Kerosene huts to tented humpies

Life has never been easy out here.

Even heading further east, towards home, where it has been a little more populated over the decades, where you might think it should be easier to survive,  there have been times when it has been a life and death struggle.

Morven Town Common, between Charleville and Mitchell, tells the tale of the Great Depression in these parts.  In 1932, with the world still reeling from the Wall Street crash, over a third of all Australians were out of work.  Many were on the move: swagmen, 'on the swag', with their bedrolls on their backs and their hats swinging with corks to swat away endless flies, were wandering from place to place looking for any income, any place to earn a penny, to rest their weary bones.

They found kerosene tins.  These were 4 gallon cans -- emptied of the fuel used then in heating, lighting and cooking -- that were just thrown away by those who could afford them, who had finished with them.    Dumped.  Many folk who had lost their homes discovered they could make secure, and even comfortable dwellings, using these discarded tin cans, over sapling frames.

Kero tin dwelling, Morven

During the Depression five tin huts circled a water tap on the common at Morven.  Some even had a measure of comfort with latched windows to let in air,  a thatch of branches offering an outdoor shaded patio and a cooking area, let alone the luxury of fresh vegetables growing in the perimeter garden.

Such kerosene tin huts become home sweet home for many an Aussie battler.

Further east, old shanties from other days of hardship still survive.  This one in Amby, a town that seems to mark the spot where grazing and grain production come together along our route.  Amby was once a changing post for Cobb and Co coaches flying along this track, back in the day before the rail line came.

Once a home

My great-grandparents had a wooden and corrugated-roofed cottage very similar to this though smaller,  just a few hundred kilometres further east, in the same era.   Their kitchen was more a lean-to out the back: not as refined as this extended covered porch area.  And thirteen of their children slept, over the years, in a second bedroom that was their closed-in verandah.

I loved to visit.  It was filled with an old wooden piano thick with sepia photographs of stiff stern relatives, overstuffed lumpy armchairs, rosary beads, prayerbooks, candles and the smell of camphor.  Or must.

Some of the old buildings on our route are being saved from weathering and destruction, we notice, by Work Camp Groups in partnership with the regional councils and Corrective Services.  This church, St Barnabas, in Amby, has been repainted, thanks to the Mitchell group.

Useful work, thanks to the Mitchell Work Camp Group

Such a good move.

But, not everyone along this route has been fortunate enough to live in a house, any house, let alone a tin can dwelling, or even an unpainted one.   Not even those who were successfully employed.

The railway line runs beside the highway out here in South West Queensland in such a way that as you watch its endless tracks unfurl as you drive, you can't help wondering what it must have been like for those who built the railway track along this stretch in the 1870s and 1880s.

Their lives really have to be counted among the meanest in our history.

Most railway building folk lived on the job, in the main: in tents, or makeshift shelters of twig and bark and leaves tied tightly together for protection against the sun, the wind and the rain.    Many had their wives and children with them as they worked.  There was nowhere else for the family to go.   Some came across the seas looking for a better life, bringing children with them, barely surviving the long months of cramp and disease on board the immigration ship, to be offered a job even as they offloaded on the docks, so vital and necessary was this infrastructure deemed.    Safe at last, they must have thought.  Money for food, for shelter, for the family.  Better, they must have thought, than from where they had come.

Railway wives scrabbled in dirt floor hovels all up and down this railway route, probably covering the floor with dampened tea leaves, or maybe finding fresh leaf matter from the bush to sprinkle in the hope of laying the dust.  Or, simply to use as a soft thin mattress.  If they were house proud. Or, if had the time.   No doubt their children worked.  If they could hold an iron nail, I imagine they were given a task on the line.  Paid or not.

It is impossible to comprehend how hard their lives must have been until you come across something like this memorial that has been set up in memory of some of those who died in this area,  in this railway camp, on this stretch of the Miles to Dulacca railway line, at Paddy's Creek, near Miles.

Memorial to the fettlers at Paddy's Ck, near Miles

Alice was born right here at Paddy's Creek, but not to thrive. She died on 22 May 1878,  just five weeks later.

Herbert, from Yorkshire, survived a cruel overseas trip, only to die here of fever and ague, on the 9th February, 1879,  all of 2 years and 3 months of age.  Barely talking age.

John, from Gatton, died of dysentary, 3 February 1882, aged 1 year.  Barely walking age.

Annie died on 21 March, 1883, just one day old.  Bertha, her twin sister, died on 31st March, 1883, barely 11 days old.  She lived long enough to give hope.

Clara, aged 17, died of fever and ague during childbirth.  Her tiny son lived for just four days.  Both died in 1878 here at Paddy's Creek.

That monument is important.  These are people who should be remembered as part of our history.

And yet, today, that very railway line, for which they spilled their blood and the blood of the children, is barely used.   Why ever not?

Eastwards and onwards to home, it now becomes impossible to move forward easily on the road.  We have come across almost no traffic for weeks on our trip.    We haven't even bypassed a road train enroute, except to see a couple, stationary, in one or two towns.  Yet, the traffic now becomes thick and congested, and all of a type, for long endless tens of kilometres.  

It is mining traffic.

And road building traffic.

Trucks loaded with heavy machinery and mining detritus,  and utes and 4 wheel drives carrying gas and oil and maintenance personnel moving between jobs along this stretch.

Endless kilometres of slow heavy mining traffic

The roads are crumbling under the very weight of the traffic.  They were not built to cope with this.

