Date: July 2009
Position: 20°38′33″ S 147°08′47″ E
Conditions: Sunny
Shifting
It had been a busy three weeks. I had shifted countries, rented an apartment, new job and got a new car that was waiting to go for a drive. There is a wee dam a short drive from Townsville called the Burdekin Dam. It has a massive spillway, and in the dry season, you can drive beneath it. In the wet season, it looks like a gigantic waterfall. In a cyclone, the water can overtop the spillway by 9 meters. Lake Dalrymple behind the dam is four times the Sydney Harbour in surface area. A massive irrigation pond in other words! And in Australian terms, at only 210km, is just a short drive from where I lived.
Creepy crawlies
There are some things you learn very quickly in Australia. Number One. Everything is trying to kill you. Number two. Everything is miles away. Number three. Everything is trying to kill you. You have some rapid learning curves! Setting off with high expectations, it wasn’t long until I felt like the only person on earth. The Flinders highway is not a particularly busy road. By the time you turned down Burdekin Road, driven past Ravenswood, you realise that maybe only two families live down there and you start to feel isolated.
Baby Emus
Driving along, minding my own business I saw three baby Emus running alongside the road. One must investigate Baby Emus! Screeching to a halt, I jumped over the barbed wire fence, ran through the paddock after the little suckers. They are fast. It was about then I took stock of where I was. Wearing jandals and a skirt, and having left my water bottle and phone in the car, I belatedly realised my attire was completely inappropriate, as was my lack of forward planning. Only then did it cross my mind that baby Emus will have mummy Emus and mummy Emus won’t be friendly (I have found out since that it is daddy Emus that do all the work). And there are the snakes. Nineteen of the top twenty deadliest snakes in the world are found in Queensland.
No one knew where I was so I would not be missed until I didn’t turn up to work on Monday. Back tracking to the car (I figured that I hadn’t been bitten on the way out, so I should be good if I followed my exact foot steps back), I donned pants and hiking boots. Put my phone in my pocket. Pulled it out again hoping I had service and called my cousins back in Townsville to say where I was, and that if I hadn’t called them by 7 pm, send a rescue for me! Didn’t see the baby Emus again. They had long gone!
The dam
Approaching the dam is an impressive sight. The surrounding countryside is so dry; it is hard to reconcile how much land this dam provides irrigation downstream. You can only see the sides of the spillway, so effectively, it is a giant infinity pool. Looking down over the dam, you still don’t get the true scale of it. The spillway is enormous, and it is kind of trippy driving under it. I had my picnic on the far side. The only wildlife I saw there were the Pelicans hanging around the falls below the dam. I decided I had to come back in the wet season and see it running. I hadn’t yet discovered what was to become my favourite shop in Aussie – Boating, Camping and Fishing or BCF to the locals. Shame, because there is a great campsite there, and the lake has been stocked with Barramundi, among many other fish. I put it on my list for a revisit.
Ravenswood
Heading home, I decided to stop in at Ravenswood. There is a fabulous old pub there – The Imperial Tavern. In the traditional Queensland style. Always good to have a beer on the porch and contemplate life. It is an old mining town – population used to be 5000 back in the day. Now 190 people live there. There are the remanent chimney stacks, and leftover slag heaps to go and poke around. Also, you can go and look over the pit in the opencast goldmine there.
This is what the dam looks like in summertime – or the wet season. We did have Cyclone Ului which made landfall in April at Mackay which is further down the coast from the dams catchment area, so I didn’t get to see it in cyclone mode. The photos taken during cyclone Larry are impressive! The water is 9 meters above the spillway. Even better, I have included some links to some very bad short videos I took! David Attenborough need not fear! Looking back over the Damn Burdekin Falls
