Last Light on the Birdsville Track
Somewhere between the gibber plains and the channel country, the old droving roads are quietly returning to mulga and dust.
I spent three weeks last autumn tracing the old stock routes south of Birdsville, walking where drovers once brought cattle a thousand kilometres to the railhead. The Long Paddock — that vast network of travelling stock routes — is returning to scrub. Gates hang open on rusted hinges, and the bore drains that once ran clean for hundreds of kilometres are choked with couch grass and the slow accretion of neglect.
The Quiet Work of Fences
The fence line tells you everything about a country. Three-strand plain wire speaks of sheep country, tight and orderly. Barbed wire means cattle, and a certain impatience with the landscape. Out here on the gibber plains, the fences run in long unhurried lines toward the horizon, each post a punctuation mark in the long sentence of the land.
We camped beneath a river gum where the billabong had dried,
— Jock McAllister, "The Drover's Evening," 1937
and watched the dust-red sunset stain the gibber plains outside.