North Queensland wildlife and the environment
We spent most of the last month in Tasmania and it was beautiful.
That’s both a reason for the recent gap in blog posts and a promise of what’s to come.
The plan is that this post will outline our trip and that subsequent posts will deal with particular places we visited, and that I will add links from this page to the new posts as I go.
That’s what I did with our Cobbold Gorge trip six months ago, and it seemed to work well then.
Leaving Undara Lava Tubes we drove towards the Atherton Tablelands through flat, dry country generously sprinkled with volcanic cones (we counted nine from the car at one point). The change between Mount Garnet and Ravenshoe was dramatic: hills! and rain! and big trees!
Ravenshoe prides itself on being the highest town in Queensland and one of its pubs, naturally, claims the title of Queensland’s highest hotel.
Undara is very similar to Cobbold Gorge (last post but one) in that it is a privately-owned tourist operation showcasing a spectacular geological formation in the middle of what was once a cattle station in the Gulf country. We had two nights at each and would have been happy with longer.
Cobbold Gorge is young and very beautiful. It was born about 10,000 years ago when a creek in Western Queensland was blocked and needed to find another way down into the Robertson River.
This is sandstone country so erosion proceeds quickly and the gorge is now many metres deep – although still very narrow – and fantastically carved by floodwaters and the debris they carry. The creek water is some metres deep, we were told, and is darkened to a rich jade green by sediments it carries.
But let’s start a bit further back, for context, and zoom in from far above…
Einasleigh is an outback town by any definition of “outback” but with a population of just under one hundred, perhaps only Aussies would call it a “town”.
It’s in the Shire of Etheridge, which constitutes most of the middle of North Queensland, and it is typical of our small Western towns – Prairie, Pentland and Torrens Creek on the road from Charters Towers to Hughenden come to mind.
Einasleigh has a pub (of course) and a caravan park, and a loose scattering of fading houses. It has no servo, if the sign back at the Lynd Junction roadhouse is to be believed Continue reading “Einasleigh and Outback Queensland”