Elly May at Home and Abroad: Murgon Barambah and District, Qld

Murgon and District, Queensland

Murgon Barambah Kingaroy Nanango

Sitting in the Elly May when the wind blows and the weather is unkind means Zan starts looking on Google Maps. 'Look at this. It's a small town, not much bigger than Clare; the park is six Km out of town and it's a bush setting. There's a bowling club and we'll get there on Wednesday, when they have social bowls…' And that's how we said goodbye to the NSW Coast and headed inland to Queensland's South Burnett Region.

Zan examines the Bargains from the peanut factory at Crawford, Qld

Barambah Bush Camp is huge and almost au natural. The surrounding bush is part of a once renown gravel pit, I was told. Gravel? In a state with copper and gold mines to burn? OK, I decided to go along with this story. But that's not the only story. In this great cattle country things were not happy, a prolonged drought leaving people desperate. I bought two pairs of shorts, knowing this to be a reliable cure for clear, fine weather. It worked a treat - but back to the story.

Murgon is the home of many a story but none better than that of the Black Flash, Eddie Gilbert. Gilbert was a cricketer, a fast bowler. Was he fast? He was so fast that despite two major handicaps he was soon playing A Grade, and then Association matches, and finally he was chosen from the Country Team that beat the City side to play in the Sheffield Shield side. As luck would have it, Queensland was to take on NSW, captained then by the already legendary Don Bradman.

I mentioned that Gilbert had two major handicaps to overcome. One was that he was only just of average height, five eight or so, and he was Aboriginal. In the 1930s his chances of success didn't just rest on his cricketing ability, hey. Bowled him! Not only that, but for a duck. Five balls, Bradman faced; the first no-one saw, the second sat Bradders on his bum. The third may well have terrified any batsman as did the fourth, but the fifth sent the stumps to the chippers. Later, Bradman was to say they were the five fastest deliveries he ever faced. So did Eddie play for Australia? No, he was accused of being a chucker, and after a while (cricketing tragics recognise this period as his surgical removal from the body of cricket in Austrlia) he returned to terrify the batsmen of teams near Murgon followed by a steady decline into dementia and obscurity. I regard him as a legend, the bloke from the bush who was Phar Lapped out, so to speak.

Dusty Hill Cellar door - a delight.

We toured the district, seeing the wineries like Dusty Hill and Moffattdale. Both made something worth drinking and the tasting was fun, fun, fun. We played bowls both at Murgon and at the wet day's Pairs at Nanango, enjoying some good wins.

Peanuts grow at Kingaroy and all over the place, everywhere. But buying them is best done at Crawford where a two kg bag of salted seconds is five bucks, and the oil is similarly cheap. We went further south to the Bunyas, a lumpy National Park apparently lousy with ticks. (That's a joke. Lousy with ticks. Get it? Oh. Sorry.) We bought some huge, cheap strawberries at a road-side ute. We visited the Timber Museum where the variety of Qld timber, turned, untreated or polished, was phenomenal.

I was intrigued by a crop on the slopes of Boat Mountain; bushes the darker green colour of Macademia, shaped like small olive trees, arranged in terraces but behind a security fance. I later found out from Len, at the Murgon BC, that it was to produce eye medication. The story is that he was working there, tilling for weeds on his trusty Kubota and by the end of the day his pupils dilated to the point where driving home was a fuzzy feeling adventure. The crop is exported whole to Germany for processing, the resultant medication worth pharmaceutical prices.