Mount Isa
I left Townsville on a Friday evening, and had no idea that the following 900kms would be totally without phone and internet reception. Luckily, all I had to do was drive in a straight line. Unluckily, my mother started to frantically worry about me because I stopped replying to her daily messages about the cat.
But regardless of reception and the lack of contact I had with people, this two day drive to Mount Isa was absolutely beautiful. Mostly, I was excited about heading west - finally getting some varied environment and officially beginning a loop instead of this strange up and down yo-yo that I’ve been doing. But, as I left Townsville in my rearview mirror, I didn’t realise just how quickly the scenery would change.
On my first night I parked in a free camp beside a very cranky Tasmanian man who yelled at me for taking the spot next to him (there were no other parks available for about 100kms). So after wishing him a lovely evening while he crankily skulked around his caravan, I looked up at the sky and noticed so many stars! It sounds really silly - stars in the sky? At night? Who’d have thunk it! But it was such a clear evening and there was no light pollution so the brightness of the billions of twinkly lights was quite astounding.
The next day I started a long drive through orange dirt tracks and an endless blue sky. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s June because back home I’m certain there’s snow on the mountain, but here I’m sweating by 10am. For the two days that I drove west, I found the scraggly rocks to be blindingly beautiful. I thought it would just be a straight road, flat as a tack, boring for miles. But instead, little hills popped out of the distance and funny towns kept cropping up along the road with hand drawn signs of passionfruit and cheap diesel. Straight away, I felt like I was in a totally different part of the country.
Deloraine soaking up some rays at Fountain Springs, just outside of Mount Isa.
As soon as I drove into Mount Isa, this smell hit me in the face. Sulphur. If anyone else was as obsessed with Supernatural as I was, then you’ll start to think demons are running around! But as it turns out, it’s just the smell of the mines. And… it doesn’t go away. The smell stuck to the inside of my nose and the back of my throat, and for the first four days of being in town, I got frequent blood noses and a raspy voice which was especially noticeable first thing in the morning.
I was booked in for two weeks of work here, taking me through to the end of term 2. The school that I was at had both a junior and a senior campus, so each morning I got a text telling me where I was needed. Teaching here has been pretty cool at times, mostly because everyone is celebrating NAIDOC week early since it falls in the holidays, so there’s been lots of music, dancing, body painting, and sharing of traditional food at break times. At other times, the kids are so noisy that I feel like abandoning the class entirely (which, I’ll be honest, I did do on one occasion, leaving them with another teacher while I had a cool-down).
Here in the outback, school finishes early - I figure in an attempt to not be working through the peak heat of the day - so I had plenty of time in the afternoons to explore the town. Most places are accessible by 4WD only and poor old Del simply can’t handle that, so I had to stick to the sealed roads. In the end, after school I ended up hiking Telstra Hill for some scenic views (and only decided to come back down when I could hear dingoes howling in the not-so-distant-distance), went to the Mount Isa lookout, met some travellers at the caravan park and had a glass of wine with them (they’ve been travelling for 15 years!), and - of course - caught up on admin and washing.
Mount Isa from Telstra Hill. Dingos not pictured.
On the weekend I didn’t want to travel too far since I have school again on Monday, so I went to the Cloncurry Show, just over an hour east of Mount Isa. The flyer I saw for the show looked like a year 7 whipped it up in Word in the last ten minutes of a digital tech class, with little clip art pictures of farm animals and fireworks framing the text. I had no idea what to expect other than the mysterious few words on the flyer including “cattle”, “sausage judging” and “racing”. Sounds like fun!
The show was set in the town’s oval, with big carnival rides like a classic American fair, and the smell of fairy floss was heavy in the air. I felt like a ten year old back at the Ballarat Show… and I was tempted to buy a WhizzFizz showbag (I restrained myself). Some highlights at the show was the live music, a guy with a water jet backpack, demolition derby, and a race where the competitors had to roll up a swag, eat weetbix and baked beans, roll a motorbike into a ute, roll a bale of hay into a fenced off area, and then skull a beer. That night I stayed at the Quamby Pub just north of Cloncurry and had a couple of beers with the friendly people behind the bar.
The following day I started heading back to Mount Isa, stopping in at Mary Kathleen, a ghost town and uranium mine. The people in Mount Isa had told me that you need a 4WD to get out to the mine, but I thought I could at least explore the abandoned town. I pulled off the highway onto a dirt road riddled with pot holes and said some words of encouragement to Deloraine as we bumped our way through the town. I pulled over to stretch my legs and had a chat with a man who told me that I could drive most of the way to the mine in the van, then leave it at a junction and walk the final kilometre. I trusted this stranger and… I’m glad I did! The drive was sketchy to say the least, but by the time I got to the mine it was a beautiful turquoise colour from all the copper oxide that leaches in from the surrounding rocks.
During the week, I also got to visit Lake Moondarra, just north of Mount Isa. It was a short drive from the city, taking me along snaking roads beside the still lake, and I parked up the car and read in the sun one afternoon.
And that all brings me to the final week of school for Term 2. I hate to say that the time has flown by, but, the time has kind of flown by! Between watching The Incredibles on repeat and helping Year 12s write short stories, I’ve realised that I’m almost at the halfway point of my trip (insane) and I’m finally setting my sights on the Northern Territory. I may have spent the last two hours in the post office crying because I’ve only just realised that I need a new passport, and that it has to be processed urgently because I’m going overseas in 2 weeks (that passport photo is going to be an absolute cracker!), but I’m trying not to let that get me down. The last two weeks have been pretty good. Mount Isa has been cooler than I thought! Sights set ahead! Let’s gooooo.
