Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

Headed out towards the river, but couldn't quite work out how to get there (other than by a kilometre of highway embankment or cross-country across a floodplain still with its share of water), so just settled for a normal run. Felt like the sort of run you have the day after a long run (not that yesterday was really that long), but not too bad in that context.

First stop of the day was Barcaldine, a point of interest for two reasons: (a) it's another one of my sites and (b) the ALP was founded there in 1891 (in the fallout from a shearers' strike). The tree under which the latter event took place was poisoned in 2006 - a crime never solved (I suspect the local police didn't put a lot of effort into it) but given the bitter and sometimes violent anti-Labor rhetoric at the time around amalgamations of rural councils (the rage is still being maintained in Ilfracombe) I think I can guess the motive - but a replica is there in its place. There's also a well-done Australian Workers' Heritage Centre. There was a weekend market happening in town, and in general a good vibe around the place, whereas a lot of country towns feel pretty dead on Sundays.

That certainly applied to my next stop, Blackall, where my quest for lunch ended in a petrol station pie (which was as appetising as it sounds) for lack of any other options; even the pubs don't serve food on Sundays. (Some will be reminded of Easter 1995 at Crows Nest, where the local community responded to having 800 visitors in town by closing just about everything for the entire four days, except for Saturday morning when we were all running).

Finished up in Charleville after an afternoon on the road, passing through Tambo and Augathella, neither of which did themselves any favours with what they put on their welcome signs - "site of first Qantas crash" for the former and "home of the meat ant" for the latter. (Qantas's legendary never-crashed status applies only to the jet era; in the days when they were flying De Havilands around the Queensland bush, they fell out of the sky as much as everyone else).

Often in country settlements my running strategy is to pick the quietest road I can find out of town (preferably a dirt one). However, in a place like Longreach, all the roads out of town are at least moderately major (with even farms close to town measuring in the thousands of hectares, there aren't the minor rural roads you'd find in more densely settled areas), with the one which looked like it had most potential being on the other side of what I assumed would be the pedestrian-unfriendly highway bridge across the Thomson.

I took the Muttaburra road and immediately discovered I'd landed on my feet - it was closed to through traffic because of flooding further out of town. As a result (outside the town area) I only saw two vehicles in over an hour. Settled into a good rhythm early on and kept it going through the run, with hamstring only at minor nuisance levels. In the first half there was a slight headwind; on the turnaround this became a tailwind at almost exactly the speed I was running, so its noise disappeared and instead the birds formed the backdrop, which was nice. Even 9km from town in such flat country, town doesn't seem far away (the Qantas 747 at the airport museum, visited later in the day, is a major landmark). The second half seemed to go pretty quickly, crunching out a succession of 5-minute kilometres; starting to get a bit warm by the end. As a rural out-and-back, this won't quite match my classics of the genre this decade - Warwick (2013) and El Calafate (2014) - but it was pretty good.

I think this is also the first run I've done which has involved crossing the Tropic of Capricorn.

Did a trip through the middle of the day to Isisford, a small town which I knew chiefly because one of my teachers moved there to run a pub after retiring from teaching (he's moved on now). It's a town which has clearly seen much better days but they've done an excellent job of showing what used to be there, with a lot of informative signs (some of the stories not so happy, such as the mother and baby who perished when one of the pubs was torched in a 1956 insurance job) and a few original shops reconstructed. The aforementioned pub's hamburger probably ranks third out of three on my list of outback pub hamburgers this trip, but is still head and shoulders above anything you'll get out of a chain in the city.

Hapless criminal story: the Isisford bank was held up in 1921, and the robber made off with a bag of money. Unfortunately for him, the money was a bag of pennies - and in any case he didn't get far out of town before feeling the long arm of the law.

Made my first contribution to the vast quantity of roadkill on outback Queensland roads by running over a snake. (I haven't seen much larger wildlife on or close to roads, but that's probably because I've usually been off the road by 5).

Longreach has a pool, which wasn't a surprise, and it was open at this time of year, which was a little more of a surprise. Not that it was exactly overwhelmed with custom - in fact I was the only person there for the entire duration of the session, which was pleasant enough.

Sight of the morning: a large jabiru bird strolling casually through the car park afterwards.

