Black Soil and the Balonne

We pushed on west, through Westmar and on towards St George, the country opening out around us into the wide flat floodplains of the Balonne. The plan, such as it was, had been to camp just south of the town. But out here the ground itself sets the terms. This is black soil country, and black soil is a thing you learn to respect: dry, it is firm enough to build a road on, but let any real rain touch it and it turns to a deep, gluey, bottomless paste that grips a wheel and will not let go. For a bus as heavy as ours, getting bogged in it was no small worry, the sort of mistake that ends with a tractor and a long wait and a lighter wallet. So we drove towards our chosen camp not entirely sure we would be able to use it.

The closer we came to St George the more our doubt looked justified. There was water lying about everywhere, in the table drains and across the low ground, the land still holding the memory of recent rain. So we did the sensible thing. We pulled over on the side of the road in town and sat a while and talked it through. The new plan came together quickly enough: refuel here, then carry on south down through the small town of Dirranbandi, where there was another camp we knew of. It was black soil too, that we could not escape out here, but it had one redeeming feature, a roadside rest area close by that would serve as a backstop if the ground proved too soft to trust. A bolthole, in other words. Something to fall back on.

Plan settled, we swung south out of St George and ran down towards Dirranbandi. Just shy of the town we stopped at a roadside rest and had a bite to eat before pressing on, not knowing, as we sat there, that the camp itself lay less than twenty minutes further along. We could have held out and eaten there in comfort had we only checked the map a little more closely, but that is the small comedy of the road, and we laughed about it afterwards. We rolled on through the quiet streets of the little town and pulled in at the Balonne Minor campsite, right on the banks of the Balonne River.

The water was here too, and the warning of the black soil written plainly across the ground. There were stretches within the camp that were pure soft mud, places that would have taken hold of the bus and stuck us fast in a heartbeat had we been foolish enough to try them. But we had the whole place to ourselves, not another soul in sight, and that freedom let us pick and choose. We found a patch of hard-packed dry ground that would bear our weight, eased the bus onto it, and made ourselves at home on the riverbank.

And then the days did what the good days always do out here. They unfolded, one into the next, into the gentle shape our life had taken. Sal at her study. The training under whatever tree would hold the rings. The cooking, the slow afternoons, the evenings drawn in close around the fire while the river ran dark and quiet beyond it. As the camp dried out over those days, others found their way in, a van here, a caravan there, staying a night or two and moving along, the way travellers do when a place is a waypoint rather than a destination. For them it was a stop. For us it was something else, and sitting there watching them come and go, we felt the difference of it keenly. This was not a holiday. We were not ticking off attractions or racing the daylight from one marked wonder to the next. We had long since let that way of moving fall away. What we did instead was find the quiet places, the overlooked corners, the hard-packed patch beside the river that nobody else wanted, and simply live there for as long as it suited us. Home was not a town or a postcode or a place on any list. Home was wherever we pulled up.Read more