Lagoons, waterholes and billabongs

Lagoons, waterholes and billabongs

For our picnic lunch on the first day of our camping trek to Birdsville we stopped at Yelarbon lagoon, tucked away so carefully in the back of town that few tourists would be likely to sleuth it out, unless they went searching, as we did.   

It probably needs a sign. 

Yelarbon, is an Australian Aboriginal word, meaning 'water lilies growing in a lagoon'; but today, albeit bare of water lilies, the lagoon still looks tranquil and picturesque, with gums shading its low grassy banks and herons beaking up wet caterpillars and fat crickets for their picnic lunch.  

Yelarbon Lagoon

This Yelarbon water stop was the first of many memorable waterholes that provided a lovely and recurring water theme throughout our entire Birdsville trip. 

And more even this day.

First night, first happy hour

On to Goondiwindi, where we camped our first night beside a beautiful bush billabong.  We are in Gunsynd territory, and, no doubt, the famous racehorse had many of his racing bruises soothed in these cool waters of the McIntyre.  

This water reminds me that Goondiwindi is famous for its floods.  In one of those floods, on a wet and muddy day in August 1875, my great-grandfather, then storekeeper and sometime drover at Inverell Station in New South Wales, drove 9,000 sheep in front of him to the Queensland border, not far from Goondiwindi, only to find it deep in flood.  

A punt man offered him transit for the sheep at an exorbitant charge of a halfpenny a head.  Too much for my great-grandfather, who promptly turned on his horse and guided the sheep in his charge in a large U-turn, heading them straight back to Inverell Station, going nowhere.  His plight was reported widely, reactivating the age-old argument that the border needed a crossing: a bridge, preferably one with low toll rates.  

And that eventually happened: a Border Bridge was built in 1914 and provided all weather transit between the two states.  But, a little too late for my great-grandfather.  

Floods right to the deck

Today, large earth levies: dykes, hold back the floodwaters that surge over this land.   Without it the waters spread far and wide.  


Our dinner date this evening was a barbecue at the home of a local couple who live by yet another billabong.  

Previous floods have spilled over right to the steps of their house deck where we sat and ate the most delicious barbecued steaks, overlooking the cache of blue-claw yabbies in their own private billabong.  

The sun sets on our first day

And, as we raised our wine glasses to the first of many lovely days to come, ducks, preparing to roost, drew lazy circles on the billabong surface splashed gold by the setting sun. 

oooOOOooo