Allthegobro

The family is off to Uluru for a hectic long weekend. We are all, apart from Gillian who is in Sydney and can’t escape, on board a Virgin flight headed for the iconic rock.

The senior Browns have been out here a couple of times before, one ages back and more recently we passed by on our way to Western Australia via the Outback Way through the centre of Aus.

The flight out took a little over three hours, quite a smooth transit. Some clear views of the landscape below, including a great sighting of the Rock as we came into land at Ayres Rock Airport. A little odd it seems in that we now refer to the actual Rock as Uluru and not Ayres.

After settling into our lodgings we all set off on the short walk up onto a sandhill, the Imalung Lookout, to catch a sun set view of the Rock. The vegetation is all very green and quite a contrast with the red sand on which we walk. Quite an impressive view.

We returned to the lodgings for dinner and an early night, it is 5am start tomorrow to see the Field of Light and a Rock sunrise.

It’s generally cold in Cowra in May and it is no exception in our time here. Days are nice and sunny but bed socks are good at night. We have paused here for a couple of nights to do some washing.

The van park is situated just down from the major high level bridge over the river. The old low level one lane bridge is down below, a few feet above the river. It must be a short cut to somewhere because it is in constant use.

The piers of the high level bridge are covered with murals of an indigenous flavour. Quite impressive art works.

There are quite a things to do around these parts but Allthego and Homealone are really focussed on the Lachlan River. So we head off up to Wyangala Dam. This dam holds back the river’s waters and controls water supply to towns and irrigation along the way we have come over the past couple of days.

It is a great drive through the countryside to get there, past a couple of river crossings.

On the way back we do a loop road via Woodstock, an old railway town. The trains have long gone but there is a great old pub looking down the street, the railway station is a bit sad among the weeds and overgrown track.

There was a big train prang here in 1919 when an out of control freight train with 40 carriages full of coal smashed into an embankment at the Woodstock train station. Very big mess of twisted carriages, there were no injuries.

The next step in this journey is to try to follow the river back upstream from the dam. This has proved to be difficult with the van in tow because the backroad has been flood damaged and was not recommended by the Cowra Information Centre people.

This means that we get to our next stopover at Gunning by way of the Hume Hwy and miss a section of the river. Gunning is a couple of km off the Hume and about 50km from Goulburn. The search starts.

Our trusty river guidebook gets us to a hill not far from a blip on the map called Breadalbane, which claims to be the ‘headwaters of the Lachlan’.

From the hill top there is view over a flattish valley with a patchwork of farmland. Some obviously green from irrigation. We take a closer look by driving on down the hill onto the plain. Sure enough we soon find ourself amongst some very marshy land, with little rivulets here and there, puddles of water among very soggy reeds and grasses.

The source of the Lachlan is here where an aquifer surfaces and feeds the river.

We backtrack to Breadalbane and then follow the guidebook to a few crossings of the river.

In its first few kms it is known as Hannans Creek, before taking the name Lachlan. As the sun sets we get a last look at the river proper from the first high level bridge crossing, Inglewood Bridge.

The river meanders off to Wyangala Dam and eventually Oxley about 1450 river kilometres away down near the Murrumbidgee.

Mission accomplished! Time to head for Brisbane.

From Lake Cargelligo we continued down the Lachlan Valley Way to Condobolin, where we again meet the Lachlan River on its way to Forbes. The Lachlan River is what is known as a terminal river, it flows into a sort of limbo place. The Great Cumbung Swamp in the case of the Lachlan. Apart from during high flood years its waters do not join the Murrumbidge and consequently nor the Murray and the sea.

The road down to Condobolin passes by seemingly endless pastoral and farming properties. A few (must have been around 2000 of them) nice cows are being driven down a stock transfer route. It is all green and sheep are thick in the paddocks as well , it seems our farmers will be having a good season. Maybe lamb prices will drop in a month or two, wishful thinking?

A few years back a farming couple started to do up old Holden utes with some catchy sort of cartoony presentation. They were in the paddock beside the road, hence ‘Utes in the Paddock’. Often with a subtle message.

Today, they have been collected up and presented in a paddock beside the Condobolin Visitors Centre. Also added to by artistic types with new creations. Very entertaining for a nomad after a long drive from Lake Cargelligo!

In moving on to Forbes down the Lachlan Valley Way we are greeted with a series of sculptures in the scrub. A little guide sheet locates them for us and there are well set up pulls off to get off the road and peruse these art works. Sometimes it is all a bit puzzling understanding sculpture, but the little info plaques help us understand the ‘inner meaning’ of this stuff.

Do hope dear readers that you can pick up the meaning of all this artistic stuff from these info plaques.

This one is rather good!

We found it an interesting distraction from taking pictures of the river and all the old bridges.

We then skipped on through Forbes, having our lunch beside Lake Forbes, a billabong type thing back from the river that has been enhanced and is now a great spot for a free camp.

