I have been on a journey, infinitely bigger in my mind and my imagination than the actual measurement of miles and time might suggest to you. I do not have the tricks and twists to my tongue that would enable me to write something glib and smooth a travelogue article designed to attract the traveller, the adventurer, the reader of glossy magazines. My mind moves to rhythms too slow for that. But I do have a passion for this place a passion that runs as deep and as slow as the channels of an old, old river, and so what I write will be what I feel for this place and its people as much as about what I saw.

I met Kate four years ago. We shared three days caught by the summer flood waters of the Barcoo River at Tambo. I was returning from leaving my children at boarding school. Kate was arriving to begin a new job. There are rare moments when you meet a person and feel an inexplicable bond a knowledge and an understanding that is something that does not have its foundations in the norms of social interaction. We knew each other well and yet knew each other not at all. You could count on one hand the number of times we have seen each other in the years since we first met and yet, four years later, I spend three days with Kate following the Georgina River from Camooweal to Birdsville, and Kate is leaving.

We drove from Longreach to Cloncurry on the afternoon of Day One separate Four-Wheel Drive vehicles laden with swags, tucker. I'm quite happy alone with my own thoughts on a long trip and this was a familiar road, unfolding and rolling away beneath the wheels, smooth and comfortable as satin slipping through fingers. Coffee in Winton Sunday afternoon sidewalk with the young local hoods bored brainless - what else d'you do in Winton on a Sundee 'cept chat up the chicks and make a bit of noise? Then followed the sunset to Cloncurry actually, travelling north, the sunset is sort of on the left! But out in those spaces it becomes all enveloping anyway until you're swimming in the colours and the half-light and the night. Half a dozen road trains and a few tourists otherwise the road belonged only to us. Arriving anywhere is always a relief.

DAY TWO...

In Cloncurry, we stayed in the Leichardt. Billy always keeps a watchful eye out for the itinerant women who pass through teachers, RAFS girls, PCAP artists, health workers and the morning yarn over the account paying process inevitably drifts from one end of Queensland to the other. We're to collect Ab Teece, an old drover. Yes, turn right, then left at the corner past the school. He had a new grand daughter last night. The mother worked here for years one of our girls - Billy looks after her girls. She grew up in Goondiwindi, or maybe it was Cunnamulla. Pubs are significant. Almost as integral to the landscape as the land! Sooner or later everyone drifts through the pubs of western Queensland, and their shadows linger despite the glare of neon lit poker machines and purple carpets in the lounge.

Ab, seventy something years old, had his swag and guitar waiting at the gate. Little cottage, low on the ground, hallway running the breeze right through and Katie there to say a brief good-bye once again. How many times has she done that? Wife to a drover for fifty years? Now it's to trips like this and the regular pilgrimage to the Tamworth Country Music Festival or the Stockman's Hall of Fame. Katie grew up over the border in the Territory - big place her family had, some of the boys still there. She could ride, Katie, she was good with horses - Was it Katie's mother? I'm not sure. The stories blend with the speed and haze of the landscape slipping past. She went for a walk one afternoon with a six month old baby out from the station homestead. Never saw her again, never found 'em, trackers, men, dogs never found a trace.

The hills around Cloncurry draw me. There's something in their raw savagery that pulls at something deep in the pit of my belly. Ab and his father, when he was a boy "fossicked for copper, all through them hills. It gets you, that fossicking, them hills, got my father." At Mount Isa K-Mart and traffic lights we drove to the airport to collect John professional freelance photographer/journalist. The airport was surprisingly busy mining officials, graziers, townsfolk, tourists. We couldn't find John, but he eventually emerged as the one with the camera bag, the most hideously distorted akubra straw hat in the terminal and his ear permanently glued to a mobile phone. I liked him. He was direct with the cynical realism of the journo who has travelled far and seen much. He has country under his fingernails though. Follows Slim Dusty and country music among other things to the extent that Slim has accepted him on board as a regular member of the touring scene. Coffee shop cappuccino for lunch and we left Mount Isa behind, Ab and I in the lead, Kate, Ned and John behind. Ned is Kate's supremely tolerant Blue Heeler. He deserves a sainthood. I saw not the faintest sign of wickedness during the whole trip just supreme resignation and patience – reincarnation of a Buddhist monk I'm certain.