For once I wasn't on the move today - much of the day being devoted to a tour of a local cattle station. I signed up for this largely because three of my colleagues had been on it when they came up here in late May (as it turned out, a few days before the rains started) to run a seasonal climate prediction workshop, and tasked me to get "after the rain" photos to match their "before" ones. Interesting to talk with the farmer, though, and find out more about what actually happens on the ground when there is a big drought here. They largely destocked (although they're starting to bring sheep back now; cattle are still a few months away), and a lot of people in supporting industries have left town, perhaps best indicated by enrolments at the local state school declining from 360 to 200 in three years. (The Census data will tell an interesting tale here, not just in Longreach).

C • Longreach 7

As flagged yesterday, I headed out to the Baldy Top lookout, a low flat-topped hill 7km out of town. After issues in recent weeks I wasn't quite sure how I would respond but the hamstring was at minor nuisance levels only today (and got no worse through the run), which is a plus - not sure whether I can thank the artesian baths or not. Didn't feel like I was flowing that well but a faster pace than usual for a run of this type (especially once you take out the scrambly kilometre up and down the last bit of the peak). Excellent views from the top - in country as flat as this, 20-30 metres of extra elevation makes a huge difference.

Quite a long day on the road today - 570km (although all on bitumen, except when one had to get off the single-lane strip typical of rural secondary roads in Queensland to make way for approaching road trains) - Quiplie-Windorah-Jundah-Stonehenge-Longreach, with a lot of the scenery subtly unfolding. Some of the dust on the car was turned to mud courtesy of some Cooper Creek water, with water still a few centimetres over the road at a couple of crossings on secondary branches of the river.

Spent some of the time on the road pondering the question of, if my quest was a 112-control rogaine with Australia as the map, which sites would get which points. The capital cities would obviously all be 20s (except maybe Darwin), and Kalumburu and Palmerville would be obvious candidates for 100. Despite their relative proximity to Melbourne, I'd also give 90s to Gabo Island and Wilsons Promontory because neither site is accessible by conventional transport (Gabo Island requires a light plane or a boat, Wilsons Prom 38km return on foot).

Random encounters: Kari Eronen (sometime Tasmanian orienteer) outside the Longreach supermarket.

The cold wind was still with us this morning but the sun was shining. Being in no desperate hurry to get away - would have been a good opportunity for something longer had I been in better shape - I headed out across the Bulloo River crossing (carrying a decent amount of water for this time of year but the flood has passed) and out on the Hungerford road. Felt like hard work in the sections into the wind but, as is often the way, the pace was no different.

Today was a day when I didn't need to be in a hurry; being a day ahead of schedule but then possibly needing to hold myself back to give the Cooper crossing at Windorah time to become passable (it turned out that it had reopened on Monday), I didn't plan to go any further than Quilpie today. On the direct route that's about 200km but there were a couple of interesting-sounding diversions via Eulo and Yowah which doubled that.

Yowah is an opal-mining settlement I hadn't previously heard of - I think it's relatively new (1990s) but still mostly looks to have the rough-and-ready air that other such places have. However, it also has hot artesian baths, which I thought would do me some good (and were worth the hour's wait for the attendant to get back from lunch).

(Queensland gem-mining settlements have a bit of a reputation for people getting away from things. Some years ago, two of our field inspectors went out to check sites in central Queensland, turned up at one of these places and found no-one would talk to them. Eventually they did find someone who was willing to converse, asked why everyone had been so unfriendly, and got the reply "Meteorology? That's fine. We saw your government plates and thought you were Tax").

Completed the journey to Quilpie in the afternoon via a stop at the Toompine pub, a pub built in the late 19th century in anticipation of a town which was never built. Quilpie definitely feels like the big smoke. It's got a newsagency! a chemist! a bank! an industrial estate! (or at least something signposted as such).

Felt significantly better driving today than yesterday - the spa must have done me some good - and may try something longer in the running department tomorrow. The lookout at Baldy Top, 7km away, is a tempting target.

C • Accommodation 6

The original plan for today was to do an in-and-out run to Burke's grave near Innamincka, go out to a waterhole a bit further along, head out of town late morning and make my way to Thargomindah.

Plans change in this part of the world. I'd camped in a nice spot alongside Cooper Creek (not in flood as such here, but flowing strongly), but didn't sleep that well because of strong winds shaking the tent. It was still dry when I got up (definitely no dew on a morning like this) so I packed up quickly, doing so just as some drizzle developed. 10 minutes later some more serious rain started - further north than I'd expected - and a very quick decision was made to leave town as quickly as possible, with the bitumen being 30km away at the Queensland border. ("As quickly as possible" wasn't immediate - I needed to buy fuel first so had to wait until the general store opened at 8).

