Day 18 Tuesday 4th July

Rick and Kerry moved on today but we hope to catch up again with them soon. We decided to do a few jobs around the van in the morning before heading out to Angellala Bridge on the Mitchell Highway. Rob and I were quite amazed that we had not heard about a terrible incident that occurred here in 2014. A truck carrying 53 tonnes of ammonium nitrate caught fire. The truck driver called for emergency services to come and then tried to get the truck off the road by driving down under a bridge. As police and firefighters arrived the ammonium nitrate exploded. Both the road bridge and the rail bridge (built in 1897) were destroyed and 8 people were injured. The blast radius was huge and it looked like a war zone after. How no one was killed was nothing short of a miracle. People 30 kms away felt it and thought it was an earthquake. We later spoke to a butcher who related the story to us and another lady in the supermarket. From here we drove back into town and visited a park that had the Vortex rain-making guns and an explanation of how they were going to work…..but they didn’t! We wandered down to happy hour around the camp-fire and heard a passionate and interesting talk from the owner of the park who is ecologist. We had thought that the sheep industry had died down due to a downturn in wool but he explained that in South West Queensland it was nearly impossible to run sheep on properties as they had done in the past due to the wild dogs. He said that they are everywhere, killing sheep and other smaller animals. He described the wild dogs as a tsunami. They are a combination of both dingos and other breeds of dogs and can weigh up to 35-40kgs. He explained that trapping, shooting and baiting needed to done to control the dogs and try and rid the area of them. He was in the process of putting up a “dog-proof” fence around his property. The downturn in running sheep on the properties had also had a devastating effect on the indigenous communities of the area. In the past many Aboriginal people were employed on the big sheep stations in a myriad of jobs and now those jobs were gone and unemployment was rife. Domestic violence, crime etc. had all increased in these communities.  He also explained that kangaroos are out of control in terms of how many thousands there are and there was a need for culling. We could have listened to him for hours!




















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