Travelling Past Time: 18 - Bourke - Burren Junction NSW 21/9

Entry 18 Bourke to Burren Junction NSW. 21/9 – 4/10/2019

After a couple of nights at Comeroo Station, we completed our drive to our next targeted destination the iconic out back Australian town of Bourke. It was about a 160-kilometre drive for the day travelling through mostly private property, along tracks requiring plenty of concentration watching out for changing hazardous road conditions. The extra level of alertness, resulted with us feeling rather weary by the time we arrived at Bourke.

Once we were near the outskirts of Bourke, we obtained phone reception and spoke with one of our extended family members who lived at Bourke to arrange some catch up time. It was a Saturday and most country towns all but shut up over the weekends. We drove directly to one of the café’s where we shared a cuppa and chat with Owen. We thoroughly enjoyed our time catching up, leaving the café early afternoon at closing time.

Our next stop was at the information centre where we obtained good information about Bourke’s attractions. We set camp at one of the caravan parks and made our way to the supermarket for replenishment of our food supplies. There was one carrot left in the fridge and a few provisions of long-life food items left in the pantry. We do maintain an emergency amount of food including a few meals in the freezer and we would have been ok if we had become stranded, with around a weeks’ worth of food supplies, but we had expired all of our normal everyday food items.

Whilst in the supermarket we stopped to chat with a couple we hadn’t seen for a few years. They were in Bourke for the Bushtracker Owners Group annual muster with about 70 other Bushtracker Caravans all based at the race course. We did know about this muster and hadn’t planned to be in this area of Australia. But ended up nearby due to the Smicks dragging us along on their pilgrimage to the muster which worked in with our wish list to experience the nearby Currawinya National Park. It was the final night of the muster and we were invited along for the final happy hour.

We returned to our caravan from the supermarket (happy hour had already started,) placing our perishable goods in the refrigerator, leaving all our other shopping on the table and benches, making our way to the race course. Quite a number of people had already departed including the Smicks & Rob and Glenda from Yorke Peninsula whom we spent a week with earlier in the year. We still managed a quick chat with about a dozen other people we knew before we ended up in one of the towns eateries for tea with half a dozen others. They were going to kick on at another venue with a live band but we declined as we had both hit that ‘brick wall’. Our day had started at 7 am followed by an exhausting 4-hour drive, straight into socialising as soon as we arrived at Bourke, returning to our caravan at 9.30 pm, happy but exhausted.

Bourke was a location with good phone and internet access which we had been missing over the last couple of weeks. It’s astounding how reliant we had become on access to electronic activities. We uploaded the previous edition of our diary / journal /blog, spoke via phone and skype with our children, parents and other family members, fitting them all in over the Sunday for ease of their busy life schedules. There was a copious amount of electronic mail to sort and attend to. By Sunday night we were feeling beat, though being able to communicate with family provided many pleasurable thoughts.

Another advantage of good access to life’s necessities available at Bourke was having our paper mail from the last three months forwarded to the Bourke Post Office. Just another one of life’s chores attending to matters not as readily available via electronic mail.

In between the above requirements, we did manage to view a few locations around Bourke.

We were pleased to be up to date with all our needs and happy catching up with our family news. We could have stayed another day at the Bourke caravan park to provide our bodies with a bit of a rest from the last couple days of hectic activities. We decided to move on to a quieter location where we could really relax.

There is an iconic Aussie saying, “The back o’ Bourke,” referring to ‘a long way away, or remote,’ which Bourke is, located in a remote location of Australia and we decided to explore, some of the nearby country side, “The back o’ Bourke.” Some of the interesting Bourke attractions for us required a reasonable amount of driving time to outlying locations and we decided to take our caravan with us, minimising the amount of driving time travelling to and from Bourke. We planned to spend about five days doing a circuit, returning back to Bourke incorporating many of the attractions along the way. Our first stop about 50 kilometres down the road was at the Gundabooka National Park.

Gundabooka N.P. we thought had a landscape with similarities to the Flinders Ranges located in South Australia, more so during the rock art walk. We set camp in the Dry Tank campground, rising at first light the next day to do the Little Mountain hike. It was a lovely walk, minus the flies but it was very early and a bit chilly. By the time we returned from the walk a couple of hours later the flies were starting to hunt us out.

Our next walk was at Bennet’s Gorge another beautiful location with a similar landscape to the McDonald Ranges in Central Australia near Alice Springs.

We spent further time at Yanda campground in a different area of Gundabooka N.P. It was located nearby the banks of the Darling River. There hadn’t been much in the way of water flow along the river for a few years, leaving a very dry dusty landscape. There was still the occasional water hole with some parts of the river having water present.

Our camp looking down across the Darling River plains

Looking in one direction along the Darling River

Looking in the opposite direction a bit of a water hole, just.

Sunset

Some of the locals

We did enjoy gazing at the magnificent river red gum trees with many very old trees > 100 years.

One afternoon a couple from the only other caravan present came up to us saying they had met us at Porcupine Gorge National Park near the town of Hughendon QLD. We were at Porcupine Gorge N.P, another very outback location in 2016. And yes, we had shared an evening campfire with Chris & Sandy and now we spent another evening chatting away around a camp fire at another National Park in N.S.W, “The back o’ Bourke.”

It was spring when the country side was supposed to be covered with wild flowers but the rains had been absent for many years. There was still the occasional splattering of wild flowers, but nothing like the publicity pictures in all the brochures, showing a country side covered by wild flowers.

And another deserted residence

We returned to Bourke for more electronic access needs, primarily to watch the Australian Football League grand final on the TV and to catch up on our clothes washing. We watched the footy, in the caravan park camp kitchen, with pizza from our freezer cooked up in a pizza oven available for use in the kitchen. It was a great setting, with some other people there for the footy whom had the camp kitchen fridge full of ‘drinks.’ There was some good banter around the camp kitchen, though we were all disappointed the match wasn’t all that entertaining.

Over the last month we had travelled along about 1,000 plus kilometres of dirt surfaced roads, at times deteriorating to rough tracks and it was time to seek the comfort of black top roads, starting with our return to Bourke. We were happy to say bye to those rough dusty roads for a while.

Even the caravan roof was collecting dust

We headed east from Bourke looking at an overnight camp location and decided to continue driving. It was comfortable driving along the bitumen road, though you still needed to on the alert for road side dangers. We set camp at our planned destination of Burren Junction a day earlier than anticipated about 300 kilometres down the road. Burren Junction had a camp ground with a hot artesian pool. Mary enjoyed the water temperature with Steve finding it just a bit cool for his liking.

We became more relaxed with the passing of each day at Burren Junction. We even relocated to another site when the current occupants vacated. We moved to a corner away from passing traffic and people with our own private setting.

initial couple of nights

our relocated setting

relocated to a corner site location on the other side of the camp ground

with beautiful evening sunsets from the rear of our caravan

It was the first week of a fortnight of school holidays and we decided Burren Junction was a good location to stay put, till it quietened down when the kids and parents returned to school and work. We enjoyed many a chat with other happy campers and spent a couple of hours each day soaking in the mineral rich artesian waters. It was a very relaxing environment with a bit of bird life about.