Buttes, mesas and termite mounds

Our overnight stop after Winton was amidst a gorgeous outcrop of jutting red rock in a pull out beside the road, which, thankfully, was as still and quiet as the landscape all night.  

To our right the sun caught the raw red cap of the butte formation: higher than it is wide.  

While to our left, the lower and wider-topped mesa glowed under the setting sun.  

We were too early the following morning for breakfast at the Blue Heeler pub at Kynuna. 

But the doors are open when we pull in ready for a drink and a chat at the Walkabout pub at McKinlay, that of Crocodile Dundee fame.  

Here we learned some of the horrors of being a backpacker trying to find work in Australia.  It seems that some of the youth hostels here literally determine who works where, even if they work; so if you aren’t staying at one of them paying the exorbitant rents they can ask even when you have no job yet to pay that rent, you simply won’t get a job because it all seems to be tied up between the employers, the hostels, and employment agencies.  

Or, you might be picking fruit in Stanthorpe, being paid below the minimum wage, around $12 an hour, for 10 hours a day,  6 days a week work only to come away with less than $500 for the week as the government requires that you pay tax.   Which, as a foreigner, you are never likely to have reimbursed. 

We also learned that agriculture and mining are now the only two industries permitted as a means of extending a visa here.  Outback pubs such as these can expect no backpacker assistance as the government will not approve jobs in hospitality under the extended visa scheme.  Ridiculous, when there are backpackers willing and happy to work out in some of these remote areas to help take the burden off the locals yet this is not allowed to happen.  Or so we were told.  

The landscape enroute to Cloncurry has become riddled with tiny termite towers,  which stretch kilometre after kilometre.  Termites are amazing little architects.   Like ants, they soldier on, building their mounds with just a mouthful of dirt each trip, though they can carry half the weight of their body in water to help in their construction.  

To keep up their strength they can eat as much grass in a year as a cow.  Yet their hard building slog can be undermined by one drenching downpour which can easily destroy a goodly chunk of their castle in one go.   A hole in their mound is like a major red alert to an army of termites.  They swarm out en masse ready to plug it up.  

Formidable.  

We follow them all the way to Mac’s Camp in Cloncurry where we pull in for the night.