Hour and a half to Camooweal, road variable. This was Ab's country and I was a captive audience. He knew it well - tanks, bores, scrub, plains, murders, accidents, disasters - This was where he started droving way back - the six mile, the ten mile, the twenty-nine mile - Yelvertoft 'timber' and Camooweal. We pulled in to the pub where we were to meet with the rest of the crew. There's not much to Camooweal border town, edge of the Barkly... Cemetry first and the town grid with the new and thriving Landcare tree plantation, a couple of houses, post office, hall servo, pub and Freckleton's Store. Then there's the new servo, the aboriginal community centre and an air conditioned demountable box that's the brand new Tourist Information Centre. There we found Amelia, a delightful young girl straight from Canberra Girls Grammar School and University with an enormously impressive bureaucratic title, full of ideals and enthusiasm, plonked in a box at the end of the earth smack in the middle of small town politics after three weeks on the job , just beginning to show a little bit of fraying at the edges at the realisation of the isolation ahead of her. I wish her courage.

Arch had told me about the caves outside town that I wanted to see. As we were pulling off the highway to check out a likely site, a Toyota landcruiser pulled - a bloke in a big hat with a brown-eyed little girl. He and Ab were immediately yarning. It was Piccaninni Willett - he was to join us also taking salt out to his cattle. He runs a few on the Common keeps his hand in. He took the lead in a way that was to become familiar and lead us to a great jumbled depression with a hole disappearing into the darkness underneath. All ragged limestone country, it must be riddled with thousands of these depressions or collapses. We didn't even make it to the National Park. It had recently been burnt out anyway - Bloody tourists? Who knows?

In the pub we made arrangements for the night. The girl behind the bar retreated to her books after every drink she served, which at that time of the day wasn't too many. I asked her if she was studying - yes, nursing, externally from Cairns. What an effort! We wandered down the street to Ada's place - Freckleton's Store and the museum that has been/is her labour of love. Ada is one strong woman direct, determined, single-minded, an absolute fount of knowledge about the history and lifestyle of this her place. Born and bred Camooweal till it's part of the fabric of her skin. Mongrel dogs and aboriginal children sucking on bright blue icy poles wandering the road with us and perched on the path outside the store. Wandered to the cemetery cast on a hill tumbled with roly poly, crossed the Georgina for the first time and watched the sun sink below the Barkly. With the evening we gathered at the pub and met everyone else.

Mike from Longreach DNR had brought along two who were quickly dubbed Big Wal and Little Wal. Big Wal was a tall, fine quiet older gentleman in the very literal meaning of the word. He had come out from the Central Highlands as a young man and taken droving jobs. After serving during the War he returned and ended up managing on various Territory places. Quieter, more reserved than our other three oldies, he lives 'Inside' now, in a unit in Cooparoo with his wife who is severely crippled with arthritis. She calls him a gypsy he can never resist a call to return to this part of the world. Little Wal, younger, quieter at least at first head of the Government Department that handles Stock Routes now. He has been working among other things on re-mapping with the latest in satellite and GPS technology. He has his roots out here though with his father working as a stock inspector years ago on Lake Nash and his own youthful days with the DPI. Big Wal had brought his map too an old and yellow 1930's version of the stock routes with basic river systems and places marked in big thick black print. Must confess that it was easier to follow though the satellite detail in Little Wal's was fantastic. Mike was one member of the team that I really wanted to get to know better, but I didn't really feel that I had during the duration of the trip. I respect enormously the amount of knowledge he carries around in his head, whipping off botanical and biological names without hesitation, widely travelled, widely experienced. Don also joined us for dinner – after settling into his air conditioned motel room - while the rest of us rolled out on the ground behind the pub! He immediately set his mark as a man of easy humour and great personality. He'd come up from Birdsville - National Park Ranger, aboriginal elder, stockman. He and Lynn, his wife had been written up in the Country Life the week before we left with their Desert Tour operation. An amazing mixture of people - wonderful luck - or an astute selection process Mark? But it 'worked' in terms of personality, surprisingly well! Rolled out our swags and slept.

