We travelled down from Karumba to the Burke and Wills Roadhouse and stayed the night before heading on to Lawn Hill. The roadhouse is a pretty lonely spot on the highway – there’s nothing for a hundred kilometres in any direction. I’m pretty sure Burke and Wills never stayed there on their journey, which is a pity as they would have got a hot shower and a cold beer before continuing on to their own personal oblivion. When we were there, there was a scattering of other caravaners including Merv and Brenda who inhabited a great big old motor home with, not surprisingly, “Merv and Brenda” emblazoned on the front. They may have been there a while as periodically big Merv would try to turn over the big diesel motor - to no avail. Still, hot showers, cold beer...no worries eh Merv.
Lawn Hill is another special place. You have to eat about 90 kilometres of dust to finally get there and you have to share the track with huge three-bogie mining road-trains that cause localised blinding sandstorms as they drive past, but it is definitely worth the effort. We booked in for four nights. The owners do what they call a” Harry’s Hill Tour” at sunset. Basically they cart whoever wants to go on their little bus up this small hill to watch the sunset, hear a few Lawn Hill stories and have some wine and snacks. Wine and Snacks? There’s a species of Grey Nomad where that means “get as much as you can while it’s on offer” and we witnessed one fat boy with wine glass in one hand and a mitt full of cheese, pickled onions, olives, and cabana sausage in the other, slurping his way through the afternoon. No wine returned from Harry’s Hill that day I can tell you...it was a massacre. The sunset was nice though.
We booked our campsite at Lawn Hill via email and we received a confirmatory reply which included, “We assume that you do not have a generator or a dog and have allocated you a space in the Grove.” We wrote back, “You are correct. Our dog ran away with our generator and we haven’t seen either for months.” It seems like that if you have a dog or a generator you are relegated to a noisier and presumably smellier part of the camp. Imagine our surprise when we noticed the couple camped next to us in the Grove had...cats! People travelling the countryside with two fluffy pussycats defy our perception of well...fun. There’s a certain sense of dedication that goes into handling cats. They were probably aged in their late sixties. They had a special pen for the cats to lounge about in outside and they walked them on leashes. I asked was it difficult travelling with cats and they both said without hesitation, “It’s easier than travelling with children.” Well you can’t argue with that!
And I’d like to make a statement about Speedos while they are on my mind! I saw three gents of reasonably advanced years strutting back from the swimming hole in their Speedos. Now I reckon that you don’t look particularly great in Speedos in your prime and those things don’t improve with age. Not only that – guys tend to hold on to their Speedos for years and years and lycra does have a habit of decomposing with time – just add water and there is incredible sagging that only underlines the incredible sagging of the male form. To murder an old C&W song (and there’s been plenty of that happening out at Lawn Hills, believe me), “Mothers don’t let your babies grow up to wear Speedos”.
Indarri Falls at Lawn Hill National Park
Everybody does the canoe trip up Lawn Hill Gorge. A lot treat it as a race and paddle like fury to the first barrier, portage over the falls and speed up and back the next bit as well – then go and book into the local masseuse at the camp because they had used muscles they hadn’t used since 1982. We were more intent on spotting the wildlife so we took it rather slow. We came across a big fallen log with several cormorants and we snapped quite a few photos from different angles. We then continued our plod up the creek to the falls and when coming back we saw a couple taking photos at the same log. “There’s a crocodile over there,” they said. “That’s incredible” we said, “We were there earlier and it wasn’t around!” So over we went and took a few shots of this croc on the bank. As we paddled off Maurs said, “You don’t think it was there when we took the first lot of shots do you?” “Of course not,” I said. Oh yes it was! When we downloaded the photos later, there it was – the damn croc sitting happily in the background of EVERY shot! We had blithely missed the gorilla in the room! We seriously considered handing in our Naturalist badges but as we only got them off the back of a Weeties packet we didn’t bother.
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So, the walks in the National Park were excellent, canoeing was grand, wildlife abundant, swimming in the spring-fed Lawn Hill Creek was so refreshing and there was a bar and restaurant on hand for us to relax at night (although we did have to listen to some fractured country music played by an old cowboy on a guitar while our drinks were going down). A small price to pay.
We were floating around in the big deep swimming hole on our last afternoon in Lawn Hill (I was in board shorts, not Speedos) and I said to Maurs, “Could we spend the rest of our lives like this?” It was a rhetorical question and the next morning we were back in the dust and corrugated ruts, bouncing our way back to Cloncurry.
Soo Lawn Hill matches up with what those old coots used to tell me all those years ago... It looks sensational. Lets talk about your eyesight when you get back.. xx
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