Gregory

I meant to post this ages ago, but ho hum.

At the beginning of May I went to a tiny little locality called Gregory Downs.

It's on, unsurprisingly, the Gregory River. There's this big canoe race every year on the Labour Day weekend (solidarity) and there are horse races too. It's a basically an excuse to hit the piss and have a good time.

I camped with my friends Caitlyn and Scott from the ABC. The great thing was that because I got a few yarns for the paper, I got to take the General Manager's 4wD and his petrol card!

I didn't get away till about five in the afternoon. It was a really nice drive, a fair bit of dirt road. But just driving through the outback at sunset by myself was a pretty special experience. Hitting a kangaroo not withstanding...
The moon was amazing! I don't think this photo really does it justice, but you get the idea.
I stopped for a toilet break (by the side of the road) and the stars were fantastic. Absolutely beautiful. If I didn't have another hour or so to drive I could have stayed there for hours and just gazed up.

This pretty much sums up the first night (and the second for that matter). That's Scotty, reaching, nay, lunging for alcohol with a big grin on his face. Good times. I kind of leeched onto their group, Scotty and Caitlyn were camping with some friends from Doomadgee, but I brought a case of beer so I was pretty welcome.
This is actually a photo by Caitlyn, I just like it because it makes me feel masculine... The swag did me proud once again.
This is how we spent a large part of Saturday. This was perhaps 50 metres away from where we were camped. It was a pretty hot day, and the water was beautiful! The current was pretty swift and you had to hold on to something, but it was amazing. Yes, there are definitely fresh water crocs in the Gregory, and yes, a four-metre salt water croc had been spotted at about this spot just a few weeks ago. But I figured there were enough other people in the river to have a statistically decent chance of not getting eaten... I took this photo of Scotty and Caitlyn as I got out to grab another beer from the esky... There was this log right there that Caitlyn is sitting on that we were leaning up against, we called it our special river bar!
That afternoon we went to the races, where Brad's tips failed to do anything. Saturday was another night of, well, drinking. But I had to drive back the next day so it wasn't too big a night.

It's a beautiful spot, and there's this great, true outback pub in Gregory. I did this really great profile on her, she's a real character.

Alas, Sunday arvo I had to drive back for work the next day. But this photo might give you an idea of the sort of country it is up here.
An absolutely great weekend. I'm hopefully going to be traveling a bit more, so will have more photos to put up!

Stuff...

Blimey. It's been ages since I've posted anything.

I guess part of that is I am now in that 'grown up' pattern of getting up, going to work, coming home, going to bed - repeat. Also there's just general slackness...

Things are going pretty well up here. My mate and colleague Nicola has left Mount Isa for greener pastures with the ABC in Port Augusta. It's a great opportunity for her, one she'd be silly not to take, but very sad for me! But I guess that's how it roles sometimes.

Work is going pretty well, but I'm starting to get pretty tired. The sports journo and my flatmate Brad went away for a few weeks and I put my hand up to cover sport for him. It resulted in me working 12 days straight with one day off afterward. Not much fun. It resulted in me getting pretty crook and having to take a sick day where I slept for most of the day! It's my day off today and it's great to just sit around and watch DVDs. Working straight for so long means I've kind of let some of those basic things one needs to do like washing clothes, going grocery shopping slip. So I'm now trying to get back into living a good, clean life... sort of.

One of the good things about working at such a small paper is the opportunities that come up. For instance, Tony Abbott was in Cloncurry recently and I was sent to go interview him. If I was working as a cadet at any other paper there's no way I would be able to do that. There's also a lot of stuff to do with the new mining tax up here, one of the projects that has been suspended is near Cloncurry. So there's a fair bit to write about at the moment, which is nice.

Other than that, I'm going to try to start traveling around the region a bit more. I've been saying that for ages, I've just got to get off my bum and actually do it. I've been making some contacts on cattle stations and am going to try to get around and visit people. So hopefully there will be some exciting blog posts in the near future!

Word cloud

I found this cool thing that is a visual representation of the words I use on this blog. I'm a bit disappointed that 'got' is up there, it's a devil word for a newspaperman like myself. I might try to put a new word cloud, as it's known, up every now and then. I think it's really interesting!
You can do it with anything with an RSS feed by going to wordle.net.

More of Mum and Dad

I just realised that I had more photos of Mum and Dad's trip I wanted to put up!

We went for a drive to Cloncurry, which involved a great steak sandwich at one of the pubs.

One of the things that we did for some reason was go out to the airport. But it was really interesting, and we saw this old hangar. You might not be able to see the sign, but it says Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service, also known as QANTAS.
Cloncurry was one of the original destinations serviced by Qantas, and this is one of their original hangars. I dunno why, but I found that pretty interesting.

Also, Cloncurry was the place of the very first flight of the Royal Flying Doctor Service flight. There was a base in the Curry for a long time. The first plane was chartered from Qantas, and so there's a pretty good chance it left from this hangar! Now, that's a historic hangar, as far as hangers go.

On the drive we took a lot of side trips. One of the things I found fascinating driving up here were all the ant hills. There are literally thousands of these things. I don't know what it is about certain areas, but they go nuts for it.
And I wanted to put up this photo because I think it's a good one of Mum, even if she does have her eyes closed!

Normanton and Karumba

I've just gotten back from a two-night trip to Normanton and Karumba, which are up in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

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There was a forum up there for the whole region, discussing various issues different industries are facing. That was followed by a North Queensland Local Government Association conference the next day.