DAY THREE...

Brekkie at the roadhouse, head west towards the Territory border and immediately, as soon as you cross the river at Camooweal, see the Barkly stretching away to forever. Pic and Ab, my driving companions for the day, already recognise every dimple, gully, windmill, clump of trees - over there - see that bit of a rise, that's Bell Hole, made by a meteorite or something - and over there .. see that - and there, we had a bloody awful cook that trip - we zap past on the bitumen in a straight black line but the stock route meanders through their memories as vivid as yesterday. There is grass, more grass and sky but I can see as clearly as they can as they fling yarns to each other - mobs of cattle, dust, horses, plant, rogues. Turn left and head for Austral Downs homestead. See there, that mill, and out there on the left - there's still an old axle and wheel hubs there somewhere. That's where a doctor and his wife and children broke down – aw, way back in the twenties or thirties. Decided to walk to the bore for water. Left the children under a conkerberry bush. Mid-summer it was. Bore was broken down. They all perished, all of them. They reckon the ants got the children before the parents even got back from the bore - Somewhere there passed the first and last car for the rest of the day.

Austral Downs homestead - a bit of a rise above the river. We call in to introduce ourselves then slip down and across the river channel to where a wall of limestone rock dams the channel and backs up a magnificent water hole.- the first of a series of Chinese built dams down the length of the Georgina to Urandangie. Incredible to think they were probably constructed with little more than manpower and a wheelbarrow. Great hunks of limestone rock make a barrier a hundred metres long and six, eight or ten feet high. Long and strong enough to withstand floods for a hundred years. A bit further upstream and there were the remnants of stone sheep yards. Today it seems unrealistic to think of this as sheep country. As we left, they were yarding a mob of cattle - classic post card stuff! Heading south again to just before the junction of the Georgina and the Ranken. The old homestead ruins lay over to the right between the arms of the two rivers, but we swung left, off the road, and followed the faint wheel tracks of the stock route. Yeah, there had been a mob through not that long ago - six, eight months - but the wheel tracks were pretty bloody faint! Even so, Pic could pick out camps - a circle of eaten out grass and scattered campfire ash - where they'd made camp at night. The feed was truly magnificent. This says Pic, is the best country in the world - never seen it look so good. More often bare and black as Pic never deviated. He knew exactly where he was every inch of the way - every single prickley bush and gully, though there's a bloody sight more a them woody weeds an' I hate them parkinsonias!

Just before the Lake Nash boundary we took a sharp dive to the right across a bit of a claypan and with Pic's unerring navigation (Don't wanna look at them maps - can't read no bloody map) pulled up at the ruins of the Dead Dog Pub - on a limestone ridge above a bend in the river. A few stumps, a paving stone where steps must have been. Little else, not even many glass fragments that usually mark a shanty pub, although I did find a rusted and flattened spoon that I gave to Ada for her museum. This is the place where her aunt had had her first job sometime in the early 1900's. Silence and space. Not difficult to imagine wagons, the chink and rattle of men and animals, grog, food - a movement of people over a great emptiness and somewhere, silent and wary, the black man observing.

