Sep 8-11 (Day 220 - 223) - Burketown (Qld) to Mataranka (NT)

Tuesday 8 September

Burketown is a fairly small town, however it’s also the headquarters of Burke Shire which covers a large part of the north western Carpentaria region, so it’s a little better appointed than some of the other smaller towns in the region, like Gregory.  It has two shops, one of which is part of the post office we’d been to a few days ago, one fuel station with pretty expensive diesel ($1.85/L), as well as the main reason for our visit - the library.  Rural Libraries Queensland has been a great service for us – we first used them at the library in Mossman where we set up our account, not really expecting to be going anywhere else, yet we have since been to member libraries in Cooktown, Weipa, Normanton, and now Burketown, borrowing books from one and then returning them at the next.  Being able to source books from all over the state and have them transferred between libraries while you travel has been really good too, and we’d collected another full load of books in Normanton.  But Burketown is the western-most public library in Queensland, so we had to clear out our account and return all the remaining books we had on loan in anticipation of leaving Queensland later today. Special thanks to the lovely lady at Weipa library who organised for some books to be sent to Normanton especially for our kids so they could finish the sequel of the Rosewood Chronicles. She certainly went above and beyond to help!

 

This cute setup was at Burketown Caravan Park.

 

No that little aqua 4WD isn't an old LandCruiser -
believe it or not, this is an old Nissan Patrol!

 

 

June 16-17 (Day 137-138) - Home Hill and Ayr

June 16

Home Hill is a quiet little town with a train line running through it. The showground is set back a block from the highway, but the train line runs right along side the showgrounds. This is preferable to being close to the highway, however, as there are only several rail services per day and during the trains they tend not to sound their horns!

The train line is primarily a freight line, but it seems to run a daily passenger service too. It seems a lot of these cane growing areas have a 'local' mill, as in every 100km or so, where the sugar cane is crushed and turned into cane sugar juice. Once crushed, this juice is loaded into stainless steel tanks on carriages and is then freighted by train down the coast to be refined into molasses, golden syrup, and all the other steps until you end up at plain white sugar. It is presumably cheaper to do this than carting the whole sugar cane down to a larger mill for processing, and then refining of the syrup.

Painting Days

Who said school had to start in February?! This was supposed to be a school project Mim prepared for the road, but the kids decided to get into class early!