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Odometer – 232966

After Uralla we headed North again, destination: Emmaville. Passed through a small, lusciously green and wet village called Llangothlin, where my father-in-law Graham was born. Further on we got to Guyra, and filled up the car with petrol, oil, water, and spotted round the back were showers for truckies – and had our first real shower of the trip, washing of the dirt of Thunderbolt’s Cave at last.

Picked up a pamphlet that described a long tourist drive to the North, including a stop at Emmaville and plenty of places to swim. This pamphlet would mislead us about every town we visited that day.

Passed through a place called Stonehenge, but unless we somehow missed the main feature this spot is named after, all we saw were boulders and slabs randomly deposited by nature – lots of them to be sure, but nothing you would call standing stones, and nothing positioned by the hand of man.

Up through Glenn Innes we headed onto a long winding dirt road to Emmaville – took a very long time to get there, and truth be told not a lot is going on there. Unsurprising for a town with a population of 400, although the town itself is very well developed – presumably its population was much higher back in the boom days of tin mining, and they’ve kept all the buildings built by civic and private enterprise in top condition.

However the few places we were looking for listed on the Guyra-pamphlet we either couldn’t find (the old convent) or had since closed. Still, we got lots of snaps of Emma in front of the various “Welcome to Emmaville” town signs, including an interesting one depicting tin-mine pick-axes and the head of a black panther, rumored to have stalked the region – although no information was available to expand on the rumors we’d heard before, much to my own disappointment.

One thing Emmaville really does have going for it is easily the biggest most modern-looking hospital outside of a city in New South Wales, offering a huge range of medical services. If you get bitten by a snake in anywhere in the towns I’m about to describe, you’d defintely hoon it right back to Emmaville.

Unable to find the signposted Emmaville swimming pool (I’m really not down on the place but it was frustrating) we headed further north on yet more seemingly endless dirt roads towards the creeks and waterfalls of Torrington.

Through dusty raods bordered by dying trees struggling to grow around large yellow boulders we reached Torrington Village, an elevated spot that allowed the refreshing breeze to blow through our windows. The streams and waterfalls were apparently down another dirt road – at points wide enough for just our car, and more of a dirt track than dirt road – we were in rocky rally-cart territory.

We traveled a long, long way deep into dry-boulder territory once more, cut off from any breath of wind. Each campsite revealed no water. There was a 3km rock-hopping walk of steep inclines and uneven surfaces that would have taken us to a waterfall, but we were so weary by this point that we feared the 6km round-trip would lead us only to a view of a waterfall rather than the base we could bathe in.

I took the wheel and rally-carted our way back to the village, then South to the deceptively-named Deepwater (damn that pamphlet!) This route, once past Torrington Village, was at least sealed road, and we looped round back through Glenn Innes and westward to Inverell, where we could see by our map lay Copeton Lake.

After all the misleadings of the cursed pamphlet, we were still very dubious even about the Lake, as it seemed a ridiculously long drive with no sighting of water at all along Copeton Road – although we spotted and snapped some awesomely imaginative mailboxes!

Suddenly we passed through an ominously high cut-rock chicane, and out the other end we were all of a sudden traveling across the top of the dam – a huge body of water lapping to our right, a sheer drop to our left. It was breathtaking, and the dam took several minutes to cross.

A short drive later we were in the National Park, driving through wooded tracks to the very edge of the park and all the unpowered non-caravan sites. Breaking out of the woods we climbed across hilly scrubland – grass plains covered in yellow-grey boulders. Small hardy bushes and tall thin trees dotted the landscape, and we wound our way through the rocks over a tyre-track in the grass, chewed short by herds of kangaroo and cows.

Down we drove to the lakes very edge, water gently lapping against the grass – never getting higher, never getting lower, but previous levels starkly apparent by tide marks on the dead grey trees ringing the lake, debris on the soft grass, and the bare trunks and branches of long-dead trees emerging from the lake, some far out from the shore, evidence of the effects of the damming of the original lake.

We parked our car a meter from the waters edge. The ground was like carpet beneath or bare feet, the view eerie and spectacular, the air cool.

