Pat around Aus: Nearly in the Northern Territory

We left Mary Kathleen and went to Mt Isa which is a large mining town that mines lead, silver, copper and zinc. I didn’t like the town much because it was smelly and gave me a headache.

As you drive along everywhere that you look there are thousands of termite mounds. Some are quite big and others are small like little mud pyramids. Some people have put old shirts on them to turn them into people. It looks really funny. We couldn’t get a photo because there was nowhere to park and the Barkly Highway is really busy with road trains which take up a lot of the road and go really fast.

We stopped at Camooweal which is the gateway town to the Northern Territory.

We camped alongside a billabong near the Georgina River. There are lots of colourful water lillies of pink, blue, yellow, purple, and white. There are many Spoonbills, brolgas, pelicans, corellas, sulphur crested cockatoos, galahs, kites, wood ducks, shags, white cranes, grey cranes, leaf hoppers and finches. I had a kite swoop me and softly touched my head. A kite looks like a small eagle and it screeches all day long.

Last night Nan and Pop heard and saw three wild pigs down on the river bank scraping around in the mud.

Yesterday we rode over to see the Drovers’ Camp Shed Museum. At the museum we saw bulls, horse shoes, all their camp equipment, saddles, swags, bags, water bottles and saw an old drover called Stumpy Adams crack a horse whip. Stumpy Adams showed us a map of Australia and the places and long distances where they took the cattle. He also told us about the explorers that searched for new land for cattle.

This map shows the stock routes that drovers used to move cattle to markets

Stumpy Adams told us drover camp stories and drover poems. He told us about some of the Aboriginal drovers who would go off at night and have corroboree and the other drovers could hear them clicking their music sticks and chanting. During the day they walked the cattle for about 10 km till about midday and then made sure ate plenty of grass and drank lots of water in the afternoon so they wouldn’t wander at night. The drovers used to sing and tell poems to the cows at night to also keep them calm. It was really cool! Road trains now move cattle instead of the drovers. In Camooweal there are still some of the old drovers alive but they are really old and one is nearly blind.