Author: Mr A
Location: Morven and Roma, Central Queensland
We continued our journey east, we would be staying a couple of nights at the small town of Roma to resupply before heading north and off grid once again. On the way to Roma we decided to break the journey with a night just outside the small settlement of Morven.
Our home for the evening was a working farm, grazing sheep, cattle and goats, with an abundance of bird life. Checking in at the office we also noticed it was home too a small business Gidgee Smith Bags. The owner set up the business 13 years ago on line and has gone from strength to strength, now employing a couple of people and producing these really smart bags from a pvc material.
We love to see this type of small enterprise, unencumbered by their location in the middle of nowhere. It probably keeps the local Post Office open as well! They also run a little coffee shop and mobile van for the passing (mostly caravans) traffic on the highway. How enterprising.
Tassie liked the fact that she had 15 acres almost to herself! It was a very peaceful afternoon for the three of us, Catherine capturing some more fab shots with the zoom lens, me continuing to get the hang of my new spotting scope, and Tas, well she was just hanging out. She doesn’t even have to leave her chair to get a drink!
Apparently over 70 species of birds had been listed on their property, and what a lovely surprise to be somewhere our hosts even knew that! I think we got to 20?
We then tootled off to Roma, our first town with a large Coles/Woolworths type supermarket since our small supermarket at Leigh Creek – 1,741 km behind us! Isn’t that just incredible? Charleville did have an IGA to be fair, but it was still a small supermarket. So this was our first town with a big supermarket in since Whyalla, over 2,095 kilometres away!
For those of you not familiar with the sheer scale of Australia, that illustrates how low the population density is away from the coast and our cities. Imagine needing some fish sauce or oyster mushrooms for that Asian recipe you want to cook…or to find some wholemeal or fresh vegan pasta..….oops..”Bye honey…just need to pop out to the supermarket…don’t wait up…back in a week or two” And in the couple of little shops we did see on the way, you will of course be paying an enormous premium for basic foodstuffs. Quite a different world. So we were excited to get our big restock done at a big national chain supermarket!
I wonder how many Australians forced to take their holidays domestically this year (we are banned from travelling other than to NZ, and that is often interrupted by our continuous outbreaks of COVID-19 from hotel quarantines) and will be shocked by how different life is for the 15% of Australians who don’t live in our five urban centres? Hopefully the tourism dollars flowing into these regional businesses will help revive some of these small towns.
We arrived at Roma to find a delivery waiting for us – a pop up screen room from our old favourite manufacturer Oztent. We have looked at annexes over the years, but they tend to be bulky and heavy and take a while to put up. This screen tent is plenty big enough for us, and literally pops up in seconds. Another couple of minutes to peg it out and we have doubled the fly and mozzie proof living area we have available to us. Let’s see how it works out but first impressions are very good.
A wine top up was also required, and fulfilled at a little bottle shop next door to our caravan park. I also slipped in most importantly, another bottle of Woodford Reserve, our bourbon of choice. Well, it’s going to be zero degrees at night where we are headed, so something a little warming is required, or so the rationale went.
Mrs A spotted (despite my best efforts to distract her) a sign to “the biggest bottle tree in Roma”, and off we went.
For you folk not based in Australia, yup…weird looking creations. I feel like singing “Who ate all the pies” when walking past them, but as they are pretty prevalent in Central Queensland that’s probably a slippery slope to mandatory mental health support.
So water tanks are filled, fridges and freezer stocked, washing bag empty (highly unusual status), wine store brimming over (not so unusual), its off to the wooly wilds again. Our water will need to last for five days, and thankfully the sun is forecast to shine as we will have no access to mains electricity. Carnarvon Gorge here we come! Talk soon…