Every few hundred metres there is a stop light as road maintenance crews attempt to lay another thin  temporary coating of bitumen over enlarging cracks and crevices in the road surface so that the big monied items of transport can pass through and reach their mining destinations.

Mining.   Fresh blood in this part of Australia, pulling out enormous product and accumulating staggering profits from the core of this country, the like of which has never been seen before.

And yet the roads crack beneath the weight of their work.

The main through-route east to west of  Toowoomba is so deeply furrowed it has already sunk deep under the weight of wheels -- in the same way that the constant endless chariots of old grooved out the streets of ancient Pompeii metropolis.   You can still see those ruts in the ruins there, to this day.

And these railway lines, too, were built for yesterday: for wool, and wheat, and beasts. Apparently not  to carry this heavy duty transit stuff.
 
But it is hard not to remember those scrabbling tented railway families who carved out this line, attempting to improve traffic to the hinterland.

And wonder was any of what they did worth anything at all?

Surely it could be made so.

On the edge of solitariness

It is hard when you are driving in these parts not to wonder about the people who first came here.  Why they came. How they survived. What drove them to consider ever living on this stone dry ground with its rare tufts of edible grass and unreliable surface water.

Driving east from Birdsville heading home, our trip became illuminated by the billboard tales of two of Australia's greatest cattlemen and bushmen, Paddy Durack and John Costello, who were among the first ever to settle in these parts.  

These Irish brothers-in-law set out in 1867 from NSW to secure the future of their extended family on the edges what is now the Quilpie shire: then unsettled, unsurveyed, and, in many cases, unexplored.

The Whynot claim
Named after Paddy's horse

One generation removed from the terrible poverty in Ireland they hungered for more.  They were driven men, searching for a better life.  They pushed their stock north and west, out onto the edges of solitariness, into western Queensland.   Here they found no one else squatting.  Here they set up places they might call home, and for a decade or more, their stars were sweetly in alignment.

The land, then and now
Flat, stony ground under a blue blue sky

They pegged the land, set their cattle onto it,  built boundary fences,  dwellings, outhouses and waterholes.  They made use of what the land offered.  They had not much else.

A boundary rider's homestead, rising out of the earth

They brought in relatives and pegged out even more claims.   Until they occupied a small country, hereabouts.

Eventually, they notified the government of their claims.  Though, they waited a few years: saving a stack on government taxes in doing so -- because when the lease wasn't in their name, they didn't have to pay it.  A risky game, as someone else might have come along and tagged their claim.   But, no one did.

For a short while, the Duracks and Costellos created a dynasty, and were counted among the most skilled surveyors, bushmen and cattlemen in Australia, at that time.    Kings in Grass Castles.

And many of their stories survive.

On this site, about seventy kilometres west of Windorah, John Costello once dismounted from his horse to boil his billy.  He was out exploring, sussing possible land claims for his friends and family.  He carved J.C. on a tree that stood nearby, so likely saw this as a possible station site.  It later became a watering hole, and the pise-built hotel was called,  by the locals,  "The J C".   A township and a property were eventually gazetted, but the Post Master General's department refused to accept "J C" as the name of the town, officially calling it Canterbury instead.  But all that ever there was has now disappeared, and none of the locals took to using the official title, Canterbury.   Then, and even now, as it lies in scattered ruins, the place is affectionately named:  "The J C".  

The J. C. Ruins
John Costello was once here

Then ill winds came, and blew much of their fairytale away.

Today birds nest beside Kyabra Creek
where the Costello's once lived

Driving the families and herds onto newer, unbroken, even wilder pastures, in remote Western Australia.  Over deserts with their dwindling herd of cattle they trekked, leaving many a swollen carcase to lie sun-bleached and sand-blown enroute.

Remarkable Aussie battlers.

But still, they had a go.

Cathedral of sand

From Birdsville towards the setting sun, sand dunes rise up like a phalanx of red parallel ridges for two hundred thousand square kilometres in beautiful linear symmetry, marching right across the Simpson Desert --  an area the size of Spain.

It is hard to comprehend that water, an enormous cache of life-saving ancient water, lies invisible and deep beneath all this sand.  It has been dripping, slowly, purifyingly, into the safe natural impermeable reservoirs of this basin for millions of years.  The fear, now is, that it could all be used up in decades in this new power-guzzling mining world we have created out here.

This great inland dune field is an erg; it contains some of the longest sand dunes in the world: some  two hundred kilometres long.  The dunes run south east to north west-- the direction the wind blew while forming them.  The largest ridge, Nattanepica, or Big Red, is a mammoth 40 metres high: it is the granddaddy of all our parallel dunes.

Some crazy enthusiasts can't wait to drive up it, over it, on it and around it.  The sides and plains between each dune are clamped together with drought-resistent grasses and tufts of spinifex.

Still, tiny quartz particles of sand are constantly shifting across the face of the dune, changing its complexion, changing its shape.

We are at the top of Big Red, with our wine glasses and cameras, as the sun goes down.

Corellas wheel and squeal and swoop as they fight that last hour for the best bunk for the night on one of the bare gums rimming the patch of remnant blue water left by recent rains.

We sometimes come across places in the world that feel extraordinarily special.  Tonight this is one of them.  As the sun sinks slowly behind the dunes words simply limp into silence.

The great natural cathedral of red pulsing sand gives off one last vibrant glow, then the sun quickly slips away, stealing the light.