When I was a child my family lived in a small town near the Queensland-New South Wales border.  Stanthorpe was chilly in winter, but it rarely snowed, so my parents would load my brothers and me into the old family sedan and we’d set off to Glen Innes to find some snow. 

My 2023 journey followed some of those old 1950s childhood memories – and made lots of new ones.

The road from Brisbane passes through Cunningham’s Gap and onto the Southern Downs, past a huge solar farm just outside Warwick. 

The University of Queensland’s 64 Megawatt farm has almost 250,000 photovoltaic panels and apparently generates enough power to keep twenty-five thousand homes cosy in the winter months.

Into New South Wales

Wallangarra marks the northern end of the New England Highway.  A vigorous multicoloured 3-D sign welcomes southern visitors to Queensland; a more modest little sign tells me that I was “Welcome to New South Wales”.

I wound my way south to the sleepy little town of Tenterfield.

A very popular song from the late 1970s was, I thought, Tenterfield Traveller, but I have since found out that it was actually Peter Allen’s Tenterfield Saddler. Allen is far better known for his wonderful I Still Call Australia Home  – a song many believe should be our national anthem.  I am not sure why he wrote about this shop – one I did not find as I drove through the town, although I found an image on Internet. I passed a couple of old farmers in huge Akubra hats drinking a couple of pints of local beer outside a pub, while their dogs snoozed at their feet.

Lots more sleepy townships pop their heads above their burrows heading south, and Deepwater was one.  The busy main road allowed me to stand in the middle of the road to photograph the bustling activity, a sign tried to divert me to an historic railway station (I love old railway stations), but I pressed on to Glen Innes to see if I could find that snowman my brothers and I had made in the late 1950s, perched on the bonnet of Dad’s old Holden car.

Alas – like Frosty – he was long since gone.

Glen Innes

I arrived in Glen Innes – a prosperous and prretty little town of about 9000 people – in the late afternoon, as winter leafless poplars cast their miles-long skeletal shadows across open paddocks, where frosts had sucked the green out of the pastures.

I chatted to Sal at the Visitor Information Centre – she was an absolute treasure trove of local history and knowledge – and found that this town grew fat on the back of cattle and from the huge tin mining boom of the 1870s when great numbers of Chinese migrated to the area, joining the copious kilted Celts who had established land holdings in the area.

Mr Wikipedia tells me that by 1875 the Glen Innes population had swollen to 1500, that the town had a two-teacher school, three churches, five hotels, seven stores and two weekly newspapers.

During my visit I found six pubs (the number has gone up in the last 150 years) but found only one funeral home.  I guess Glen Innes residents are so hard working and so hard drinking that they do not die off too quickly.  The town features lovely old buildings such as the Town Hall and the 1915 Kwong Sing and Co importers, and a great place for a steak dinner:  the Hereford Char Grill.

I missed the Glen Innes Murray Grey cattle sales on 7 July and the 5 July flag ceremony for the Isle of Man at the Australian Standing Stones centre.  This lovely mini-Stonehenge pays tribute to the Celts from all over Europe who settled here, and the July flag ceremony apparently paid tribute to the Manx Tynwald, a legislature that has endured since the Thirteenth Century.

Another thing I missed – thankfully – was any close-up meeting with the huge articulated eighteen-wheel trucks barrelling through the night up Glen Innes’ Church Street with more lights on their cabins and trailers than on a middle-class white Californian suburban home at Christmas. 

Thunderbolt

Just south of Glen Innes is a sign leading off to Thunderbolt’s Cave.

Australians love felons – and many Australians are descended from those transported from England to the colonies as prisoners for such heinous crimes as stealing sixpence, a loaf of bread or two, or for brutally murdering the odd London Bobby or two … 

If, as an Australian, you can trace your heritage to one of the convicts on the 1788 First Fleet you are often elevated to quasi-royalty. 

• Tiaras and Christian Louboutins stilettos optional
• Akubras and RM Williams boots mandatory

“Thunderbolt” was really Frederick Ward, a horse rustler, a father of several children, a multiple-escapee from prison cells and known as a “Gentleman Bushranger” as he apparently avoided all violence … so it is something of an irony that he was shot and killed at the age of thirty-five at Uralla, just south of Armidale, where is now buried and remembered – probably fondly – as Australia’s longest-roaming bushranger …

Armidale

Armidale is a highland city of 30,000 people, heavily scented pine trees, more churches than you can shake a choir boy at, and many excellent schools. 

In addition to the University of New England, there are over forty non-government schools in this small city, including NEGS (a dreadful acronym when one considers that this prestigious girls’ school has a huge equestrian centre), the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, and The Armidale School (TAS), established 1894 and with over seven hundred students:  local and international kids.

NERAM – the New England Regional Art Museum is very close to TAS and is an important storehouse of Australian art.  Their current exhibition (until early August) is Three Echoes – 30 years of Western Desert First Nation Art.  The exhibition featured the works of more than fifty significant aboriginal and Torres Straits islanders’ works

Uralla

Just a didgeridoo or two South of Armidale is Uralla.

I had been surprised to see the vast solar energy farm at Warwick, but equally amazed to find the radio telescopes of the Lockheed Martin Telemetry Tracking and Command facility near Uralla, which is, according to their website, “… a critical component of a global network of earth station facilities used to support commercial satellites through launch and transfer orbit into the satellites’ intended final location in geostationary orbit …”

• I think I almost understand that

But the Lockheed website also states “… the Uralla site is able to readily host additional LEO, MEO and GEO services …”

• And I have no idea what any that means … but it was anything but music to my ears

Tamworth

Country music is also anything but music to my ears. 

