The Darling Run

In conversation with last night's artist we were persuaded to follow the Darling down to Wilcarnia instead of taking the easier but much longer route by bitumen. It meant some 300 kms off road,  some of it on gravel, but in other places on black soil, or sand.









We certainly raised a lot of dust behind us, (as usual), in places we had to stop when a vehicle came towards us to let his dust settle before we could go on. One cattle road train raised so much we could see him a couple of miles ahead, and it took at least a couple of minutes before we could proceed after he had passed us.
The notice in the back window by the way says For Sale, A Complete Camper, and our Tel No.






From time to time we would come to small bridges, often there would be a bypass through the creek or billabong for the road trains as there would invariably be a load limit on the bridge, as there is on this. All of these creeks run into the Darling, which was quite close by, a couple of hundred metres, but we saw very little of it through the trees.



When we did however, we could quite see why it had been the lifeblood of the area ever since European occupation. Broad and deep most of the way, it was a vital transport route for settlement and pastoral development.
Named after NSW Governor Ralph Darling in 1829, the river varies from scattered waterholes in drought to 80 kms wide during floods. Recent rains in it's huge catchment area have made it fill the bed at the moment, just the size that the old paddle steamers needed to navigate all the way to Bourke and beyond.

This is feral goat country, and we passed many herds grazing close to the road, as we did cattle, sometimes having to stop and encourage them to clear the way. I take back what I said yesterday about them being biddable - sometimes they are just plain stupid!






We saw a great number of kangaroos and emus, unfortunately quite a few dead ones too, as they tend to gather on the road and anyone driving at night has little chance of avoiding them. We followed this group of three roos for almost half a mile at about 35kph  (20 mph) before we could clear them off the road.

But later it started to rain, which made the road slippery and less easy to drive, we were glad to arrive at Wincania and the bitumen again.





However there proved to be no room at the inn in that benighted town, it was virtually closed and boarded up apart from a couple of motels and a filling station, so we had to move on a couple of hundred kms to Broken Hill, and our first sight of that town did not look very promising! We'll see tomorrow......