But we have to keep moving in order to get to Cowra for the night and have a couple of days to pursue the source of the Lachlan.

We left Hay on the Cobb Hwy which heads almost due north towards Ivanhoe in far west central NSW. The road traverses the great Hay Plain, past the spot where we had sat watching the sunset a few days back. We are headed for Booligal where the Lachlan is more like a river.

Along the way we stop off at the abandoned One Tree Hotel, built here back in 1862 as a Cobb & Co staging post and as a ‘watering’ hole for passers by. It was renovated a bit over the years but is now fenced off, warning visitors off the private property. CCTV camera warnings seem out of place out here!

At Booligal we left the Cobb Hwy to go across country following the Lachlan Valley Way to Hillston.

As soon as we left the Hay Shire the bitumen stopped and we were onto the gravel, the adjoining shire is sealing it slowly from their end. Maybe they will meet one day! Anyway it is a little flood damaged, not too bad but we still needed to be cautious of the conditions. The road is some distance back from the river. Properties line it preventing public access. Our map though showed a short side trip to see the river, along the Whealbah gravel road. So away we went past farmland with all sorts of crops; grains, beetroot and potatoes prominent as well as sheep and cattle. But not a soul to be seen, we had been passed by a ute going the other way before turning off on the side track.

After crossing the bridge and taking another picture of the river (one wonders why because they are starting to look a bit the same these river pictures!) some room was needed to turn around and go back to the main drag. Allthego is always cautious about doing this, particularly when things are a bit damp on the road verges. You don’t want to get caught in a boggy spot and get stuck. But guess what? Allthego went just that little bit wider than he should and ahhhhhh.

The mud was like soft red clay, really tacky and sticky. The van on the back wasn’t really helping either. When venturing out into these sorts of places you need to come prepared. So, out came the long handled shovel and max traxs. These were great and after about an hour of mucking around we were away ok on the way to Hillston, a bit lucky I suppose as it could have been worse.

We stopped overnight at the van park in Hillston. The Lachlan does a big S bend here through the town and is quite wide with plenty of water. The town has only just had its water tower painted with a mural, quite a spectacular sight.

Next morning we continued along the Lachlan Valley Way to Lake Cargelligo.

The free camp here at Froggy Hollow overlooks the lake. The lake is fed by the Lachlan in times of flood. We have found it very full after the recent heavy rains. A fellow camper said that when they were here last here they had set up on ground about 30 metres out into the lake.

Like Hillston, the water tower here also has a mural and some other street art adorns buildings along the main street. We had a fire as the sun set, lamb chops sizzled away. Rather good!

In the morning we were greeted by a magnificent sunrise over the lake.

Time to leave though for our next stopover at Cowra.

We are now starting to wind our way back home along the Lachlan River. However, before leaving Balranald we made a brief visit to Yanga NP. This is a former pastoral property that has something like a 160km frontage to the Murrumbidgee River. It was established in the 1840s and acquired by the government in 2005 to form a NP. The old homestead and woolshed are centre pieces for visitors.

The homestead overlooks Yanga Lake and has been left in ‘as it was’ condition when National Parks acquired ownership. Frozen in time if you like. It is being maintained of course but not renovated, the same goes for the woolshed which could house 3000 sheep about to be shorn. It is a big shed. After 20 years it still has that sheep smell.

The lake is a little mysterious in that it fills, not only by surface run off, but by the ‘two way’ Yanga Creek. During flood times water runs out of the Murrumbidgee into the Lake. As things dry out the water runs back out of the Lake into the river, a weir has been built to keep water in the lake. It was very full when we there but it has been known to be almost empty. There was a water skiing club here once. It is an amazing sight in an otherwise ‘dry’ landscape.

Balranald is also big on green frogs. The Southern Bell Frog, aka ‘Growling Grass Frog’, is endangered in these parts. So the good townsfolk have installed green frog cut outs around town as a touristy thing ..,, go and see how many you can find, so we did here are a couple.

It was back on the road after our brief stop passing by some expansive crop and pastoral land.

We are taking a loop road back to Hay. It goes through the town of Oxley, to the north west of Hay. Involves a bit of gravel road and skirts around the Great Cumbung Swamp.

The swamp is what the Lachlan River drains into. It is only during flood that the Lachlan reaches the Murrumbidgee. The swamp is something like 35-50,000 acres and is a vast network of creeks and reed beds, depending on the flood water flows. Oxley is the place where you see the Lachlan disappear into the swamp, that is why we are going there. You can’t get much closer to it than this spot on a small bridge out in the middle of what city folk would call ‘nowhere, absolutely’!

The explorer Oxley was stymied by the boggy ground conditions in his explorations of the Lachlan river system back in 1817, near Lake Cargelligo (where will stay the night further on) which is 100km or so north east of Oxley.

After lingering awhile in Oxley we got back onto the loop road and made it back to the van park in Hay for the night.

As is generally the case the blog runs a few days behind real time, it is no different this time. Allthego aims to catch up!