North Queensland wildlife and the environment
We have been out West again, to Porcupine Gorge and Undara Lava Tubes. We have been impatient to go inland ever since the rain stopped but there is a frustrating period every year between the end of the rain and the re-opening of flood-damaged roads and flooded parks.
Continue reading “Porcupine Gorge and Undara Lava Tubes revisited”
Western Queensland is dinosaur country and every little town seems to have its fossil display. Lark Quarry is special because, by its nature, it is an on-site display. It is a dinosaur trackway preserving the footprints of flocks of small dinosaurs and at least one T-rex-sized monster. The tracks were imprinted in soft mud 95 million years ago, covered and protected by silt which became sandstone, and exposed over the last fifty years by paleontologists.
Such a site is so extremely rare that it demanded protection and invited tourism. The result is a large modern hall (basketball court size) sheltering the exposed trackway in the middle of nowhere – well, 100 km south of Winton, which is much the same thing.
Muttaburra is a small town in the middle of the endless grasslands of Western Queensland. The nearest bigger centres are Hughenden, Winton, Longreach and Barcaldine to its north, west and south; there are none to the east until you reach the coast. ‘In the 2021 census, the locality of Muttaburra had a population of 158 people,’ according to Wikipedia, which puts it in the same league as Pentland or Torrens Creek; it sprawls just as much, too.
We passed through on our way from Moorrinya National Park to Bladensburg. Moorrinya to Muttaburra was an hour down the sealed road towards Aramac but turning off, after a cuppa and some birdwatching, at Nat Buchanan Bridge. Thence about 80 km on mostly dirt roads to Muttaburra and a campsite on the edge of its recently extended Rest Area. We walked into the town centre to look around the new, nicely-done and always-open Muttaburrasaurus Interpretation Centre.
We’ve been out West again, to Moorrinya National Park for the first time and to Bladensburg for the second, with incidental visits to Muttaburra, Lark Quarry and White Mountains. This index post will be updated with links to separate posts about each location as they are added to the site, in a process which should be familiar to regular readers.
“It could be nicer,” I exclaimed when we arrived, “but it’s hard to see how!”
Minutes later we saw this Water Monitor lounging, very much at ease, on a log in the river, and our day got even better.