Boulia

Boo-YA!

What a town!

It's got Min Min lights, an emphatic name, a great pub and crater on Mars named after it.

Something about the place resonates with me. I find myself conscious of  all the people and all of the interactions going on around me - and they all seemed pretty happy.  I have had earnest and involved conversations every day and night; with the publican, the gym receptionist, the mayor, the servo owner, bar girls and all the backpackers that work in town.  The work here is great; we have walked under skies hung fat with cumulus puffs, driven roads without end and covered over 3000 km in a week. 

A fair bit of the profundity of the conversations I have had could be put down to the amount of time spent at the bar in the Australian Hotel, and also to my fascination with the phenomenon of the Min Min lights. As a bonus, the town has a $3,000,000 gym and pool complex for its 300 inhabitants, and it costs $2.70 to have a dip.

I ask everyone I meet if they have seen the Min Min. Cheryl from the Desert Sands Motel tells me of her encounter while working with her husband on a station in the Northern Territory, about 200 km west of Boulia.

"We saw a huge glowing ball off in the distance, ooh, about 5 k away. We knew there was nothing else out there, the nearest station was 30 k's in the other direction.  We instantly knew it was Min Min lights"! 

I asked her what she did; "first we checked how many bottles were open - it was only a couple!" she laughed, then grew serious "the experience left us feeling a bit strange, and we didn't talk about it too much".

Tracey from the gym had seen the lights when she worked out Winton way, to the east, but they didn't seem to have phased her. However Tracey has just bought a new puppy and is more interested in its antics than my questions about the numinous luminescence.  According to the Min Min museum, two out of 11 Eggheads reckon the lights are shiny bugs, "the result of insects swarming that have taken on bioluminescent characteristics after being contaminated by naturally occurring agents found in local fungi, or of species of owl with their own naturally occurring source of bioluminescence". Glowing owls seem a little far fetched, unless the indiviual in question has been self-contaminated by naturally occuring fungi. . . which leads to the other 4 out of 11 boffins who subscribe to 'Geophysical lights',  the hypothesis that the lights are the result of known geophysical phenomena, such as piezoelectrics (of course!). A fair few folk round here reckoned the phosphate and potassium mines in the vicinty may have something to do with the lights, which seems plausible.

A third hypothesis is that the lights are the result of an optical illusion known as a Fata Morgana, or a nocturnal mirage, which causes remote lights or objects to appear closer, and in a less recognizable form. I like the name and the concept; it sounds appropriately exotic. Others reckon aliens, or hallucinations. Who knows?  I've seen some crazy stuff in my time, and it is hard to explain it to others, whatever the cause.

On the eve of ANZAC Day the bar of the Australian Hotel is busy, with all stools taken.  A dishevelled Aboriginal man stands at the bar, his barefeet broad and cracked on the edges like a dried claypan.  He orders a case of XXXX Gold as I walk in. Trevor, the publican, sits in his usual seat, his stocky frame and round head alert to all of the goings on, his full lips looked poised to issue orders to the two Irish brunettes running the bar.  Trevor's high pitched voice, replete with whistling lisp and delicate  enunciation, belie his brawn and his ability to settle any argument within these walls.

The night before Trev strode into the beer garden and dispersed the last remaining clump of us with a few assertive words and a menacing gaze. He saves his most ascerbic wit for the girls behind the bar. On all the nights I am there I only ever hear him offer jokes about women, and occasionaly Aboriginals. But it's a blokey place and a place where political correctness means voting against Anna Bligh.  It's the wild west of Queensland, and Trevor does have a redeeming sense of humour. At one stage he regails the bar with a joke about the dissatisfaction of KFC: when the juicy thighs and tender breasts are gone, all that's left is a greasy box. I laugh, order another beer and keep an ear to conversations around me.