Welford and Idalia National Parks

Once more across the Barcoo (with water) and we were in Welford National park. We tried to follow some tracks to a waterhole and a lookout that were on some National Park brochures but to no avail. It seems that National Parks have been closing some of the tracks and scenic routes - is this cost cutting we wonder? Certainly there were no signs and we ventured up some tracks that only seemed to peter out and give us an uncomfortable feeling of being slightly lost…

The park drive along the river was more successful. Here was a massed jumble of white feathers - corellas feeding furiously and noisily on the ground. As I sneaked up to take a photo or three, a sudden movement under a tree startled me. A red kangaroo was resting there and I had disturbed him. As I approached the poor thing tried to rise and get away, but its hind leg was clearly broken and the lower part just dangled loosely. Hit by a vehicle most likely, and as it hobbled off I could only hope it dies quickly.

Even better was the so-called Desert Drive which meandered through the park. It was 20 or so kilometres of ever changing landscape: one minute wide desolate claypans, the next a thick acacia forest. Ghost gums stood proudly and the thicker vegetation around the creek beds allowed us to catch glimpses of easily-spooked dark-furred wallaroos. Isolated sand dunes for the climbing revealed a myriad of small and large animal footprints: small mice, dingoes, snakes, kangaroos, lizards. A trail of tiny pawprints headed across virgin sand and then suddenly stopped - what happened to this tiny thing just there? A bird? An enormous leap? Beamed up by Scotty?

After a night on the banks of the Barcoo (life's tough but someone's got to do it) we took the main road passing through the town of Yaraka. This was the old end of the line for the rail and a faded, almost undecipherable sign declared it 'The End of the Line'. More like the end of the earth with its railway station building, about 6 houses, a pub and general store (well sort of a general store - there wasn't actually much to buy besides fuel) and a police station. A kelpie ran out and tried to muster us along the road as we drove slowly along the street and was partnered by a small dog that I can only surmise was a cross kelpie-chihuahua. And it's been a long, long time since any railway came to this place with overgrown tracks finishing at a rusty railhead.

A side track to a jump-up- Mt Slowcombe - that promised us wonderful views plus the added bonus of huge communication towers gave us our first feral rabbit of the whole trip. Oh and wonderful views too.

If Yaraka was small then Emmet takes the trophy. At a population of precisely 2, it has 2 houses (one derelict) and the railway station. There was also a ram and a goat in a yard. Emmet is clearly only a shadow of its former self when some hundreds lived here when the railway came by.

In Idalia National Park we seemed to be the only people there. We met no-one on the roads, no-one in the campsite. This former station now resembles not at all the grazing properties that surround it. Inside the fences the natural vegetation has returned and, despite an apparent lack of water, the bush is thick with undergrowth. While Red Kangaroos are as plentiful as - well, not rabbits anymore - bushflies everywhere else, there were few to be seen in this park. It seems they prefer the open grazing country and we saw more of the shy wallaroos here.

Some timber and corrugated iron is all that remains of the hut that was once on Idalia Station. Surrounding it are the rusty remains of tins and shards from glass bottles in all colours imaginable - clear, cobalt blue, amethyst, milky green, brown. A rusted old ship's tank must have been used for water and some odd bits of machinery are slowly returning to the earth.

A quite spooky half-burnt mulga forest surrounded Wave Rock, not the Western Australian one of note, but a smaller version of an incredible bit of weathered sandstone smoothly curling overhead and sheltering mud birds' nests and weeping springs.

Our campsite in the park was, for a change, not by the banks of a river though there was a dam enclosed by fences and a gate. But wallaroos came down to graze and, just to remind us of other more scary things 'out there', an intact skeleton of a huge snake, which must have had a diameter of 15-20 cm given the size of its ribs, lay just at the edge of the clearing. Old hand-hewn timber stock yards crumbled in the late afternoon sun and small birds came down to drink from the dam. Not a bad place to spend a quiet night!