3/6/23 Counting Emus: Roma to Bourke.

"I'll be very disappointed," I said as I buckled my seat belt bright and early on a crisp Roma morning. "If I don't see emus today. There are always emus between Charleville and Cunnamulla."

But first we had to leave Roma.

Last views of Roma's main street in the early morning.

Early morning shadows highlighted the tracks of harvest, west of Roma.

The bikes were always with us.

We had to buckle our belts and do some serious traveling after all the lollygagging and sauntering and doubling back and riding bicycles over the past eight weeks. We didn't stop other than to swap drivers and for Roger to take his back for a walk. The roads that ribboned under our wheels were familiar from years of working throughout the area. The little towns along the way had changed very little, if at all: a few more shops closed, the odd new one open. After several good seasons the country wore a healthy coat of grass.

We had morning coffee in Charleville, under the watchful eye of a big kangaroo.

 

My favourite fish still spun on a pole in the wind in Charleville's main street. The pub however, had joined the list of businesses closed since last time I was here. 

20km outside of Charleville we stopped at the site of the Angellala bridge explosion.

You wouldn't believe how many engineers suddenly had pressing reasons to visit Charleville in the year after the explosion, and when they visited Charleville they all just had to take a drive out to Angellala.  Engineers like to build big things, but they also love the thrill of shivery horror when big things go bang. 

Emus were sadly lacking between Charleville and Wyandra, but I remained optimistic as the Wyandra-Cunnamulla leg was usually rich in emu pickings.  We had a picnic lunch in Wyandra, in the grounds of the library/town hall/building-with-an-unusual-amount-of-satellite-dishes.  Roger developed all kinds of exciting theories as to why Wyandra's hall would have so many satellite dishes but alas, his questions will probably never be answered.

Four dishes here, and one at the front.

 Overhead, contrails drew sharp white lines across the winter-blue sky.

Finally!  Let the count begin.

The emus kept appearing and I kept counting.  We stopped in Cunnamulla for a quick walk around town. 

Cunnamulla streetscape #1.

Cunnamulla streetscape #2. 

The Cunnamulla Fella and I got reacquainted.  He's the strong, silent, statuesque type.

 We reached the border and I started adding NSW emus to the tally.

Welcome to NSW. And welcome to Outback NSW. And further down the road we were welcomed the the 'real' Outback. Which goes to show that the Outback is always just a little bit further out than where you are at the moment.

Neither of us had ever driven on the stretch of highway from the border to Bourke, so we got all excited about being somewhere new. It was hard to maintain the excitement however, as the new bit was just like the old bit with the addition of more feral goats. The emu tally kept rising and for a brief moment I thought we might crack >50 emus for the day but it was not to be: we rolled in to Bourke with a final tally of 48 which was a far cry from my best ever roll call of over 300 emus in the 200 km between Charleville and Cunnamulla.

Blue and red.

Beautiful old buildings in Bourke.

 

"Bourke is the most dangerous town in the world!" Roger declared with unseemly glee, as we checked into our overpriced cabin. I think this may have been a case of journalistic exaggeration, but the fact remained that Bourke was a high risk place to be if you were a car, and had a raft of social problems that the community struggled to overcome. All the grey nomads had read the reports and circled their wagons at a campground 10km out of town but was the point of that? We wandered downtown to find out that Bourke on a Saturday night was deathly quiet, the only nod to any social problems being the roller doors that covered every shop front in the street. 

Window shopping was not a rewarding pastime in Bourke.

Eating out was not a rewarding, nor possible, pastime in Bourke either. We ended up back in our cabin eating huge slabs of dubious lasagna from the local IGA, and polishing off a whole packet of biscuits between the two of us for dessert.  Then we tucked the car out of sight from the street and took our over-fed selves off to bed in preparation for another long driving day tomorrow.

Home for the night: Bourke.