Round Australia: Day 97

Day 97 Elliott

Well today was fun. We started off in Mataranka and went to the Barra Feeding session at the camp

Few mangoes short of a box - yum

Air sick bag advertising

ground. They have this pond with a dozen or so Barramundi living in it. The biggest is about 1.3m long. In the pond they have a platform just under the water (no Maureen is not walking on water) and the guide, who in our case was a 10 year old boy, hand feed them. The water is clear and you can clearly see them lurking under the platform waiting to be fed. When you hold the mulie on the surface they come up underneath and suck in the water and fish in this really load thumping noise. Maureen was the lucky person of the day according to Ben our guide, she would hold it under the water and the barra would

Maureen teasing the fish

Elsley Station

swallow her hand and spit it out again! Well not quite but nearly. We took some film of others feeding the fish, then headed off to the Elsey homestead where Jeanie Gunn’s book “we of the never never”, was made into a film. It is a replica of her original place, but authentic. Every museum we have visited in the NT has referred to this lady who in the late 1800’s came here from Melbourne with her husband and lived in

Elsley Station

Hot spring Mataranka

the middle of nowhere and was the only white woman around. There were no white women, but they had a Chinese cook! Her husband died after a few years and she returned East and wrote the book “We of the never never” . There is a series of statues to all the characters in the book in the middle of town.

From there Maureen went to the mineral hot springs for a dip. Unfortunately as it was 38C out of the water and 31C in the water, it was not so good, but we can tick it off the list. The best part of the

I want to be a Wallaby

Forrest after bats tore down leaves

place was the wild life. There are huge numbers of flying foxes there and the place looks like a cyclone has been through as the bats got viscous recently and tore down a whole lot of braches from nearby plants. This is a natural thing and it helps germinate more undergrowth plants as it opens up the canopy. There were also a lot of Wallabies there as well, the animals, not the players, although…

We intended to go back into town to get some gas and visit the museum there, but after we topped up

Statue of Jeanie Gunn and husband

Alexander Forrest Marker

the gas, we decided it was too hot and we would hit the road and we did. Our target was Daly Waters Pub where we were informed that they had nightly entertainment. On the way there, we stopped off at the Alexander Forrest Memorial. Alexander Forrest had walked all the way from the De Grey River in WA to this spot where he hit the overland telegraph. It is quite fitting that his memorial looks like a huge Survey Mark after all his surveying of the country.

We made it into Daly Waters and the pub. To be fair, it is a small pub, originally built in 1930, but

Girt and Trude waiting

The straight road ahead

you cannot miss it, that is all there is there. It is one of the must see places on the trip. They usually have entertainment every night and a lot of the time it is by a guy named Chilly. We heard of Chilly at Barn Hill when another couple had come up via this way and had dropped in and they had a CD of his act, and it is irreverent, politically incorrect, possibly racist, everything it should not be so it is hilarious. We

Daly Waters Pub

T-Shirt Collection

could not wait to get here to see him in person, alas, it is not to be as it is off season and there was no entertainment, sad face. But the pub made up for it. They have one of the most eclectic collections around. They have a captive breeding program for thongs as the native variety is being over run by the different import types, they have currency from around the world, they have a bra collection (has to sit under

Me hanging around the bras

Things to take away area

that, with so many bras, one was bound to be full! Ever the optimist No luck) they had Badges from services, cards and ID badges, Licences passport pictures, you name it, they collected it. If you wanted to contribute, all you had to do was donate a gold coin to the “kids”, tin on the bar and they give you a staple gun! The barmaid was lovely, a lively 30 year old pom who has been hear nearly a year and loves it. She is going back home at Christmas to surprise her mum but is coming straight back for another year (we wished her better luck at surprising her family than we had had). We had a

Hat Collction

Currency Collection

cuppa and a cake and hit the road. We were going to stay the night, but the caravan park was just average and there was no entertainment, so we would go to Elliott, they were the next big town after Mataranka, so they must have a better caravan park – surely.

Our next stop was at a landmark for Sir Charles Todd Post Master General in SA in 1872 and it marks the joining of the two ends of the telegraph, well 1 mile away from the memorial, but you get

Grove of Thong Trees

Servo

the picture. It made it possible to telegraph directly to England! It is hard to think that the line was still in operation as was used by the ABC to do the Cricket Tests commentaries when the telegraphed every ball and the announcer made the sounds and read the action! So far from our satellite live connections.

We drove the extra 120kms and arrived in Elliott. Well the sign that says Caravan Park is not where the park is at all. It is behind the BP garage, which you have to drive past the see the sign, starting to get a picture of the size of the park. But so

Airport

Nearest Maccas

be it in the NT, not everything is as it seems. Elliott may have been the next big stop on the way to Tennant Creek but it is no town, it just has 3 petrol stations! We booked in to the park and drove around the back of the pub. Well there are about 6 bays there, the toilets are at the petrol station and oh, the locals are quiet! Well we did not get a flash place, but we are here now and really it is just an overnight stay, we are not