After our hot, dry, disappointing day, we were in paradise. Read all about it in our article on Lake Copeton.

Uralla is home to the Thunderbolt Festival, celebrating the life and times of infamous bushranger Fred Ward – aka Captain Thunderbolt – who met his end there, and is buried in the town cemetery – just opposite Emma’s great-great-great-grandfather, the first of her family to land in Australia.

Thunderbolt is a great example of Australia’s interesting respect for criminals as opposed to lawmen, presumably due to the convict heritage. When I first heard of the term ‘bushranger’ I presumed that was the title of an official person who upheld the law in the bush, rather than the exact opposite: a highway robber, a cattle-rustler, a burglar. Even in his own time Thunderbolt was loved by the people for his amusing scallywag ways, and pitied too for the wrongful imprisonment that forced him into a fugitive life of crime upon his dramatic escape across the shark-infested waters around Cockatoo Island.

Certainly Thunderbolt has a romantic image: a cheeky stealer of race horses purely to outpace the police, married to an aboriginal lady who forbade him to shoot anyone, and spending his nights hiding out in his cave and his days behind a massive boulder on the highway, waiting to jump out and lighten a passing traveler’s purse. He’s passed into legend: tales of Thunderbolt talking to farmers – comrades suffering under an unfair government – while the wife made ready to signal the presence of lawmen by throwing a red sheet on the clothing line. Even his death has mystery and romance: was it Fred who was shot and buried or was it his brother Harry, both having operated under the name of Thunderbolt? Was the tall veiled woman at the funeral really Fred paying his respects before fleeing to America?

Over the course of the next few days we visited a few Thunderbolt landmarks.

Uralla’s Thunderbolt Festival to be honest had little to do with Thunderbolt, it was more of a town festival under a different name – and it certainly drew in the crowds. The normally sleepy town was jam-packed with people cheering the floats, perusing the markets, dancing to the bands, dodging the whip-cracking stilt-walkers and getting roped into acrobatic displays. Amongst the visitors to Uralla were hundreds and hundreds of bikies who roared into town, set up their own stalls and took over the pubs. The bikers had their own display of bikes to admire, but it seemed that many of them were only there to see the kids billy-cart racing event on the steepest hill in Uralla, maybe reliving the first taste of tearing down bitumen back in their own childhood.

Thunderbolt visits the festival in Uralla

There were trips to Australia’s oldest working foundry in the back of Austin black cabs from 50’s London, sausage sizzles, climbing walls and all the fun of the fair. The only actual nod to Thunderbolt in the festival was the unannounced appearance of a man on horseback making his way down the main street, the very image in face, clothing and gear of the Thunderbolt statue he slowly heading towards. There was no mention of him in the otherwise exhaustive festival guide, so maybe it was just old Thunderbolt mixing with the crowds, just as he used to at the races – knowing no-one there would ever dob him in to the authorities.

A few days later we were back in Uralla and popped into McCrossin’s Mill the main museum in Uralla that has a Thunderbolt display on the top floor that includes his hat, a number of his guns, one of his horse saddles and even the table his corpse was laid out on to be viewed by the general public after Constable Alexander Walker took either Fred or Harry down in 1870 and the legend of Thunderbolt came to an end.

There are other items that passed through Thunderbolts hands on display – ‘owned’ is necessarily the right word, for instance there’s a gun there he had stolen and later exchanged for a horse – so it wasn’t exactly his to begin with, and wasn’t good enough for him to want to hang onto either.

Other items include artifacts owned by Thunderbolts associates, plus lots of newspaper cuttings of the time and books, stories, cigarette cards and other merchandise produced in the years after his death, up to the present day with CD by Slim Dusty.

Heading south we visited Thunderbolt’s Rock which still commands excellent views of the highway in both directions, regardless of whether you climb the rock or not. The rock itself is a collection of gigantic boulders sticking out of the landscape, notable not just for its size and location, but also because the surrounding landscape seems to have nothing else like it – it’s a real anomaly.

