5 March, 2011 - Wallabadah Rest Area, Wallabadah, NSW

It was not the planes that disturbed our night but the rumbling and thumping of some industrial process that continued through the night. We did apparently receive one undesirable visitor through the night, however I was fast asleep and their efforts to disturb were token in view of the fact that there were four vans stopped over.

So we rose this morning not greatly rested, but grateful for the facilities offered to travellers such as us, all the same. The sun was shining and the day considerably warmer than those preceding.

We shopped for provisions and then parked where we had yesterday, across the Peel River from the city and walked along the river levy to the Tamworth Art Gallery. There were two exhibitions there; ceramics by Jeff Mincham which were quite unusual and equally brilliant, and the other by painter Michelle Hungerford which did not do a lot for me personally. Both collections were on loan from a gallery in Adelaide, where the artists hail from. The tourist brochure had suggested we put an hour aside to visit the gallery; for us this was somewhat overstated.

Since neither of us was interested in seeing the Hall of Fame, the Walk a Country Mile Interpretive Centre, the Big Golden Guitar Tourist Centre, and all the other country music paraphernalia the city has on offer, we decided to leave Tamworth.

Perhaps we had done the city a disservice in spending so little time there. It is a city of just under 35,000 people beside the Peel River, the “capital” of the New England North-West region of NSW, serving around 178,000 people. It is steeped in history, including our own family’s, prosperous surrounded by productive farmland, and is the self-proclaimed country music capital of Australia, an image that has been carefully cultivated since the late 1960s. Over 50,000 flock to the city for the annual festival each January, and looking at the tariffs that take effect in that month of the year, it is evident that the place makes the most of that trade.

Since both of us were tired, we decided to travel only a short distance south, and so after little more than fifty kilometres we came to Wallabadah, a tiny settlement on the banks of the Quirindi Creek. It is a surprisingly expansive park next to a garden dedicated to the First Fleet of Australians who arrived here on 26 January 1788 (thus the date for Australia Day). All the names of those  who sailed with this convoy of ships; the convicts, sailors, soldiers, officers, women, are listed. They are then listed again on commemorative “headstones” grouped with each ship name.

There are at least eleven camping parties here tonight. The traffic on the New England highway, not too far away, has quietened down, and I am sure we will have an excellent night. As with nearly all the rest areas provided there are toilets and picnic facilities. Here there is also water with the sort of taps one can hook up to, and no time restrictions; many of them have 20 hours stopover restrictions. Unlike other rest areas, there is a request to make a gold coin donation which of course we have. This is aimed also at those who visit the garden.