A Trip Out West

It has been many weeks since my last post and I anticipate that some of my readers will have drifted away. Well, this is the start of an avalanche of new posts concerning the visit to Australia of my brother Brian and his wife Daphne from Plymouth in the UK. All up they spent a month with us and we travelled long distances. The posts will not necessarily be in chronological order, but that doesn't matter. What does matter is the collection of unusual and often stunning sights that we saw.

I'll start with a 2-day excursion we took out west to Narrabri, a small town on the flat western plains. Brian and Daphne joined us in early to mid-March at a time of year (Autumn Australian style) when temperatures would be cooling down. So we encountered relatively mild 30+ degrees C on this trip.

We took the back route to Narrabri through magnificent scenery much of the way. The route wound through the little villages of Bundarra and Bingara before taking the long Killarney Gap road across the Nandewar ranges to the western plains. Shortly after leaving Bundarra we took a side trip to see one of this country's great inland storages - Copeton Dam on the Gwydir river. As you can see from this first picture, the dam wall is immense.

And the second show the lake impounded behind. Because of a very long drought the lake is now only 17% of capacity so you can perhaps imagine the scene when it's full.

After Copeton, when headed down the Gwydir Rive to Bingara. By our standards, this is quite a large river and a major tributary of the Murray-Darling system. At this point the water still has about 2000 km to go to reach the sea.

At Bingara, shown here from a lookout over the town, we had morning coffee at the glorious Art-Deco cafe in the main street after we were shown around the Art-Deco interior of the Roxy Theatre - the subject of an earlier post. To see more about the theatre and its attached Greek cafe visit: http://www.roxybingara.com.au/about-the-roxy/ . Its amazing that such a small town should have such a facility.

Leaving Bingara, we took the road to Killarney Gap and after maybe 40 km we saw an intriguing sign directing us to a view of glaciated rocks. This immediately intrigued me since I know that no part of this area was glaciated during the last ice age which ended over 10,000 years ago. I suspected a hoax, but it wasn't! The glaciated pavement you see here was formed 220 million years ago!! Where else in the world could you see such a formation?

As the road wound up through the Killarney Gap the scenery became ever more grand. The Nandewars have a volcanic origin demonstrated with these images of volcanic plugs and the wonderful rock formation at a reserve called Sawn Rocks.

Sawn Rocks look like a church organ made from columnar basalt and this visit added to the famous sights of columnar basalt I've visited. Almost 50 years ago I saw the Giants Causeway in northern Ireland and around 16 years ago I took a short boat trip from the Island of Mull in Scotland's Inner Hebrides to the famous Fingal's Cave on the Island of Staffa. This image is a least their equal visually but is largely unknown!

After a restful night staying at Tommo's motel in Narrabri - much better than the name seemed to suggest - we headed into the long line of dramatic mountains lying east of the town. They rise sharply from the flat plain to an altitude of well over 1500 m (4900 feet). Just have a look at this gorgeous scenery.

And here I am standing on top of Mount Kaputar (1510 m) which is reach by road followed by a flight of steps from the car park below.

After Kaputar, we headed off to the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), at the Paul Wild Observatory - an array of six 22-m antennas used for radio astronomy located about 25 km west of Narrabri. The moveable dishes are on something like 6 km of 'railway' track and are part of an even larger collection of radio telescopes separated by some 300 km. So this facility is world-class and has a visitor centre where one can watch on a computer screen the signals being received from deep space. The centre is also surrounded by astronomical sculptures like the one shown here: very pretty.

And, some of the local  wild-life hops around the facility. We saw a pod of kangaroos like this little fellow here.

The final image from this trip is a field of cotton getting ready for harvest. Theses cotton bushes are rather on the low side, which I presume reflects the low rainfall and small amount of irrigation water in major storages. Still, Brian and Daphne were interested in seeing a real cotton field. At, at the moment, I have a rather large grant - with two others - from Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (Cotton).

Come on down to visit us and you can see these things for yourselves.

AS