• This is one of a few articles which I published elsewhere long before Green Path was conceived or begun but is still relevant enough to deserve a place on the blog. The date-stamp will say 2005, the date of first publication, although the article was only added to GP in 2016.
If Australia is little known to the rest of the world, North Queensland is little known to the rest of Australia – and Western Queensland is little known even to most North Queenslanders. Most of the NQ population lives in the provincial cities along the coast (Townsville, Cairns, Mackay, Bowen, Rockhampton) and most of the rest live in the roughly 50 km wide strip between the coast and the Great Dividing Range. These pictures introduce some of the country on the inland side of the mountains.
Landscape near Ewan, between Hidden Valley and Hervey’s Range, in late July, well into the dry season – and after a wet season that provided much less rain than usual. Ewan is less than 100 km north-west of Townsville.
It’s not always dry. This is the bridge at Belyando Crossing, about halfway between Charters Towers and Clermont, in mid-January 2005. We walked down to the bridge, and took the photo, because the river was much higher than usual – it’s often a trickle between sandbanks. But there was more rain upstream a week or so later, and the bridge was under water for nearly a week after that.
Belyando Crossing, by the way, is the biggest place on the 400 km stretch of road between Charters Towers and Clermont. It has a permanent population of less than a dozen people.
• This page was created in April 2005 for my older website. Now that I have been blogging for five years and 600+ posts, there are several more pages about the West: Rainsby, Ravenswood, Hidden Valley , White Mountains (again) and Mount Fox come to mind.