Thursday, 2 September 2021

Day 61 - Gibb River Road - Silent Grove to Birdwood Downs Station

 (Kate)

Day 61 – Gibb River Road - Silent Grove (Dulundi) to Birdwood Downs.
We packed up at Silent Grove and headed west on the Gibb. After a while we noticed a couple of cars stopped up ahead, and a bloke retrieving a wheel from the side of the road behind his very old camper trailer. “That’s a snapped axle”, said Ben. We stopped to say Gday, and commiserated with him on his situation. His name was Henry, and he was a really nice bloke. He asked if we had any welding gear. Ben explained that we had emergency welding only, run off 2 batteries connected together, which wouldn’t make his axle strong enough to make it to Derby, still a couple of hundred km away. Henry speculated about finding a piece of wood to attach to the axle and dragging it all the way to Derby. Ben said “let’s take a closer look and see what we can do” and out came the toolboxes. Keith jumped out of the car eagerly to function as assistant. Another young fellow stopped to help out too. He was a plumber.
It turned out that the solid axle stub (still attached to the wheel) had pulled out of the hollow axle tube, which was still on the camper trailer. After considering the situation for a while, Ben suggested to Henry that they drill and tap the axle stub, with a matching hole in the axle tube, and then put a set screw in (a bolt with thread all the way up to under the head).
Once that was done, we followed him on the track for a while to make sure all was OK and kept in touch on the UHF. After a while, Henry said he was stopping because the corrugations were so rough and he was worried about it. We’d just passed a sign to a station with a UHF channel listed, and we suggested calling them up on the radio and asking if they had a welder to repair it properly. Henry did this, and the station folk agreed to help him out. Before we parted ways, Henry came over and said “look I know you won’t accept any money, but this is for the young fella (meaning Keith) and dropped $50 in Ben’s lap. Ben protested, saying he would have done the same for anyone, but accepted the money on Keith’s behalf. We decided that Keith and Nicole could share the money for car snacks and any other recreational spending.
Off we went. After a lunchbreak in a roadside stop, we encountered some roadworks, where a lengthy diversion was in place at slow speed on the side of the road, while the main part of the Gibb was being sealed. Lo and behold, we heard Henry on the radio chatting to a fuel tanker we had just passed. He then caught up to us enough to hail us on the radio and invited us to pull off the road and he’d shout us a cold beer. And so we did. It turned out that the blokes at the station welded the axle stub back on in about ½ hour and sent him on his way with instructions not to tell anyone, or everyone who breaks down will want to come in for repairs.
We bid Henry goodbye and good luck, and off we went, and stopped for the night at Birdwood Downs Station, about 20km short of Derby, because, you guessed it, it had amazing reviews on Wikicamps. We found our way to the office and found Hans there, who was one of the original founders about 40 years ago of a sustainable farming operation at BDS. https://www.birdwooddowns.com/index.html We paid for 2 nights and were allowed to choose our own spot. It was lovely and shady and spacious, with free-ranging chooks, guinea fowl, and peacocks. There were lots of trees, 3-5m tall, with small fruit about the size of a grape which looked like mini-oranges. The chooks were not eating these. Hans said they were not regular eating but were used for bush medicine. It was called something like “Quilpie” - I'm not sure of the name and was unable to find it on google. Does anyone know what they are?
All the cabins, and the amenities, had bright yellow rooves. Very cheery. The showers were fabulous after a long hot day. There were 5 small cute frogs in my shower room. Ben felt ripped off because there were no frogs in his shower room on the first day. Although on the second day a frog jumped onto his leg during his shower and he almost went through the roof.
Nicole named the chickens – Smol, Black-eyed-peep, Little Chicken, Clucky, Dusty 1, Dusty 2, Mystery chicken, Grumpy Rooster (old man) and Nice Rooster (younger one, judging by the shorter spurs). Nicole has photos of all of these. We all loved Smol and fed her lots of muesli and other treats suitably soft for chickens.


Little chicken

Grumpy old man


Nice Rooster



Smol - the friendliest hen of them all







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