CAMOOWEAL, Queensland

As you cross the border into the Queensland Outback, you enter Bob Katter country. Scary really but his electorate is so big you can’t avoid it! It stretches from the NT border in the west to the Atherton tablelands in the east and from the Gulf towns in the north to Mt Isa in the south. Hoping to escape many of his like minded constituents, we chose to stay at a free camp beside a beautiful billabong in Camooweal for our first few nights in the Sunshine State. Fortunately, our neighbours were other travellers who mostly seemed to come from Victoria! (Not unusual for these parts!)

Camooweal has some notable history as a droving post but today is better known for its natural attractions including cave sites and birds (the feathered kind!). We thoroughly enjoyed the three nights we spent at the billabong. It was incredibly peaceful; a place to relax and enjoy the impressive show of birdlife. We’re hardly bird watchers but when pairs of majestic brolgas, flocks of greedy pelicans, cunning falcons and a plethora of other species spend their days hunting in the fish packed pools right in front of you, it’s pretty engrossing. We’d have loved to stay another couple of nights but our supplies were low and the weather was changing. We were in the line of a cold, wet front and we knew we’d be stuck, literally, if we didn’t get out before the rains arrived.

After discovering the front would not just bring rain but also an icy blast of air, we decided to book into a caravan park where we could be out of the mud and plug into mains power to run our heater in the van. Yeah, yeah, soft, I know but we’d not experienced a day below 30 degrees for months and now we’d have to suffer through two 12 degree days before it was forecast to rocket up to 16 degrees. What the???? As Michael said repeatedly, “We didn’t sign up for this!” Perhaps it’s a karma thing…we’d sat smugly up here in the north, gloating about our warm, balmy weather while everyone in SE Oz shivered through the coldest Winter in a long time. That’ll teach us!