Finally, we have a clear notion of “the Darling downs.”
Most Brisbane folk watch the ABC television weather news on weekday evening, I expect, for hints on how to dress the next day, but for me it’s a geography lesson as much as anything else.
On an outline of Queensland, town and city names are posted with their high and low temperatures for the day, and I think, “Oh, that’s where that is” or, more rarely, “We’ve been there.”
But the names of various regions such as “the Darling downs” never get put on the screen because, obviously, everybody knows where they are. Unless, of course, you’re newcomers, as we are even after nearly three years.
Until Easter weekend this year, we didn’t know where Australia’s “New England” was. Then we drove through there and expanded our knowledge even further by visiting Texas, QLD, which is, appropriately enough, in the southwestern part of the state. Well, south, anyway, and as far west as we’d been.
On that trip, we also learned, while hiking over large chunks of it, where “the granite belt” is and we got to know a bit about Stanthorpe, where our farmers’ market apples come from, near the New South Wales border.
But “the Darling downs” was an entirely mythical place as far as I was concerned. I assumed it must have something to do with the Darling River, which is dying a slow death from drought, up-stream irrigation, and city-water demands.
Our printed maps don’t use the term as a label and my trusty Australian dictionary carries no definition of it despite listing “Darling shower.” That’s a dust storm.
As I said, though, we are finally in the know. This past weekend, Kristi and I traveled west and then north, passing near Ipswich, driving over the Wivenhoe Dam’s dam, and going through Esk, Toogoolawah, Blackbutt (named after the tree of the same name, I assume), Yarraman, Nanango, and on to Kingaroy, the peanut capital of Queensland.
From there we hiked for parts of three days in the Bunya Mountains from which we could occasionally see great swatches of rolling hills and farm land below stretching southward toward Dalby, southeast toward Toowoomba, southwest toward Chinchilla, and identified in our tourist materials as the Darling downs.
We now know that the region was named for Ralph Darling, governor of New South Wales long ago, and that we were in the southern edge of it earlier, when we were in the granite belt.
With Monday off in celebration of the Queen’s birthday, we had a great trip and came home with
• scores of digital photos,
• four containers of wonderful, fresh-made peanut butter (or “peanut paste,” as the clerk at the Peanut Van preferred to call it),
• and the ability to distinguish a hoop pine from its cousin, the bunya pine, which looked much as it does today, tall and sprangly, when it was being nibbled by dinosaurs.
Further, we reaffirmed our appreciation of Brisbane as a place from which newcomers can find a vast range of national and state parks, well equipped and maintained, varied in interesting ways, and within a half-day’s drive.
We saw only one kind of bird that was new for us (apostle birds) but we did see large flocks of galahs, as well as wallabies and kangaroos in the wild. Perhaps best of all, we avoided the “stinging trees” we saw along some of the trails we hiked.
Good thing we did. A Queensland government web site says contact with the “hollow silica-tipped hairs” on the leaves and twigs of stinging trees (often just bushes) can “penetrate the skin, causing a severe stinging … which can last for several days or even months” as small red spots on the affected skin join together to form “a red, swollen mass” and the pain is sometimes “referred to other parts of the body.”
That’s Australia, a place of wonderful parks where even the bushes can do you in.
Next time a friendly Aussie asks, “How ya goin, mate?” I may answer with literal honesty and say, “Very carefully.”
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