You can try out your clambering and rock-hopping skills trying to reach the tip of the rock. There’s plenty of routes up through smaller boulders or crevices you could brace yourself up, but it’s a tricky ascent. I made it all but to the topmost rock, but it can definitely be done – a 40 year old father in thongs managed to get up there and shout to his kids, so if he can do it with that sort of footwear, surely anyone can. By all accounts Thunderbolt didn’t necessarily use the rock to clamber about on to get view, instead he’d hide behind it when he spied a traveler coming down the road, to leap out on them at the very last moment – or, if it was the police he spied, to disappear into the bush until they’d passed by and double-back into town.

The rock is absolutely plastered in graffiti by modern-day scallywags, some marking their names, some pushing slogans, one in particular within the split of the main outcrop “Souvenirs and Kodak film at the gift store” mocking the fact that it’s a rock on the side of the highway with no kind of facilities or information beyond the road-sign pointing to it.

North of Armidale, Thunderbolt’s Cave rounded off our exploration of his stomping grounds, another location that’s signposted from the road but rarely makes the map. We ended up there late in the day – I’m still an L-Plater so my speed limit is capped at 80 kph. By the time we got there it was spitting with rain and getting dark besides, and once we’d driven our way carefully round the winding stone and dirt tracks and parked up near the roof of the cave, the rain was pouring down. If we were to have any hope of cooking food before daylight left us we’d have to run with our gear and set up in the dry cave.

As I lit our meths stove, small white objects began to rattle down the natural chimney, pinging off the saucepans. At first I thought the wind was knocking seeds from the trees, but they rapidly increased in number – I looked out the mouth of the cave and realised it was hail. The noise was incredible, slashing through the leaves in the canopy of the forest outside, drowning out all other sound. We ferried items from the cave to the car, getting soaked with rain and pounded with ice. Smaller fissures in the rock made themselves known as water dripped through, and we re-arranged our gear to keep it and ourselves dry.

The hail cleared, but the rain poured. The sun began to set, turning the sky a brilliant orange as thunder rumbled threateningly and lightning flashed across the sky and lit up the cave with blasts of pure white light.

Occasionally the rain would clear for us to jump out and take photos, but there we were, seeking shelter from the storm and cooking our tucker in the cave, just as Thunderbolt would have 133 years before.

We’ve been to Armidale a few times before, but it’s always worth a trip to the New England Regional Art Museum, which along with their permanent exhibition (including a life-size white rhinoceros made out of various canvas items stretched over a metal skeleton) and permanently baffled shop staff (there’s lots of good stuff to buy, but be prepared for a long wait as the lady at the till always seems to have to go for help, “but I must learn”) there’s always new exhibitions coming through of past and contemporary artists.

This time around there was an excellent display of Aboriginal bark paintings and log coffins – some recently created, some much older. A few lines from the exhibition introduction caught my interest:

Aboriginal bark paintings: “crosshatchings (rarrk) are said to capture the power of the Ancestral Beings by creating a shimmering effect.” (1992, Howard Morphy)

Hollow log coffins: “contain bones of a deceased person… the logs intricate clan designs were aimed to guide the soul of the deceased back to the ancestral past.” (1992, Howard Morphy)

So the hollow log coffins are a form of time machine? Fascinating stuff.

Later we drove to the eastern outskirts of Armidale to a dirt track approaching the Weemala Pottery Studio – we didn’t actually visit, but instead took the opportunity to take photos of some llamas wandering around the slopes of a farm and the power lines looping into the distance, and also to test out our solar panels for the first time in the wild: they’re topping up a deep-cycle battery that we run through an inverter to convert the electricity from DC to AC – we simply plug our laptops or camera battery-chargers into a regular plug socket on the inverters, and we’re away. Although we’ve got plenty of sun to soak up, the solar panels still create a decent charge even behind the tinted windows of the panel van – free energy, too easy. So far Emma’s created and emailed off a print-ad for a client, I’ve started creating the bigtrip website and caught up with some folk online – we’ve got a Telstra USB modem that, depending on the availability of the mobile phone networks (Next G, CDMA, whatever), we can be online as fast as we were with a home connection. So far we’ve not been out of range yet, but when the signal gets faint we’ve got a booster antenna mounted on the front of the van like some bad-boy CB radio rig.

the bottom of one of many big glass boots of rum, possibly whiskey...

