Romancing Roma
15th January 2009
Latitude 26'34, Longitude 148'47
Start Mileage: 3707km
Finish Mileage: 5674km
Fuel reading: 6.5L/100km
Trip Notes: Roma, river crossings and a big country
“I am not the best navigator,” Jennie warned me on the phone, her voice crackling with static. “But get to Roma first. It’s south on the old Coolabah Road. About 20 kilometres until Dingo Creek. Drive through it, turn left at the yellow sign, then keep right on all forks until the black stump. If you reach the big bottle tree, you went too far. If you see Hickok’s Humpy, you are not far enough. Alright?” A pause followed. “Well sort of,” I trailed off uncertainly. “Terrific James. There is no mobile coverage of course. Can’t wait to meet you.”
Roma. 479km west of Brisbane. Flung out on the Western Downs, named after a Greek countess, and famous for one of Australia’s most daring cattle duffers, the town of Roma knows a thing or two about the romance of the outback. It might have the richest saleyards in Australia, but the locals still boast of the cattle thief Harry Redford. He duffed a thousand head and took them to South Australia in 1870. The judge roared for a hanging, but the jury refused to convict. They were too full of admiration for a man who survived deserts where Burke and Wills perished. And as the Octavia Scout trawls through sandy bottomed rivers, I can half understand them. It is bushcraft and good cars that keep people alive in these places, not the law.
Bulbous bottle trees and iron lace balconies line the main street into town. There are nine thriving pubs in Roma, and a gigantic oil tower they call the ‘Big Rig’, but this is no tourist town. Weatherboards sell for one million dollars, and expensive 4x4s line the streets. After two decades of bad fortune, the town is running a fever on oil and big rains, and the locals ain’t looking back.
Jennie’s place is 230,000 acres. It’s green today, but she knows that’s blackjack. Survival is a wild gamble on rain. If you destock for the drought, you will have to pay a fortune for stock when it rains. If you stock up and it doesn’t rain, they die. She was castrating a pony as we arrived, a group of dusty children hovering over her with interest. “The kids see life at its grassroots,” she explains. It’s the children that Jennie documents. She wants to record their tough, romantic lives through the lens of a camera. And she wants them to be proud of it.
We stayed for four days and three starry nights. We rode boundaries in the Scout, flew the light plane next door, and mouthed the words outback James Bond more than once. On the last night, they held a barbeque for us down at the billabong. Damper was in the fire, snags were on the grill and the VBs stacked high in an esky. The kids were drinking warm lemonade, their faces red and excited from running around. Usually they would swing on the tyre hanging from an old red gum, but their attentions were distracted by the presence of brownish ridge submerged in the water.
“Is it a goanna?” one of the kids yelled. One threw a stone in and the ridge stirred. We looked up. “Look out kids,” Jennie’s husband Adrian shouted instinctively and moved towards the creek. The kids froze at the tone of his voice, rocks still in hand. When the brown ridge disappeared, we dropped our beers and scattered. “It’s a bloody crocodile,” he roared. The children jumped up and down with feverish excitement. We scrambled up the banks of the billabong, searching wildly for something to climb, but Adrian had entered the water. “Look at this boys,” Adrian yelled excitedly as he dived in fully clothed. And we stopped to watch in amazement, as he came up wrestling with a block of coloured foam, and the entire Bucknell family fell apart laughing.
James