Tamworth (population 66,000) is a town of two halves:  north of the railway line is what I could call “Nob Hill”, with lovely old houses and views over the city from John Oxley’s Lookout.  South of the city is Goonoo Goonoo Road, where my excellent Country Capital motel was located, and which has lower-income houses, many of which are partially tumbled-down and where high-speed trucks pass by.

I visited Tamworth’s Big Golden Guitar (ho hum) and the Country Music Hall of Fame and found it of some interest.  Had I been a greater fan of US-styled shirts and US-country frocks and US-hats and boots I may have been more impressed.

Peel Street – the main road through the town centre – is an attractive tree-lined road with plaques set into the footpath showing winners of Golden Guitar awards, and statues of Slim Dusty and others.  In January each year there is a huge country music festival in Tamworth – said to be the second largest in the world after Nashville USA.  The vast Tamworth Regional Entertainment Centre with a theatre seating 5000 people is just south of the town and is, presumably, where singers and performers hoot and boot scoot out their latest airs.

Heading South

I enjoyed Glen Innes but found Tamworth rather uninspiring … although there are some lovely old buildings, a pretty and pretty idle railway station (just two trains daily) and the delightful art deco Central Hotel … but I was glad to move on.

A few kilometres south of Tamworth is Goonoo Goonoo Station, dating from the 1830s.  After gold was found in the area in 1852, the station prospered even more.  Today it is a Shorthorn cattle stud and a place offering luxury accommodation, meals and weddings in refurbished buildings and is a fine example of how diversification can help boost the bottom line when cows and horses and seasons and global warming and the price of the dong in Vietnam affect business …

Just after Goonoo Goonoo Station (and what a fine name that is!) I passed herds of Santa Gertrudis and Angus cattle.  I also found some Belted Galloways.

Some years ago, I helped friends on a Tasmanian vineyard where we had a couple of Belted Galloways.  They were lovely beasts although they escaped one day and I had to chase them out of the olive trees, out of the vineyards and back into their pens.  They were lovely beasts … but we eventually ate them.

• With an olive and pinot noir dressing

I rather think that if Frankenstein ever decided to cross a Black Angus cow with a white Merino ram, he might have ended up with a Belted Galloway calf …

I saw a lovely bovine domestic sight.  A herd of Belted Galloways was heading one way … but a newly-born calf – obviously something of a rebellious little critter – decided to head the other way … until his mum decided to butt him in the bum to get him to comply with the ruling of the masses.  My Internet-obtained image is fortuitous!

According to many highway signs, the best coffee outside Italy is apparently to be found sixty-five kilometres south of Tamworth in the Dallabadah General Store.  There were lots of cars and lots of people there … so perhaps Fred Flintstone (Yabba Dabba Doo) would also be a happy visitor.

Hunter Valley

In my mind, the Hunter Valley is known for its fine wine, its gourmet products and its clean waterways.

I had forgotten the coal.

The inland parts of the valley are studded – saturated? – despoiled? by coal mines and power stations.  My own energy is supplied by one of these monsters, but the Bayswater Power Station chews up almost nine million tons of bituminous coal every year … but unlike that solar plant near Warwick … this gross consumption apparently powers two million Australian homes … mine included.

• I have just turned off my air conditioning unit
• Please read tomorrow’s newspapers for the bankruptcy notices for Bayswater Power

One or two of the power plants in this region including the Liddell station have been decommissioned, but there are many others – Glencore, Mt Owen, Ashton Coal, Rix’s Creek – still gouging coal out of the ground, hauling it on long long long coal trains, with grotesque power pylons marching Triffid-like across the lovely countryside and endless conveyor belts whisking coal from here to there to be burned and to generate …

Some rehabilitation of the earth raped by the miners is under way but from the road it seemed that this “rehabilitation” was cosmetic at the best.  Large levy banks have been created with new saplings planted on them to shield the scars of the open- and deep-cut mines from the eyes of passers-by.  But I feel sure the scars are still there …

Singleton

The road lead on to Singleton, where as part of Australia’s National Service in the 1960s – 1970s, twenty-year-old boys were ripped from the bosoms of their mums and from their lives of pleasure as butchers, teachers, apprentices and electricians … and sent off to learn the arts of war … and to learn just how itchy surplus WWII woollen underwear can be …

Australia decided to support the USA in its ill-conceived battle with the Viet Cong in Vietnam. 15,300 Australian men were conscripted into the Australian Army during the Vietnam conflict.  More than two hundred died and at least 1,200 were wounded on active duty in a war that did little – if anything – to help the people on whose behalf it was ostensibly fought …

Sydney

860 kilometres south of Brisbane, the New England Highway becomes the Hunter Expressway and speed limits go up to 110 kmh … and drivers engage in the mad rash down to sea level.

Over nine hundred kilometres after leaving Brisbane I found my hotel, just a block from the stadium where that night the Australian Rugby Union team, the Wallabies, would play Argentina.

And lose.

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Journey July 2023

Text and photographs © Christopher Hall July 2023

Illustrations marked thus * from the Internet

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In my blogs I try to present a snapshot of the places I have discovered during a brief visit.   I am not trying to present a detailed picture of the whole city or the whole region or the whole country.

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If a man ascended into heaven and gazed upon the whole workings of the universe and the beauty of the stars, the marvellous sight would give him no joy if he had to keep it to himself. And yet, if only there had been someone to describe the spectacle to, it would have filled him with delight.

• Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero – On Friendship

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