13 September 2012 - Kinchela Rest Area, Kidman Highway, Outback, NSW

It wasn’t until after we had taken a twenty minute walk upriver through the fenced reserve that we up stakes and drove back through Brewarrina. Our overnight camp had been just perfect; it is such a joy to bush camp away from civilisation. We were not actually that isolated because apart from our fellow campers, the homestead for the cotton farm between us and the township was just over the brow of the hill; however we could pretend which really was not so hard to do. As I sat in the corrugated shed that served as the “Ladies” and noted two sides of the structure with gaps of at least six inches underneath, I thought about the possibility of a large goanna straying in and wondered how I would handle such an invasion of privacy. Fortunately such ruminating remained that; silly imaginings on my part.

It is nearly one hundred kilometres from Brewarrina to Bourke, the road all flat following the Darling River. There was quite a lot of road works and an awful number of road trains, but apart from that the road was superior to that travelled the previous day. There were also great flocks (or crowds?) of emus especially as we neared Bourke.

The Darling River, that of the Murray-Darling river system, seems to start once the Culgoa River meets the Barwon. A great network of substantial tributaries, the Culgoa, Birnie, Bokhara, Narran, Monie, Gwydir, Namoi, Castlereagh, Macquarie and Bogan Rivers, most of which we have crossed or encountered during our earlier travels, all flow into the Barwon which in turn becomes the Darling, subsequently flowing into the Murray and so on down through Victoria and South Australia to the Southern Ocean.

We pulled into Bourke late morning and headed for the Information Centre which doubles as the Back O’Bourke’ Exhibition Centre. Here we gathered an assortment of information offering a mass of attractions to be taken in with the likelihood of needing a couple of days to do so.

Decision making is never done affectively on an empty stomach but we did decide to leave the planning until after lunch. In the meantime we drove down into the main street, parked, walked up and down the street noting that here the shop fronts in Bourke had pull down roller shutters rather than the steel bars we had seen in Walgett and Brewarrina. There did seem to be a prevalence of locals about however they did seem to be a little more purposeful.

The Bourke Post Office

There are some fine old buildings in Bourke’s main street, notably the Courthouse, the Post Office and a couple of hotels. We wandered a couple of blocks to the river, the Port of Bourke, where once upon a time paddle steamers and other craft plied their cargo and passengers. In 1996 the old derelict wharf was replaced with the replica which stands over the river side now. We missed seeing the lock and weir, but learned of their existence later at the museum.

The first explorer that came here was the famous Sturt who declared the place unfit for human habitation. He was duly followed by Mitchell when exploring the Darling River who came with a couple of boats but spent most of his time on land, another example of bad planning. The boats must have been an absolute nuisance. It was he however who declared, after he had built a fort to protect himself and his entourage from the dangerous natives, that it might be quite a good place for future settlement. Sometime later, like about quarter of a century, a settlor came through with a huge herd of cattle and that was the beginning of what became a relatively successful pastoral industry.

In 1862, the town of Bourke was established as a centre for supplies to surrounding properties and for the export of wool. Horse, bullock and camel teams provided the initial means of transport complimented soon after by the paddle steamers. Bourke became a municipality in 1878 and reached peak prosperity in the early 1890s. At its peak, the Bourke wharf had three steam driven cranes handling 40,000 bales of wool a year. This was shipped down the Darling to ports in South Australia and Victoria, then sent by rail to Adelaide and Melbourne for local textiles and export.

The following years through to about forty years ago saw a slow decline. More latterly with greater control of the water supply, there has been development of the cotton industry. So today this, along with sheep and cattle, is the life blood of Bourke, supplemented apparently with fruit growing; citrus, grapes and melons.

Mural on supermarket wall in Bourke

Just near the wharf is a restored 1923 Crossley Engine, a twin cylinder oil fuelled stationery engine which in its previous lives has been used in the generation of electricity, pumping of water and the manufacture of butter. Here in retirement, it is lovingly tended by engineering types such as those who run train rides for tots as an excuse to indulge in their hobbies. Each weekday, dead on midday, two men come and speak about their pride and joy and start the engine. Today there were at least a dozen men all waiting for The Event and a few wives under sufferance, me included. There is a donation box for the generous to contribute to the cost of the sump oil or anything else they might need. While Chris stood among the menfolk, I chatted with a woman from South Australia who had some travel advice for us on our intended route. She was lovely and we parted in the hope we would meet along the way as we travelled southwards on the same route.

We headed back to the Centre, dined on some inferior buns we had purchased in Lightning Ridge and then headed into the Back O’Bourke Exhibition Centre. This is a must-do for any traveller; effectively a small museum offering lots of stories making up the history of Bourke which sits on the edge of the real outback. The famed poet and novelist, Henry Lawson, was one of several who came and spent time here and who was inspired by the land and the battlers who have striven to survive here. Much of Lawson’s prose is used as a base for the displays and works very well. However … while we both did enjoy the museum very much, we did feel it was overpriced, even paying concession rates. We have visited other museums of a similar standard and paid far less and often nothing at all.

Our camp beside the road

There were other attractions we could have taken advantage of, particularly if we had stayed the night in town. A cruise on the Darling River would have been interesting and is sold in tandem with the entry to the Back O’Bourke Exhibition Centre, however we decided we would leave Bourke to its residents. We had been led to believe they prefer it that way. Perhaps that comment is a little unfair because the tourism board or whatever body administers such matters really has made an effort to produce brochures and information packages to promote the area.

We are camped forty or so kilometres south of Bourke at a layby, but one that has hectares of scrubby hinterland, with a maze of tracks across bare red earth. Our camp is actually not that far off the road, but so very private. Providing there are no bush fires, we could not ask for better.