Music, Yabbies and fishing in Queenslands Outback towns

Hi everyone, we've made it one of Australia's iconic towns,... Birdsville.

Along the way we've stayed at Cunnumulla, Thargomindah and Windorah, so grab a cuppa and I'll fill you in.

We loved our stay at Nardoo station just outside of Cunnumulla. Its a 110 hectare working cattle and sheep station. The great artesian hot tubs were great to soak in. Especially in the cool mornings! The kids watched the station hands muster the sheep and listened to their stories around the campfire. The station was gearing up for a music festival they hold annually, and they were expecting 600 caravans. We were lucky as some of the performers were already there, so we had a great night around the campfire listening to their music. Ben became the fourth member of the band (with his harmonica) after one of the of the musicians noticed him grooving to the music! They ended up giving him a lesson the next day and wrote out some scales to practice. We tried to buy one of their CD's but in typical country spirit they gave it to us for free.                         

Next stop was Thargomindah. We weren’t looking forward to it as we'd been pre-warned that the mice were in plague proportions. Anyway we were well prepared packing up our kitchen and pushing it in every night. Although we could hear them scurrying all over the outside of the camper and at times sliding off the sides and hitting the ground we didnt get any inside!

Thargomindah is a small town on the Paroo River. We caught 5 beautiful blue claw yabbies and a fellow camper lady came over and showed us how to pull their heads and tails off and cook them up. I was in heaven. They tasted sooooo good! The kids had a ball fishing. We used fresh bait caught in our crab net and they caught about 50 fish each over a morning and afternoon session. They were hooking the silver perch within 3-5 seconds of throwing in the lines. Too small but lots of fun!

We had a long drive from Thargomindah to Windorah.

The kids did their usual school work in the car and I did the marking. We had been told about a pub called Toonpine, that apparently had the best steak sandwiches ever. Its about half way between Thargomindah and Quilpie. Basically its a Pub without a town. It lived up to its name and the pub owner was quite and interesting character. 

 

Isolation was starting to set in by the time we reached Windorah. It has a population of around 50 and the kids were amazed there was only 8 kids in the whole school. We went down to the Cooper Creek but could only last for about 10 minutes because of the stench of dead fish. The locals had told us that because the Cooper has been running for a whole year the fish have had so much breeding time and have now overpopulated the river. Basically they don’t have enough oxygen now the river is slowing down so I guess its natures way. The birds were having a feast and apparently lots of pigs have been coming down to the banks too. We also had some fun in the afternoon on the sandunes. Such a gorgeous colour especially with the blue sky as backdrop.