A 1000-kilometre circuit through south-western Queensland reveals a host of surprises and level of amenity uncommon in the outback.
Corey Richards is of average height, but he stands way below knee height beside the replica skeleton of Australia’s largest dinosaur, Australotitan Cooperenisis. As the operations manager of the Eromanga Natural History Museum, Corey explains that when this giant grass-eating sauropod nicknamed Cooper roamed what is now the Channel Country of south-western Queensland in the mid-Cretacious Period some 95 to 98 million years ago, he was the third largest creature on Earth (Patagotitan and Argentinosaus from present-day South America just pipped him to top billing). Weighing about 67 tonnes and measuring 30m long, Cooper and his slightly smaller distant relative, Zac, who is remarkable because he was an articulated fossil (his bones were found in anatomical order), were both discovered on Plevna Downs, an hour to the west of Eromanga. Fourteen-year-old Sandy Mackenzie was riding a bike across the paddocks in 2004 when he noticed an ‘unusal rock’ on the ground. “His parents, Robyn and Stuart, took it with them when they took Sandy back to boarding school,” Corey explains. “They became the driving force behind the museum, and still host twice-yearly digs on the station.”
As each dig, which accepts paying volunteers to do the time-consuming work of excavation using brushes and pneumatic drills as fine as dental instruments, uncovers enough material to need 10 years of processing before eventual display, the museum has a huge backlog of bones waiting in its prep rooms. Not to mention a $15 million funding deficit, which its supporters remain ever hopeful a munificent benefactor or government funding will provide to build the second stage so they can display a life-sized replica of Cooper that’s currently stored in sections in a shed. Even if you weren’t (well not yet) a dino devotee it’s worth travelling to the museum for the timeline video that begins each tour. As if the vast western Queensland landscape weren’t enough to provide perspective, the video uses the road trip from Brisbane, 1060km to the east, to Eromanga, as an illustration for the Earth’s history, beginning with the formation of the planet with the Hadeon Eon some 4.6 billion years ago, travelling through the earliest form of life with the evolution of single-cell, oxygen emitting stromatolites in the Archeon Eon, 3.5 billion years ago (at about Roma).
Having finally made it through various ice ages, the age of dinosaurs and extinction, visitors finally arrive at the museum’s carpark. The few hundred metre walk to the museum entry becomes the timeline’s equivalent of the brief period that man has been on Earth. Eromanga, the self-proclaimed town most distant town from the sea in Australia, is also home to opal mines and gas and oil fields and is the most western point on this circuit trip, which loosely covers 1000km of the Channel Country from Cunnamulla, which itself is 790km southwest from Brisbane. No matter how you travel, there’s no shortcut to this neck of the woods. The good news is that once you get there, your efforts will be rewarded so many times over you’ll wonder why you took so long to visit. It is possible to fly (thanks to Rex Aviation) to Cunnamulla or Quilpie, 956km due west from Brisbane, but a car is an essential for exploring so it makes sense to make a road trip to the far south-west. Four-wheel drive is not needed as the entire route is sealed. But leave the Porsche at home, because some of the roads are singletrack bitumen and you’ll need to put two wheels on gravel to pass oncoming traffic.
This can include road trains transporting livestock that measure more than 50m long. A bit of clearance will also be welcome when travelling some of the detours along the way. The unexpected treats begin in Cunnamulla, at the Club Boutique Hotel, where Peieta Mills, whose family has lived in the region for generations and has turned the derelict 1936 Club Hotel into an oasis of comfort with ensuited guest rooms and five Bell tents behind the beer garden for glamping. Her vision has seen the down-at-heel watering hole turn into a social hub of town with a Boho vibe, antique furnishings, Persian carpets on the floor and roses from her prolific garden on the tables. A tireless advocate for the region’s attractions, Peieta sends guests to the new $12 million Cunnamulla Hot Springs, a wellness facility, where visitors can soak in the mineral-rich waters of the Great Artesian Basin. has also introduced paddles of craft beer, all named for Cunnamulla identities to the bar offerings and there’s nightly live entertainment in the dining room during the tourist season (from Easter to the end of September).
Travellers who prefer a swag, tent or caravan are spoilt for choice at Cunnamulla, where camping opportunities include Charlotte Plains station where there are 14 bathtubs set around a waterhole created by the bore that releases underground water to the surface at 42°C. Guests can take a bath while they watch for some of the 130 birds that have been recorded on the property or look for constellations in the bedazzling night sky. There’s no lining up for a bath at Francvillers station, where a booking at the four bush camp sites guarantees exclusive access and the outdoor baths that are heated by a woodfired ‘donkey’ hot water system. Three campsites have water views of a lagoon or creek, while the fourth sits atop a ridge for commanding views of the sunset over the vast plains. From Cunnamulla, it’s 67km to Eulo, where a sign at the entrance to town declares it’s unAustralian not to have a beer at an outback pub, so a stop at the Eulo Queen is mandatory, along with a visit to the Eulo Mud Baths.
