 So now we are much further south having driven through more sheep farms, cotton plantations, seen lots more emus and wild goats in much more interesting countryside. We are in the mining town of Cobar for a couple of nights.

 25/07/2012
 After the mild disappointment of our last two major towns Cobar had a lot more to offer, if you are interested in mines that is. It is a mining town and always has been , mining gold, silver zinc, and lead with copper being the main resource. We looked at the mining heritage site where we saw an original head frame, which is the structure at the top of a shaft, made from steel now but wood in the old days. There was the obligatory stone crusher, of which we have seen many throughout various  mining areas in Oz.
 Just out of town is the New Cobar Gold mine with a lookout platform looking down into the very deep mine. Not for anyone who suffers from vertigo!  We went to look at another gold mine which had a sort of heritage trail for you to follow, but that was just heaps of rock and rusty lumps of iron. Funny how they don’t let you very close to these gold mines! Cobar was definitely worth a visit We are moving on tomorrow to the big city of Dubbo.

 26/07/2012
 Another 125 Ks further south and it’s definitely getting more and more chilly, nearly time to start heading north. Most of our journey was pretty boring today with no hills and lots of arrow straight road. We have driven 300K altogether with half of it due east then the remainder south. It wasn’t until we were close to our destination that we got something to look at.
At Narromine there is a statue of the great Australian fast bowler Glenn Magrath who was raised there. Whether he was actually born there it doesn’t say so knowing the Aussies there is probably a plaque or something somewhere else saying, this is where he was born. Then we travelled through more cotton country where we saw again huge quantities of cotton in bales waiting to be dealt with. This part of N S W is also a major wheat grower, obvious from the enormous grain silos and sheds.
 Now we are in Dubbo which looks interesting, especially as there is a pizza shop just across the road from our van park! We may give it a go!!

 27/07/2012
 Bloody hailstones!! I don’t believe it. We are sat in the van with the heater going full bore at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, this, after waking up to another gloriously sunny morning We spent the morning looking around Dubbo which is quite a big town although classed as a city, but not as big as Leamington Spa for instance, but nice enough, by the Macquarrie River. Nice until the rain came, followed by this snowy stuff! Still it has given us a chance to catch up with our computerating , well it has     if this shiny thing wouldn’t keep shutting down. This is shades of how things used to be before we got our gismo thingy which is supposed to give us internet connection anywhere within range of Telstra phone mast. Just lately it’s been a real pain, we just wrote an email and hit the send button sending it who knows where   then “sending failed”  and it hadn’t saved either. It just vanished into the ether. It eventually went after rewriting the whole thing. Not a good day!

 28/07/2012
  The plan for today was to get up early (6 o’clock) and watch the Olympic opening ceremony online, because we had googled it and found a link which promised a live stream. Well, that worked didn’t it! ( irony) We read about it online with ,the BBC had live text commentary as it happened but no pictures, until the caravan park manager arrived and opened up the TV room. We hotfooted it over there and switched on in time for the beginning of the parade of athletes until the end. It was amazing, even though we had missed the earlier spectacular stuff and some preamble. Our buddies up in Cairns watched it, and when we spoke on the phone  they remarked that they were very impressed.
 The rest of the plan was to walk into town, do some sight seeing , lunch and a couple of hours in the pub followed by a takeaway pizza. Most of it (the plan ) came together, just delete the site seeing bit as we were late getting away and had missed brekky. An hour on the skype thing was also not in the plan.

 29/07/2012
  The one thing we wanted to look at in Dubbo was the old town gaol which is now a historic site having ceased to be a prison in 1966. We managed to get there today, as, apart from a few jobs around the van and another skype session, there were no other distractions.
The gaol has a number of points of interest but is not very big so the whole tour only took just over an hour.
 It was built in 1847 and must have been a dismal place to work, let alone be an inmate. They did their own flogging and hanging and there were animatronic exhibits of the poor buggers waiting for death or the cat-o-nine tails. All a bit gruesome really but it kept us out of the pub! Back at the van we tried to catch up with the blog but for some reason the internet connection is crap again and it is a real struggle. Last day in Dubbo maybe the shiny thing will start to behave when we leave here.