We looped around to the other side of the river and camped for lunch by another of the stone weirs. The routine of the next few days was set. The men tumbled out of the vehicles, set and lit the fire in a minute, then Pic would head for the water, quartpot in hand, kneel, dip and drink and pronounce it - ahhh, good sweet water .. It became more ceremonial than routine, and it wasn't theatre. It was as real as the earth. I like this old river, he said. It's home t'me. Drank good tea - Mike's brew - ate corned beef and pickle sandwiches and headed off. We'd seen barely a movement except our own and the wind - no mobs of roos, no emus, a few galahs back at the homestead and a couple of hawks circling high over our lunch spot. Through a gate and into Lake Nash with the wheel tracks in front of us getting fainter and fainter until Mike roared past us twenty metres away in a cloud of dust! He'd found a freshly graded fire plough track! Just as I was boasting of being a great negotiator of paddock tracks! And so we cruised then for a little while. Pic pointed out where the French photographer with the Bi-centennial Droving trip from Newcastle Waters to Longreach died. Paused to yarn with the grader driver - never met anyone on this road before - a man obviously accustomed to his own company. Paused again to change two lots of flat tyres. Out of the plains, down through and across gravely ridges and claypans bare of grass, fences more frequent, looping up through the home paddock, past Lake Nash to the Alpurrurulam settlement. Ada and Kate yarned to friends. John put the kids football up on the roof of the store. Briefly called in at Lake Nash homestead before heading along the 'netting fence' - south. Pulled up briefly at another outstation (Headingly?) where the wind and the tumbleweed were achingly persistent. On the side of the shed, the constant blowing of a clump of grass had scored the paint off the iron wall in a perfectly described arc. The day was beginning to close in as we headed for Urandangie. Gidyea scrub and patches of plain. Urandangie not much more than a dying pub whipped into life with a coat of paint - crimson trim - no doubt to impress the tourists. Aboriginal family camped in the dust on the outskirts of town. We were all fading fast and so left Don and John to fix a tyre while we headed out to find a waterhole to camp beside. Kate and I were dying for a swim but the waterhole was not impressive except in size - dead cars and rusted iron pipe and discarded tyres. We camped on a bit of a limestone ridge at the top of the river bank much to everyone's horror. Tea, tucker - good, hot and plentiful despite Ab's aversion to veges. The boys - Don and Ab singing and guitar. Ada reading from Bill Harney, but we were all had it. A hint of rain during the night and two mosquitos. No one noticed the rocks.

DAY FOUR...

Following real river channel country. I'm going to have to check the names of places and water holes with Little Wal. There was a well, collapsed in on itself now, then further down the road and in to the river channel and a whole series of stone weirs that began on outer channels and worked their way, must have been four or five kilometres into the main channel. Further on, the dump at the Old Walgra Station ruins. There were thousands of stories there. The men scratched among bits of machinery, saddlery, the women - broken china, glass - remnants of dreams. Further downstream to the Carrandotta Wool Scour - fascinating. Beautifully constructed stone buildings - scour and quarters, scattered blades and shears everywhere. Must have been a lot of timber at one stage. There were thousands of nails - old, old nails. There must have been yards too but there seemed to be no sign of them close at hand anyway. I would imagine they were stone - maybe not. Today John and Big Wal are my passengers.

Looping in and out from waterhole to waterhole over claypan country and old man saltbush. Lunch at Marion Lake. Kopi country where the water is clear as clear but brackish. Don convinced he had concussion and was going blind after cracking his head on a low slung branch. He eventually realized that he'd lost the lens out of his glasses! Walkerbee waterhole on Linda Downs. We went a bit astray somewhere here and came upon the most beautiful crossing dominated by a grove of huge paper bark trees - a little bit of absolute magic. Roxborough, Glenormiston, rolling hills and Mitchell grass plains, storms skittering along beside us. Herbert Downs is where the old stock route forked - east to Boulia and across to the Diamantina, or south to Birdsville and South Australia. Passed a yard full of cattle here and on to the homestead where the stock camp had just arrived - rimmed with dust, filthy, happy and so, so young - a wild looking mob of bushrangers! The head stockman must have been twenty-two - red haired, long and lean, no teeth, but an air of authority that sat quite easily on his shoulders. They pointed the way to Marion and we swung over gravely hills glorious in the evening light with storms and a whipping cold wind. Another flat tyre! Closer in to the hills with the last of the daylight following a series of minnaritchie gullies to where Marion sat on a ridge overlooking a bend in the river. Rhonda and Bill had invited us to camp there and share dinner - a fresh killer - a paddock kill still quivering on a bed of leaves in the back of the Toyota. A lovely old stone homestead reminiscent of Glenormiston. It meant real showers and a bed for the oldies. The rest of us swagged with the wind in our hair. Tea - all the interesting bits on the barbecue - liver, brains, milk gut, rib bones, chuck steak. The staff, today, off to watch TV as soon as they'd eaten. No campfire entertainment and yarning!

