BOURKE

“The truth is that there exists inside coastal Australia a second Australia of which most of our people know very little...for out here you have reached the core of Australia, the real red Australia of the ages.”

C.E.W. Bean On the Wool Track, 1910

               

On Friday we drove the 165k north to Bourke.  Nearing Bourke the vegetation becomes sparser and then the cotton fields reappear, as well as the cotton balls along the road.  Bourke has two cotton gins, one of which is said to be very high tech using laser technology to set a world record for ginning.  Bourke is flat and has about half the population of Cobar at around two and a half thousand, 70 percent of whom are supposed to be indigenous, but apart from a few kids near the supermarket, we haven’t sighted any.  We’re camped at  Kidmans Camp, about 8k north, by the Darling River,

definitely a whites only area – mostly old and grey ones at that, all chasing the sun north.  Many are headed for Karumba on the Gulf, which is just about due north of Melbourne only right across the other side of the continent.

Our first night here, the people who run the camp put on a cook-out under the coolibah trees.

About 45 of us were fed and treated to recitations of bush poetry, some by Paterson and Lawson, by a fellow I’m guessing was a cocky “from up the road”, and the General Manager of the Shire.  We also had jokes, most of which were about sheilas, queers and greenies – hilarious!  However, there weren’t any jokes about aborigines or refugees, so I’m afraid that political correctness may have reared its ugly head, outback at Bourke.

The Shire General Manager explained to us, with the help of a large number of statistics about evaporation, water flows, rainfall patterns, etc., how taking water from the river for irrigation had no effect whatever on water flows downstream.  Furthermore, I think he was trying to argue that we have a moral and ethical duty to supply cotton to China, but I became a bit confused by the rambling nature of the argument.  I could see that most of the audience were loving it.  Someone called out, ‘Tell Tim Flannery’.  I can imagine this story being  re-told along all the trails travelled by the grey nomads, whatever the validity or otherwise of the arguments.

Anyway, a team of people gives hours of their time twice a week to these events.  In addition to propagandising, profits are donated to the Flying Doctor Service so I suppose some good comes of it.  It intrigues me that while they’re quite happy to quote Henry Lawson and take over his ideas of mateship, battlers, etc., I’m guessing that their political views are about as far from Lawson's as you can get.

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After the floods, bird life on the Darling is prolific - egrets, herons, spoonbills, cockatoos, hawks, wedge tailed eagles, honey eaters, and more. 

Bourke has some fine old buildings in varying stages of repair or disrepair:

Court House:



At Poets Corner there are memorial plaques to Henry Lawson, CEW Bean, ‘Breaker’ Morant and Will Ogilvie.



Archibald sent Lawson to Bourke in 1892, partly to dry out away from the pubs of The Rocks and partly to gain inspiration for his writing.  A number of Lawson’s poems and stories were written in Bourke and he was heavily involved in the militant shearers’ activities of the time.  After humping a swag to Hungerford and back, he was thoroughly disillusioned by life on the wallaby and Paterson’s “sunlit plains extended”.  He went back to Sydney and never returned to Bourke.

“We found Hungerford and camped there for a day.  The town is right on the Queensland border, and an inter-provincial rabbit-proof  fence  -  with rabbits on both sides of it  -  runs across the main street.  This fence is a standing joke with Australian rabbits – about the only joke they have out here...”

                                                                                                                              Henry Lawson 1893

The Bourke cemetery is an interesting place to wander about.  The old headstones detailing age and manner of death paint a picture of life – no, death - in the 19^th century.  ‘Drowned’, ‘Perished in the bush', ‘Policeman shot by bushrangers’ (Thunderbolt and Starlight roamed these parts) and,  inevitably, many graves of babies and children.  Afghan cameleers are buried facing Mecca – one old bloke reached 107 -  and a small building they used as a mosque still stands.

Fred Hollows chose to be buried here.  A team of international sculptors carved the stone monument.



Interestingly, the cemetery has, as well as the usual Catholic, Methodist, etc., sections, areas for General, Independent, UnSectarian (I think it was) and I can’t remember what else – a tribute to the imagination of the classifier.

The Darling from the old wharf:

Old lift-up bridge:

I don’t know what to make of the town of Bourke.  People have told me what a friendly place it is, and that’s true, but it’s the absence of a significant indigenous presence that I find strange – though I did see a couple of aboriginal fellows playing with a bowls team yesterday.

UPDATE:

Many aborigines out and about today, especially congregated in front of the Court House this morning, so my sense of reality/normality has been restored.