8 July 2011 - Home Hill Comfort Stop, Queensland

Beside another rail line tonight, but so much closer. Each time a train passes the television screen goes blank and we have to wait until the last carriage has passed. Fortunately it is just Master Chef Class night rather than another episode of gripping competition. We are following the series as avidly as television reception allows, as well as the Tour de France (the latter for me, just the highlights). It is all so very exciting!

Last night passed without great event, however I did seem to wake often even if for a moment to identify the source of rail or road noise. After breakfast we travelled the relatively short distance of 56 kilometres to Home Hill, a journey through flat lands as the day before, with random peaks all about.

Home Hill is an RV Friendly Town, all good news for us and the other 100,000 travellers on the road. We filled with water as we entered the town, driving in to a rather wet park and having to utilise the 4WD function to exit without tearing the surface up. At this Comfort Stop between the main street and the railway, we found that a dozen motorhomes and caravans had already arrived and staked their claim to the best spots. While we missed out on a personal grassy terrace, we are on a very level gravel spot, with a railway metal picket fence just beyond our door.

Homehill

After lunch and lounging about in a thoroughly decadent way, we walked up and down the street with the self-guide brochure, calling in to see the gallery of Aboriginal – Torres Strait Islander artist Aicey Zaro whose work we absolutely loved. After years of working away with little reward, he just recently secured a fantastic sale of several art works; about half a dozen paintings priced in the vicinity of $4,500 each to the one buyer. Hopefully this will be the impetus of great financial success for him, something that is often so elusive for living artists.

We also visited the Silver Link Interpretive Centre where there is a large collection of photos of floods here in 1948 (when the rail bridge across the Burdeken River was washed away), 1958 and more recently, and damage suffered from Cyclone Charlie in 1987 and Cyclone Aivu just one year later.

The bridge over the Burdeken River took ten years to build, cost $6 million, is 1,103 metres long and is the only bridge in Australia built without a firm foothold. This is because of the unstable sand base in the river. The road and rail both cross on the bridge, know as the “Silver Link”. Home Hill is situated on this side of the river, Ayr on the other. We will cross this tomorrow when we travel to Ayr just ten kilometres away. Photos of the construction process are also on view.

The Burdeken River is one of Australia’s more significant river systems, the catchment area of about 130,000 square kilometres. The Burdeken Falls Dam is 159 kilometres up river from Home Hill and an awful lot further to access by road, so unfortunately we will have to be satisfied with the DVD that was also showing at the Silver Link Interpretive Centre. This, along with weirs further down river, control the flow of the river for irrigation and flood control.

The Burdeken region is built on a coastal aquifer, a huge underground lake of water running just ten metres below the land’s surface. This constant supply of fresh water is often referred to locally as “liquid gold”, and is pumped up and piped to the farms producing sugar cane and other horticultural crops. This aquifer is said to be one of the largest in Australia and contains over 20 million mega litres of water.

We fudged out for the rest of the afternoon; I actually fell asleep for an hour, something I haven’t done since we arrived here in Australia. Chris counted thirty eight rigs in at 5 p.m., and they were still pouring in.

Sunset and sugar cane fires

The Comfort Stop is obviously this large parking area, two sides of a back street along the railway line, has free showers, toilets, parenting facilities, barbeques and eating areas. It was opened in 2004 in an attempt to capture the tourists who were otherwise proceeding through to Ayr without stopping here and the town was in its death throes. I just hope that the dozens of tourists in here tonight spent at least as much as we did in Home Hill, hopefully a lot more. Good on Home Hill for such innovative thinking!

This evening we witnessed a rather spectacular sunset. Clouds of smoke from the cane fires were evident in the distance, but fortunately blowing the other way.