I got to go because the local federal member, Bob Katter, was going up on a charter flight from Mount Isa and there was a spare seat. The plane was a Beechcraft Baron, which is a four seater plane, but I got to sit up the front next to the pilot!
We didn't get away as early as we had hoped, so most of the trip was in the dark, but I got this sunset photo as we took off from Mount Isa.
It was pretty fun sitting up the front and chatting to the pilot about all the controls. I also got to watch us coming in to land, which was very interesting!
We got a cab from the airport to our hotel, and there was a meet and greet session in the pub next door. I had to do some work, but there was also the chance to have a beer and a prawn!

I couldn't believe how many cane toads there were just hopping around...
The next day was a very early start involving a bus trip to Normanton. Most of the people at the conference were rural mayors who are graziers, and the start time was clearly set for graziers, not journalists. It was a forum about difficulties facing several industries in the north west - a great source for stories and an opportunity to get my head around some bigger issues up here.

So I wrote up a few stories and sent them off and caught the bus back to Karumba. I went for a walk down near the beach, keeping an eye out for crocs, and found out that it wasn't the sandy beach I had grown accustomed to in New South Wales. But I wanted to put my feat in the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Now, the pub we were at was called the Sunset Tavern. I've never seen the sun set over the water in Australia. It was a pretty darn good sunset, and a beer really made the moment.
The pub had great seafood - I had oysters and barramundi that night and it was divine. Just the ticket after a hard day's work. Karumba has a reasonably large fishing industry, so all the seafood was so delicious and so fresh.

This morning it was an even earlier start back to Normanton. I had taken the work laptop and Telstra internet thingy. Today, however, all of the Telstra mobile network in Queensland was down, which meant I couldn't file my stories that way. So I had to write my stuff up, put all my stories and photos on a flash drive (which I had to borrow from someone because I didn't take one - why would I? I had nifty wireless interent...) and go down to the council chambers to email it back to my editor. But it got there on time.

After that Local Government Conference wound up it was out to Normanton Airport and another flight back. I again got to sit up the front, and it was light for much of the trip, so I got to see a fair bit of the landscape.
It was a great trip, and something I'm really glad I got to do. Karumba is beautiful, and it was just great to see more of north Queensland.

Dirt and Dust Festival

The weekend after Easter, my colleague Nicola, her boyfriend and I packed up my car and headed to the Dirt and Dust Festival at Julia Creek.

It's this annual festival that apparently started as an idea in the local pub as a way to rejuvenate the town. It's won a couple of tourism awards because... it was so much fun!!!

Gagey and Lukey had to work on Friday, so we didn't get away until the afternoon. I drove to Cloncurry, which was about half way, and than Gagey drove the rest of the way. That's when Luke and I hit the beers in the esky...

But we got there in time to see the headline act, the one and only Troy Cassar-Daley.
We were so close I could see up his nose...

Now, I'm not really too big a fan of country music, and I have never really gotten into Troy much before. But he was awesome! He had an amazing presence on stage and really worked the crowd. I think he was also the perfect person to play at a festival like the Dirt and Dust.
So channeling my inner Queenslander, we drank a few rums and danced had a great night. It did involve getting a security guard to drive my car to the camp site at the racecourse because of said rum, but he was very friendly (I think he had his eye on Gagey - Luke was too drunk to defend her honour) and his mates followed him out there to give him a lift back. Great night.

The next morning we woke up with, it's fair to say, pretty bad hangovers and headed out to get some bacon and eggs. Now, one of the main attractions of the festival is the triathlon. They do the swim in the creek that apparently has stagnant, gross water more often than not, then cycle into town, and then run laps of the main street. I'd say it was about 36 degrees while they did this.

We, in contrast, sat in the cafe eating bacon and eggs, recovering from our hangovers and feeling very unhealthy.

I kept taking photos of this old dude because I thought he was cool. I hope he didn't think I was stalking him! I was just impressed he could run a triathlon while wearing a straw hat.
That night was the bull ride! I had actually seen a bull ride the Thursday because I got a free ticket to an event in Mount Isa from work. But the Julia Creek event was way better.

Not quite sure why, but I really like this photo of the cowboys singing the national anthem.
Watching a bull ride is so exciting, even if there are few animal ethics issues...
The bull riders are crazy, but I reckon the crazier guys are the clowns, who put themselves between the bull and the rider when they come off. They're usually experienced older bull riders, but they're the people the bull will usually charge. Of course, the rider can also get trodden on when they come off...
I was sitting right near the fence taking photos, when I got charged by a bull! He'd thrown the rider, and stood on the other side of the ring, glaring at me. He did the full-on snort and hoof scrape across the dirt, and charged me. He hit the fence, which hit me pretty damn hard! Luckily I'd gotten a bit further away, but it was a bit of a shock! They way over 500kgs, so you don't really wanna get trodden on by one.
So all in all, a great weekend. Country music, bull ride, triathlons, rum, friends. Who could ask for anything more...

Big fish!

Mum and Dad in Mount Isa at the moment, which has been great (they bought me a trolley load of groceries!).

Tonight we went fishing out at Lake Moondarra. The secretary of the Mount Isa Fish Stocking Association had leant me some lures and given me some advice on spots, times and technique and out we went.
As you can see it was an absolutely beautiful spot. The sun just poked out from behind a cloud when I took this photo. Dad here is quite hopeful that he might actually catch something!
And he did! He was very excited to catch a fairly sizable barramundi! As was I, trying to get it into our bucket!
Look at the size of that fish!

Combined with a bit of a picnic at the lake and a few beers, life was very good.

I've got some other photos of Mum and Dad's visit to put up, but will do it later.