Released to Travel New South Wales - Part 1

Monday 1 June 2020

COVID-19 travel restrictions in New South Wales were relaxed permitting non-essential tourism travel from 1 June.  Accordingly I decided to venture on a week long ride heading north where I hoped the weather would be warmer.  I awoke to a windy, wet morning.  I delayed my departure hoping that it would become more clement but eventually I had to bite the bullet and so I donned wet weather gear and set off.  As I reached the end of the road the heavens opened.  The torrential rain lasted for several minutes and then settled into steady rain and drizzle for the rest of the day.  I was heading for Lake Cargelligo, a distance of 325kms.  I arrived at my motel at 1615 feeling miserably cold but was met with a warm welcome from the owner.  That evening the rain had stopped and I ventured to the local pub, the Royal Mail Hotel, where I enjoyed a couple of beers and an ‘outback’ parmi (The Chicken parmigiana or Chicken Parmi is an Australian pub staple; there is barely a pub in the country that doesn’t feature a parmi on the menu. The ‘traditional’ Chicken parmigiana consists of a pounded crumbed chicken breast fillet, deep fried or pan fried. The fillet is topped with tomato puree sauce and usually a slice of ham. The parmi is then topped with cheese and a sprinkle of Italian herbs before being grilled golden brown. The dish is usually served with chips.). The pub was paying lip service to social distancing and I had a fascinating conversation with an old Aborigine man who was in his late seventies.  He was waiting for a takeaway and told me some interesting tales of his early life, for example driving a large flock of sheep to the Snowy Mountains (nowadays they are transported by truck), and of his grandmother who as a girl walked from Darwin, a distance of around 2000 miles.

Tuesday 2 June

I had ordered breakfast when I checked in and it was delivered to my room.  It was delicious, a full fry up with all the trimmings and fresh coffee.  I was set for the day.  My objective for the day was Cobar, a modest distance of 255kms (158 miles) so I decided to meander.  I took a minor paved road from Eubalong towards Condobolin.  Although heading east rather than north I reasoned that there would be roads branching off to Cobar.  I took the Kiacatoo Road which was extremely quiet with a vehicle sighted every 20 minutes or so.  On reaching Kargathur Road at Kiacatoo Railway Halt, I looked at my paper map and seeing no road to Cobar ahead I decided to turn around and seek another route north.  It was quite cold and windy and of course Murphy’s Law dictated that to view the area I was in the map had to be unfolded completely.  Wind + no shelter + large paper map = much swearing!  I was heading back to Eubalong West but noticed a small signpost to Cobar on a road not indicated as the route on my TomTom.  It was an unsealed road, the Grain Road, which emerged on the Kidman Highway at Gilgunnia, a distance of 122kms on largely red earth/dust.  I met only one other vehicle on this road, a truck which stopped to offer help as I had stopped to take photographs.

Cobar is a mining town and I was greeted by the sight of an enormous slag heap on the approach to the town.  After checking into the Crossroads Motel I walked the short distance into town for coffee and a slice of delicious cake.  I got into conversation with an elderly fellow who told me of the history of the Kidman Way and of Cobar.  It appears that it had become a mining town because in the 1860s a couple of guys noticed that the water in a local stream was red in colour.  They picked up a strange looking rock and on showing it in the local pub, the landlords wife said that it was copper.  It appears that she came from Cornwall and that as a girl she had worked sorting copper ore!  I ate in a Thai restaurant that night, the first day in over two months that they had been open because of COVID-19.  Although still cold, the sky was clear which augured well for the following day.

Wednesday 3 June

On leaving Cobar I visited an open cast gold mine close to town.  There was a viewing platform close to the rim and the scale of the mine was most impressive.

I left Cobar travelling west to visit Mount Grenfell, the site of a number of Aboriginal cave paintings.  Access was at the end of a 27kms long gravel road from the Barrier Highway.  The condition of the road was good for 15kms but it then deteriorated, largely as a result of being washed away by flood waters it appeared, to loose gravel and large rocks.

Mount Grenfell Historic Site was interesting although the paintings did not compare to those seen at Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland some years ago.  

I went for a short walk, glad of the beanie I had bought in a sale in Wagga the week before, and appreciated how easy it must be to become lost in the bush.

I returned to Cobar for fuel, coffee and lunch before heading for my next overnight stop at Bourke.  I was again following the Kidman Way, not named after Nicole, but after Sir Sidney Kidman (1857-1935) who was born in Adelaide and as a boy worked on stations in SA, WA and NSW.  In 1870 when copper had been discovered in Cobar he set up a butcher’s shop selling meat to the miners.  He bought his first station in the NT in 1886 and went on to become the largest landowner in the world. The road is not named for the person but rather for his inspiring vision to open inland Australia.

With the sun being fairly low in the sky it was remarkable to see, mile after mile, the light glinting/reflecting off a very large number of empty beer bottles littering the roadside.

I was about 39kms short of Bourke when I stopped to offer assistance to the occupants, two men, of a ute (Australian name for a pickup truck) which had broken down on the other side of the road.  They had no phone signal but did have an engine which was haemorrhaging oil everywhere.  I volunteered to arrange their recovery on arrival in Bourke.  They were on their way to Western Australia, a considerable distance.  I stopped at first workshop I saw in Bourke which happened to be the local NMRA (Aussie AA) agents.  They didn’t have a recovery vehicle but pointed me in the right direction.  Incidentally, they asked me to describe the men and the vehicle and said that they had seen them three days earlier in Bourke and had advised them that they would never reach their destination as the vehicle was in such a poor state with hoses sealed with tape etc.  I found the bloke with the recovery truck and arranged for him to collect them.  My motel was a short distance away where I had a chat with a man, an environmental septic tank engineer, from Dubbo who had a 25 acres plot, a goat, and 4 bikes.  He had rescued the goat, one of the many feral goats in the area, as a kid from beside the road and it had been reared indoors before outgrowing the house.  He showed me several videos on his phone of the young goat playing with his grandson.  I did wonder if it had been house trained!  He invited me to stay over on the Sunday but I declined as that was the day of my return to Wagga.  I walked to the Port of Bourke Hotel for a couple of beers and a great steak.