There was enough of a break in the weather that I felt able to spend an hour making the side trip to the Dig Tree after crossing the border - seeing the site caretaker as I did so and passing on the story of my favourite archival discovery (a reference in the 1861 annual report of the Melbourne Observatory to staff shortages caused by the failure of Mr. Wills to return from his exploring expedition when he was supposed to). Nonetheless, although there wasn't any more rain as heavy as what fell just before leaving Innamincka, I was happy to be on the bitumen on a day with intermittent showers and a chilly strong southerly wind.

The road across to Thargomindah was something of a classic road to nowhere. It doesn't appear on a 1980s map of the area I saw yesterday and I presume it was built to service the gas fields in the region. The loneliness was perhaps reinforced by the lack of any distance markers or other signs. Took a side trip to the Noccundra pub (20km down a side road) for lunch - there's a lot to be said for outback pub hamburgers - before continuing on to Thargomindah.

I had done well to be so paranoid about rain; while significant falls didn't end up getting north of the border, the road from Broken Hill to Tibooburra was closed on Monday, and those out of Tibooburra were closed today.

Thargomindah has gone into legend in the Australian storm-cashing community as the first organised group chase in Australia ended up there in 1999, involving encounters with some "interesting" locals at the pub and then having to leave town on 15 minutes' notice or face being stuck there for 10 days as floodwaters rose. (Some of you will have seen some reliving of that on my Facebook page, as I know many of the participants). I didn't have anything so exciting, although it does seem a bit strange that the pub was deserted at 6.30pm.

For me, coming from remoter parts, Thargomindah felt a bit like a proper (small) town - and has kids (even if a reasonable proportion of them seemed to belong to the same mother). In the remoter parts of the outback living and travelling seems to be an older person's game; the only people younger than myself I'd seen since Broken Hill were European backpackers working in pubs and roadhouses.

My back had been feeling tight and sore for the last couple of hours of the drive, so I wasn't too surprised that a run didn't work out once I tried to do it.

Today was going to be the most challenging day of the trip in terms of the terrain covered: Tibooburra-Cameron Corner-Innamincka, 420km with 99% of it off the bitumen, although I'd heard from others that it was reasonably manageable.

The first section to Cameron Corner was indeed reasonably manageable, although a few spots of rain early on were slightly concerning (nothing more came of them). Cameron Corner is where NSW, Queensland and South Australia meet (I should have thought of doing a tri-state run although would have had to have negotiated the dingo fence) - a real outpost, as indicated by the store's fuel price ($2.20 a litre), but also the most accessible of the "corners" (the others are either in serious 4WD country or in a river).

At the store they told me that the next section was much more corrugated than what I'd come through. This, 120km across to the Strzelecki Track, was the bit I expected to be the most challenging; while a few sections were badly corrugated they were only short, and it was also the nicest country of the day, lots of red sand dunes with greenness around and carpets of yellow flowers (there are definite benefits to visiting the desert after rain). The road's formed so there's no actual sand driving as such and it would be perfectly passable to a robust 2WD. (That said, the number of Kingswoods you'll see on the tracks of central Australia in the hands of the local indigenous population is an indicator that the Aboriginal concept of "passable to 2WD" differs radically from ours).

The final and easiest section was the Strzelecki - this is a well-built gravel road which can mostly be driven at 80 without too many dramas. It gets a fair bit of truck traffic because of the Moomba gasfields and there's a proposal to seal it - as I understand it, the SA government has made the plans but is chasing money from the feds and/or the gas industry. In the latter case I presume they would be looking for a meaningful contribution towards the cost, whereas on the Queensland side of the border, given that road's vintage, I'd speculate that a backhander to Russ Hinze would have been enough to do the deal.

(Note for younger readers: Russ Hinze was the infamously corrupt (and infamously obese) minister for roads, planning, racing and probably a few other things I've forgotten in the Bjelke-Peterson government. He died before being convicted of anything, but enough people subsequently went to jail for paying him bribes that it's reasonable to assume he would have been convicted of receiving them).

As for the run: an out-and-back on the airport road in Tibooburra before leaving town. Felt like I was flowing quite well, but still some hamstring tightness similar to yesterday.

C • 2WD 7