This quirky venue is managed by Polish migrant Edyta Brumell. Patrons spend about 90 minutes in the openair bathrooms, each with claw-footed bathtubs, rustic showers and wood-fired heaters for the cooler months.There’s a ‘stretch’ tub that fits two people comfortably, a room with four tubs and a couple’s space. Guests first soak in muscle-relaxing, magnesium-rich milky clay enhanced artesian water, then experience an exfoliating mud wrap followed by another bath and finally a deep moisturise. From Eulo head west for 129km to Thargomindah, a service town for the local sheep and cattle industry and home to Australia’s first hydroelectric power plant, which was run from the Thargomindah bore. From ‘Thargo’ the road narrows to single track bitumen as it tracks west across stations for 160km to the turnoff to the Noccundra Hotel, built on Nockatunga station in 1882 from sandstone blocks shipped in by camel from Milparinka, 40km south of Tibooburra over the border in South Australia. With permanent water on the Wilson Creek, the pub was once a strategic watering stop for livestock and stockmen and Noccundra pub once bustled with vistors en route from Adelaide and Broken Hill on their way to the Channel Country. These days it’s mainly tourists who come to Noccundra to camp on the waterhole, fish and kayak, and get to know the town’s population of three – Neil and Marg Turner and their adult daughter, Sarah. As Sarah explains, space and social distancing are not an issue out here … at 73,720sq km, the Bulloo Shire is Queensland’s third largest.
At the last census, that meant there was 218sq km for every person who lives in it. Retracing our route 20km back to the highway, it’s another 160km to Eromanga, a very comfortable night at Cooper’s Country Lodge in the grounds of the Natural History Museum, and a counter meal at the Royal Hotel, once a Cobb & Co staging post built in 1885 from mud bricks. After dinosaurs, the other mail attraction in town is opal mining, and you won’t spend too long in the pub before you run into someone who has opal to sell. The district’s latest attraction is on the nearby 130,000-acre (52,609ha) Belombre station, run by the museum’s Corey Richards’ aunt, Fiona Ferguson, and her partner, Adam Walker. They opened Toogunna Plains station stay at the beginning of this year in acknowledgement that there wasn’t enough accommodation in Eromanga to accommodate growing visitor numbers and have quickly made the station a destination in its own right.
The ensuited accommodation with 16 guest rooms in two wings is partly made from materials repurposed when several major windstorms destroyed the station’s shearers’ quarters and shed. Auxiliary buildings – refurbished railway workers’ huts a couple of caravans and two outback touring dental vans – have been cleverly made over with recycled iron, hessian lining and Fiona’s artistic eye to create a mini village with a level of amenity uncommon in the bush. While Adam takes visitors on a station tour that includes a visit to the remains of a Cobb & Co changing station, an explanation of exclusion fencing, lunch in the shearing shed and sunset drinks on a sand dune, Fiona is busy in the kitchen. Her CV as a homestead, shearing and mine camp cook belies the fact that she is a top-notch chef and frankly, you’d visit the station for her meals alone. In a land of endless steak and schnitty, Fiona’s homestead dinner of beef braised in red wine and blueberry almond cake is such a welcome reprieve, we could have stayed for a month.
Tickets to the annual degustation dinner she cooks as a showcase of local produce for a fundraiser for the museum are hotly contested. Suffice to say, we’re booking in for next year’s event. From Eromanga, it’s 106km east to Quilpie, another little town that punches well above its weight. In town, there are landscape artist Lyn Barnes’ gallery, a Catholic church with an opal altar, Country Collections shop and the restored 1926 Brick Hotel with cut-above counter meals to sample. Just four kilometres out of town, The Lake is a must-visit for campers and other guests who stay at the bush resort Dan and Louise Hoch have created around Lake Houdraman, a beautiful expanse of water surrounded by shady gums. Self-sufficent campers stay on the water’s edge, caravaners stay closer to the amenities block and those who prefer a ready-made bed and kitchen have a choice of the remodelled shearers’ quarters or two workers’ cottages on the property.
Dan and Louise, who run Merino sheep, cattle and Kalahari goats on the station and several other properties, provide station tours, sundowners are served in the bar every evening and many guests book into the lakeside bathhouse for a soak in the Artesian-water filled tubs. Another don’t-miss station hospitality option is the Rutledge family on 120,000-acre (48,562ha) Moble station. See the story that begins on page 84 in this issue. But perhaps the most unexpected treat of the trip, if not the whole of outback Queensland awaits those who take a 200km round trip detour north to the town of Adavale, population 25, give or take, and almost as many cows mooching around the sparse landscape. A blue street sign on the approach to town announces patisserie. Follow the sign to the ‘Paris end’ of Adavale, an unlikely mauve building in the middle of a paddock where Cristina Zito brings the panache of a high-end pâtissier to town. Entirely self-taught by online videos, Cristina serves exquisite mini gateaux, financiers, pithviers and delicate tartlets during the season.
She shuts in summer, when the soaring temperatures make it impossible to laminate butter into pastry. It’s truly worth the detour as they say in the Michelin guides. From Quilpie, head south-east for 74km to Toompine, the ‘pub without a town’ where long-term locals Stuart and Kate Bowen and their daughter, Lauren and her husband, Sean Bond, have restored a pub built as a Cobb & Co station in 1893 to replace a former building that was destroyed in a fire. From there it’s 155km back to Eulo. Or, those who have become besotted by the fiery stone might opt for the 40km-return detour to the opal mining settlement of Yowah, where there are chances to buy aplenty, yet more opportunities to bathe in artesian waters at the local hot pool or the bath house at the caravan park, and the chance for a round of golf on a course fashioned out of the gibber plain with not much green in sight. From Eulo, it’s a short run back to the trip’s starting point at Cunnamulla. Back at the Eromanga Natural History Museum, a sign on a door reads Sat cito si sat bene, Latin for ‘Soon enough, if done well’. It’s a reference to what Corey Richards calls “the ultimate act of delayed gratification” that is the palaeontologist’s lot in life. If you take the time to sift through bucketloads of 500-micron overmatter from a dig, you might just discover a tiny speck that turns out to be a 100,000-year-old remnant of the jaw of an ancient geckonoid. It could just as well be a metaphor for this trip and the most important message from it: it’s a long way to get there, so slow down and enjoy every aspect this extraordinary region has to offer.