Stayed at Jamies as a home base for a few days – got a few ‘real’ showers in – as his birthday was at the weekend… got horribly drunk the night before his birthday, so had to get on it again with him the next day – ah, tough life on the road :-) Was good to see the nieces and nephews again one last time before we head off for good, even if they did run out of the house at the wee hours of every morning to open up the van door and jump all over us – we’ve got to train ourselves to wake with the sun anyway once we start camping properly.

day one of the Big Trip
Distance traveled: 0 kms, 232483 on Odometer
Fuel used: 0 litres

Day one of the big trip came about 3 weeks later than planned, as the wedding went on for about 3 days (basically until the kegs ran dry and the tent was taken away along with the jukebox) and we’d only managed to purchase a vehicle for the trip the actual day before the wedding. We’d intended to get a toyota troop carrier with a high hardtop conversion and bed, sink, the lot. We still want to get one (as we’ll need the 4 wheel drive capability at some point) but in the meantime we have a 1995 Ford Panel Van, and it took some time to kit it out with a bed and storage facilities.

Big Trip mark 1 transport

We’re trying to keep this trip as green as possible (as much as can be when you’re driving a 4 litre engine): we’re kitted out with solar panels to power our electrical equipment, a pair of solar showers for washing, wind-up radio and torches, a meths burner for cooking, recycled toilet paper, phosphate-free soap, etc. We’re going to keep track of our fuel usage and carbon-offset the result, probably by purchasing threatened american-continent rainforests to protect them from logging – we’re unsure about new-plantation schemes in Australia as new trees release a lot of carbon as they grow, and Australian bush fires potentially mean they may never reach the stage of growth where they start to do some good. However we’re not yet committed to one scheme, so all suggestions are more than welcome!

We finally left the Davidson homestead and headed out onto the open road. 0.4 kms later we did a u-turn and went back to the house for the spare set of car keys we’d given up looking for, which had been located almost as soon as we’d left. We got to say goodbye all over again – even the sheepdog Geordie gave an odd rumbley yelp as she came running up for some more tickling behind the ears; from all the packing and farewells she’d obviously realised we’d left for good, not just to the shops.

Our brand from Bar-S-Dot

We made our way North to the small town of Moombi where we stopped off at ‘Bar S Dot’, a brand-making business owned and run by a lovely man by the name of Warren Skewes.

Warren makes brands mainly for farmers who want to brand their cattle, but it’s a labour of love: he’s kept all the working sketches of his designs from day one in a series of well-thumbed exercise books, as well as his up-scale drawings for the giant cut-metal horse he created as a signpost to his property. Warren makes all his brands himself by hand, which can be a long painstaking process depending on the complexity of the design of the brand and how decorative the rod wants to be. Warren took us into his workshop and showed us some miniature brands he’d created with a kangaroo design on the end. The handle was only 20 cm long but itself took 10 days to create as it was carefully braided by heating the rod and teasing the metal into a number of strands for plaiting.

The brand shown to the left is one an uncle of ours had created for us as a wedding present, and we were dropping it in as Warren had been supplied with an incorrect spelling. Rather than just knock off a letter, Warren was keen – as were we – to ensure that rest of the letters were moved round and re-kern to maintain the symmetry of the lettering.

On our way out we noticed Warren had burnt into his door every brand he’d sold, each one unique – and there we were at the bottom looking somewhat out of place amongst the cattle brands with our love heart design.

Late in the day we reached Armidale and my brother-in-law Jamie and Sally’s property, to spend some time with them and the kids, as it’d be the last time we’d see them for some time. Although the youngest volunteered her bed, we spent our first night of the trip properly: sleeping out in the panel van on a chilly 2°C night. We were fine too – the panel van is a pretty small area for two people to be in, and although the interior was soaked in condensation we maintained 15°C inside just from our own body heat.