#dirranbandi

Tom Dancy

(On my travels)

I thought Dad’s annual family rail pass to be a tremendous privilege.  So did he.  If only, he and Mother would visit interesting places.  I no longer wished to wade in Southport’s still water to Mother’s allowed depth of twenty centimetres.  Regrettably, Dad didn’t like leaving the local area except to go to his beloved races or Southport.  Perhaps, he believed he needed government permission.  Mother though wished to see outside our small corner of Queensland.  She had visited relatives scattered further afield.

Once, Dad did relent to Mother’s wishes.  He agreed we could take the train from Brisbane to Dirranbandi, though without my five year old brother.  I found this funny named place on the map in my purloined Queensland Rail Country Timetable Book, my Railway Bible.  We were going to the Outback!

The two days, we’d be away, didn’t seem a long time.  How wrong I’d be!  I was excited to be travelling a great distance, further than Toowoomba to where Mother and I had previously travelled.  I didn’t worry about where I’d sleep.  Afterall, one didn’t sleep on an adventure.

At 6 am, we caught the first City train, took a tram across the bridge from South Brisbane to Roma Street and connected with the mixed goods and passenger train to Dirranbandi.  The long train had goods wagons and first and second class carriages.  The carriages were identical except first class cost more.  Posh people didn’t want to sit with the riff raff, which was nearly everybody.  Dad’s pass entitled us to first class tickets and a whole compartment to ourselves.

The train’s C-16 steam engine made good time until it reached the base of the Great Dividing Range.  I loved the train’s rhythmic motion, its constant chugging noise and the whistles its engine driver blew.  I didn’t mind the coal soot that was sucked into our carriage.  I glued myself to the window.  I didn’t want the train to reach our destination.  That meant the wonderful sights flying past my window would end.

The Lockyer Valley’s market garden farms passed by.  Draught horses with ploughs toiled in paddocks.  Potatoes, cabbages and cauliflowers grew in orderly rows.  The pumpkin vines were disorderly, occupying whole paddocks.  The train crossed flowing creeks.  Everywhere was picturesque and green.  At Helidon, men coupled a second steam engine behind the guard’s van.  The front engine pulled and the rear engine pushed the train slowly around the mountain range’s bends.  I saw rainforest and waterfalls.  At Spring Bluff Train Station, close to the range’s top, I had a vast view of the valley below.

Then the train picked up speed until it arrived in Toowoomba.  At the city’s station, the second engine and some carriages were uncoupled.  Goods wagons were exchanged too.  A new crew started.  My family sat on a bench eating our packed lunch for the couple hours.

The train pulled out at dusk.  Darkness surrounded it; yet inside, it was dimly lit.  It crossed the Darling Downs wheatlands.  I had the strange sensation of moving through the blackness without having any sense of direction as to where I was going.  The train’s motion rocked me into a fitful sleep.  Each time it stopped at a station or a siding, I awoke with a start.  I peered through the window at wooden place name signs.  By the middle of the night, it chugged into the city of Warwick where more wagons were exchanged.

On and on the train travelled further west.  Just when I thought the night would never end, the sun peeped on the horizon at Inglewood.  I watched its fiery ball rise to heaven and paint the sky in brilliant orange.  The sky seemed wider here than at home and the sunrise more magnificent.

I was in the Outback!  The countryside was foreign to me.  Parched yellow grass and spangly grey bushes of lignum dotted the flat plains of black soil.  These stretched far and wide.  The creeks were dry beds of sand and the rivers mere streams.  The rivers’ names, the Macintyre, the Weir, the Moonie and the Balonne, meant nothing to me but later in life they’d indelibly inscribe themselves in my memory.

I thought the environment was inhospitable.  Yet, it was crowded with animals.  The land appeared to be rolling with mobs of hundreds of kangaroos hopping across it.  Before, I had only seen a kangaroo on the Australian penny.  Crows picked at the unlucky dead ones that had been caught in the railway fences.  Thousands of sheep grazed on the plains too, right up to the tracks.  Flocks of birds flew overhead.  To my delight, I saw a whole flock take off from the ground at once.  I identified galahs, budgerigars, cockatoos and quarrians.  If only I could trap some of these birds to take home.  So much money flew above me!

The train took on water and exchanged mail bags with stockmen on horseback at sidings and tinpot stations.  At Noondoo, it pulled up beside a huge homestead to offload supplies.  Amidst nowhere, a stockman waved the train down and boarded it carrying a saddle over his shoulder and meagre belongings in his hands.  His craggy face resembled the cracked earth of the plains.

The new day brought heat I hadn’t experienced before, and by midmorning, was burning hot.  When I jumped from the train in Dirranbandi at eleven o’clock, my eyeballs fried from the heat and glare.  On the platform, wool bales were stacked ready for loading.  The large station was a major hub in Australia’s wool empire during the 1950’s wool boom.  We were at the end of the line.  Dad felt homesick.  He had been away from home just over a day.  Fortunately for him, the train would depart for Brisbane in three hours’ time.

The town, if it could be called that, had two pubs, a few essential type businesses but nothing for us to see.  Dad went to Mc Gregor’s Hotel to quench his thirst and ease his homesickness whilst Mother and I found a cafe.  Good fortune shone on Dad there.  He stumbled upon the local police sergeant, whom he had gone to school with.

We departed on time at two.  Sunset happened at the same spot as sunrise.  Thus, I didn’t see the wheatfields on my return either.  After sixty hours travel, we arrived home in the clothes we started in.  Mother was keen to tell her clients she had travelled to places they hadn’t.  Dad swore he’d not leave home again.  I thought I’d never be lucky enough to go back.

Alas, those black soil plains wove a spell on me.  The saying, ‘Go west young man.’, wedged itself in the back of my mind.  When the chance to return came, I did.  Next time, I’d drive and would travel the route many times.  Thankfully, the round trip by road would be a shorter fourteen hours.