Windorah

Back on the road to wonderful Windorah, where the women are tough and the men aren't pretty. Each day we clock up another 6 or 700 km.  There is no mobile reception and the Internet is a dial up affair. The country is dry and the traffic is building, with hordes of people heading to the Birdsville Races.  I waited in Windorah all week for the Annual International Yabbi Races, and when it happened it was a whole lotta fun.  You can read some of the race results here! 

Isn't the point that interesting things don't need sign posting. What's the point of interest if they don't?

Fair warning. Good pub too.

The bloke who lived in this place was sitting out front when we left
each morning and still there when we returned each afternoon.

A station called Retreat

The landscape out here reminds me of the the U.S.  Perhaps it feels so foreign, even in my own country, that it is easier to identify with images seen in films and descriptions read in Cormac McCarthy novels, than it is to feel part of this country. There are mesas and buttes and calderas and long open sky. Its haunting and vast and beautiful.

People heading into Windorah have been coming from Betoota, a town with a population of zero, a part time pub and a fully functioning racecourse which hosts the gallops once a year. From what I saw of the crowds the race meet was a fairly geriatric affair, with 300 or so camping out Betoota way for the weekend.  Skipped it.

I began to doubt that I would enjoy the Yabbi races, which from initial assessment was like the ultra country super bogan tryouts.  There were masses of blokes in wife beaters and tiny shorts, the younger ones in over sized sunnies, and the women gripped their stubby coolers and leered out from under tattered hats. The threat of gambling was encouraging, although it has never been a worthwhile pursuit in its own right for me, just a very good excuse to assemble friends to indulge in drinking and spending.  The novelty of betting on Yabbis probably just meant I would lose money in ways I didn't understand.

Some of the purty folks rolling in for Yabbi fun

Wandering around the usually deserted streets of Windorah I overheard some ridiculous accents and conversations between rednecks, each trying to proclaim more loudly than the other how sympathetic, understanding or environmental  they really were, before launching an attack on whatever greeny, lefty, labour proposition they had borrowed an opinion on.

But I was being overly sensitive and besides, I sat writing this wearing a singlet and sipping XXXX outside the Western Star hotel, waiting for my spare tyre to be fixed, listening in and judging people in a most hypocritical fashion.  This town was pretty great, especially Merv the blind garage owner who felt his way around the eftpos machine with his careful fingers and fixed the blown tyres himself, with a hammer and crow bar. He liked to make jokes about his blindness, while his foul mouthed side kick Bub would flat out insult them.  They were an odd pair, in a curious town.

Merv with his cat. He had a nice smile and hairless legs.

I took a few shots of the folks around the place before and during the Yabbi races. Here are some of them.



                       

Your man Andy, the fighting Irishman, was a sound lad with some fine stickers.

The crowd were right into it - one Yabbi went for $900

 With the sundown and the punting about to commence, my new buddies, 5 ringers from Corrowa, studied the form.  Pooh Bawl leaped from the page immediately and he was our pick from early on.  The Yabbi descriptions were a ribald affair: who knew Pooh Bawl would become our catch cry for the days to follow?

 



Pooh Bawl in action, shooting to the front! Old mate celebrating the huge win $1400 back from a syndicate outlay of $450 - sweeeeet!



 

With the Thomson Trot Trophy

Well Windorah - One Shovel only, in the cultural attraction category.  There was no where I could find vinyl, fairly terrible food, a distinct lack of cultural diversity and, the biggest disappointment - no gym!  Still it was a great Yabbi festival, so its a bloody big shovel.



On the outskirts of Windorah stand a row of five huge dishes lined with mirrors reflecting light onto a single point and harnessing the sun to power the town.  These divisive hunks of technology were reviled by many, despite helping keep power costs down.  I heard many criticisms and few compliments; they were the product of greenies in Brisbane, or worse, Anna Bligh, and so could do no good.  I thought it was a progressive develpoment.  Perhaps, like any new technology it takes some getting used to.  Then what was once novelty soon becomes necessity.

 A little further out along the highway toward Betoota, this stone circle lies, outlining a native well.  These Aborignal survival tools were crucial for travelling across the arid landscape in the dry season.  The effort to carve the holes through bedrock, and ensure they remain free enough from contamination to remain potable shows a profound understanding and manipulation of the landscape. Once the location of these wells were known to European settlers they were able to survive the treacherous journey from station to station.

 

Dusk. The sun is setting fiercely over the horizon, blazing the red sand of the lunette on which I sit. I am perched on the most westerly escarpment where the sand plunges down into a natural bowl. The stillness is sublime.  Clouds crouch in geometric shapes and lines, propounding strata. It is an isolation to be savoured and a scene best imbibed alone.

It was dawn when we left town, and the land swept out before us like an ocean. We crossed the plains from Bedourie to Birdsville to Betoota to get here. The car crested grassy waves on slow undulating hills that stretched and surged up out of the flatness, and then we surfed down their sandy faces onto floodplains awash with ironstone.  The stones sit squat and waxy, their baked volcanic tumescence spread out like a swamp. By mid morning clouds were strewn across the sky like dirty fingerprints on the windscreen and the juicy silhouettes of insects festooned the front of the car, attesting our journeys length.

I open the last of my XXXX as the sun drops heavily the horizon like a tired man slumping into an armchair. Birds flit urgently from shrub to scrub. Their flighty presence reminds me of the carnage we inflicted this morning at sunrise, as suicidal bush chooks flummoxed fatally across the highway.  The indecision they showed as they darted three quarters of the length of the bitumen, then back again in time to be rendered under the tyres of the Hilux reminded me of something pathetically human.  I was glad not to be driving so I could look away.