Poured over maps in the men's dining room for a while, but we all hit the sack pretty quickly.

DAY FIVE...

Left Marion to a beautiful soft morning - for this time of year – grey, overcast, but the colours of the grass and herbage infinitely varied, subtle and beautiful. We headed across a vast basin of grassland - the Bellevue Plain. Wheel tracks even fainter than in Austral, but Pic was undeterred and we had to believe him because someone had obviously driven cattle across it – in the wet! Tracks that had set solid as concrete. We didn't get out of first gear for miles! But there were grasses and more grasses and variations on weeds that were magnificent. Mobs of brolgas, flock pigeons – more birds than we'd seen for days. The going was so slow that Ada started an impromptu concert over the two-way radios, reciting The Pearl of Them All. Ab sang - old cowboy style - four chords and a drone of lost loves and tragedy. Mike played harmonica - and drove! Even Pic said he had a contribution - the songs he'd sung around the cattle at night - Three Blind Mice, Three Blind Mice - and 505 is the Brunette Brand, 505 is the Brunette Brand - droned over and over and over ad infinitum!

Eventually the bone jarring stopped when we hit the main Boulia - Bedourie highway for all of a quarter of a mile, then shot off again but over rolling gravely hills and plains that I remembered from my last trip, on to the beginning of the sandhills and Bedourie. We pulled into Morrabulla yards and waterhole where there were thousands of ducks lining the banks and where I somehow netted something very putrid under my vehicle - to the extent that when we set off I turfed Ada and Ab out until they'd checked their boots. No evidence, but that very distinctive odour stayed with us and curled noses until Birdsville! Bedourie was amazing with patches of neatly trimmed green lawn, street lighting, new buildings – community centre, swimming pool, roadhouse. Big Wally was quite overwhelmed at the changes. I was amazed, even in three years. The cemetery is now a swathe of vivid green kikuyu. I can't imagine what the old fellas think when they climb out for a look around on dark nights.

We're following Eyre Creek now, and pulled up for lunch at Allan's yards, past Glengyle homestead - sand, a beautiful waterhole, incredibly ancient coolabahs - and the stink issuing from under my vehicle! Everyone is tired, but Kate urged us to think a little deeper about where we'd been, what we'd seen. For me, landscape, people, past and future passing each other here for this moment in the present. A precious experience and fertile. We will all split off in different directions in a few hours. Kate is already reluctantly withdrawing into a world of arrangements for the events of the weekend. There's a satellite phone in her car. We barbecued the last of the meat for lunch and ate the lot. It was good - hot, charred, licking our fingers, perched on our haunches, Mike's tea. We needed three brews to get us thinking. We're ordinary travellers now, scooting down the road at a conventional speed (Eh, Don?) Don fished a witchety grub out of the branch of the coolibah over our camp, a slightly mangled witchety, but we shared it with all the camaraderie of travel companions and headed down the road, across the great lignum swamp where some of us saw a water buffalo. True story - a great grey water buffalo who leered at us suspiciously before blundering off into the lignum.

At the turnoff to Beetoota, Pic shot off the road again - or was it Don, over a gravely rise to where we could look out over the stunning expanse of desert with Lakes Machatti and Koolivoo surreal in the distance. I needed to lie against the earth, but resisted for fear they'd think I was mad. From there it was a straight run to Birdsville, but a couple of lingered at Carcoory bore and ruins where Mike told us of birds in the drought landing in desperation on the scalding bore drain; the graffiti and the old ruins haunting in their pathos. Finally with grey dusk closing in, we stopped in a spread of wadi trees – acacia peuce – older than time, a cold wind sighing through them. It was John, the cynical realist, who said I really don't want to arrive anywhere yet. It's all going to be over – and so different. I know exactly how he felt. I never have liked motel units, and so to Birdsville - and things were 'different'.