STITPICS

Outback NSW 2022. Downtown White Cliffs as seen from the top of one of the “white” “cliffs”. We’re actually standing on the rock roof of one of the many dugout homes in this blisteringly hot (in summer) opal mining town.

* Wedge tailed eagle (you can see why it’s called that in this pic). Aquila audax. Our largest raptor. Found all over OZ and even up into PNG.

Outback NSW 2022. And speaking of camels and chicken wire, what a great life-size sculpture of Abul and friend in the main street of Tibooburra.

Outback NSW 2022. Lots of good gallery- and street-art here in Sliverton. I wonder what this camel was doing inside the old post office?

Outback NSW 2022. Lots to do in tiny Silverton, once a ghost town but now a little mecca outside Broken Hill. Here we are in the Mad Max II / Road Warrior museum, with lots of good stuff from the movie, which was shot hereabouts.

Outback NSW 2022. Gorgeous apricot and near-green sky colours at sunset at the Living Desert sculpture park at Broken Hill

Outback NSW 2022. A lovely escaped little echinachia type daisy weed in the middle of nowhere around Menindee. So perfectly formed.

Outback NSW 2022. A very clever mural in Menindee township showing five stages of the history of Menindee, from the original inhabitants in ceremonial attire through the Bourke and Wills exploration expedition to the boom years of wool and the Darling River run, the chinese merchants and finally the arrival of the railway.

Just another train line in Outback NSW 2022. See the dust from the road from Ivanhoe to Menindee off to the left. This is part of the Transcontinental Railway that runs nearly 4000km from Sydney to Perth via Port Augusta and Crystal Brook.

Outback NSW 2022. More of the amazing rock art at the Mt Grenfell Historic Site. I seems clear to me here we have dancing and hunting enactments and some other deeply spritual stuff.

Outback NSW 2022. And no longer in the outback. This beautiful leaf and its beads of raindrops was on a wander we had along the wall of Burrendong Dam near Wellington in the central west of NSW

Outback NSW 2022. White Cliffs was a pioneering site for solar thermal power generation.  This experimental set up powered the town from 1981 to 1996, when the electricity grid finally came to town. It is now a scientific heritage site.

Outback NSW 2022. A poignant little “pioneer” cemetery in White Cliffs, one of NSW’s opal mining towns. There are some very sad stories of both hardship and tough family choices out here in the far west NSW wilderness from days of yore.

Outback NSW 2022. Not that far on in Sturt NP from the last post and there’s plenty of scrub (low trees) and a good quantity of emus. You can see how (relatively) lush and green is the grass after a season of relatively high rainfall out here.

Outback NSW 2022. On the road to Cameron Corner, where three Australian States meet. It might look very desolate in this pic, but that’s just very local. This part of the world in Sturt National Park is no nullarbor. The hills in the distance are the “jump ups” just north of Tibooburra.

Outback NSW 2022. We didn’t luck out on seeing iconic Sturt’s Desert Pea, ( Swainsona formosa ) wild by the roadside, but there was an excellent patch at a car wash in Broken Hill. Here’s my car trying to blend in.

Outback NSW 2022. A shingleback lizard unimpressed at us disturbing her/his amble across the toad to Menindee