The homestead is on National Park land, so there are no dog shots below.

The original house on the property was converted to a shearing shed by Carmel’s dad and a new home erected down the hill. Carmel’s mum planted fruit trees around the home, many of which are still there are are covered in fruit.

The chicken coop is clearly recognisable

Unfortunately, the main homestead building burned down about five years ago and was cleared away rather than rebuilt. Nothing remains of the main building except black and white photos in Canberra.

Slightly disappointingly, it is a model of a fossil found in Kentucky. However, I could not tell the difference, and it beautifully captures the detail, so I enjoyed it nonethless. There were also “real” trilobites…

sea ferns….

… and smaller, but real, fish fossils.

It’s a small collection, but worth a view if you are in town or passing through.

Peak Hill also has a gold mine.

It was worked originally in the nineteenth century for a few months, and then again early this century for six years. There still is a lot of gold, but it is not economic to extract at present.

Cobar is called “Copper City”. They found a bit of gold amongst the copper, but that was just used to defray working costs of the mine – a nice problem to have. Although the mines are mostly abandoned now, there still is a lot of copper still – the owners are waiting for the price to rise.

The heritage society had done a great job at rescuing the various artefacts. I fell in love with the fire engine.

I also really want this for my work chair. The red button on the right would be my “publish the new web site” button. I reckon two joysticks would be better than a mouse!

The road from Broken Hill to Cobar was astonishingly green. It had clearly rained a lot recently. As a result, we saw a lot of wild life on this leg – more than we had seen throughout Northern Territory and South Australia put together. The winner of the group was this spiky fellow. He began digging in when he saw Dog.

We saw a lot of emus, but this one had chicks so was quite hard to catch. Pardon the pixelation.

Dog could not get near these, so had to do with their smaller cousins

There were other young ones too

…and even some trees were in the mood for spring

We pulled over at Mt  Grenfell Historic Site to see the Aboriginal Art. The reserve was badly sign posted and we inadvertently took off on a 3 hour walk up a mountain and only discovered our error after 45 minutes. I suppose that would cost us $80 at a gym, so we should not complain, and we did get to see the art in the end too.

I loved the old surveying equipment. I am sure this is very close to what my grandfather used in his surveying days.

The astonishing thing for me was that Broken Hill was a major rail junction. There was a tram line that ran from here to Silverton, which is now a ghost town. These steam trains pulled that train.

They also had the Silver Comet, a diesel train that used to connect the various mining towns.

There was a lot of cute paraphernalia from the train ways. I liked this inspection car.

The next museum was the silver mint – lots of lovely things to see and buy, but no photos allowed. Finally, we visited Pro Hart’s gallery. A video presentation told me a lot about this artist – I just thought he messed up carpets.

Unfortunately it as cold, windy and about the rain while we were up there, so we did not spend very long. (It seems odd that the rain on this trip was at Kings Canyon, Uluru and Broken Hill.)

On a good day, the hill would be worth a walk.

The museum had a number of the vehicles from the movie, mostly stunt doubles and fragments from crashes.

I must confess I saw the movie but cannot remember much detail. I think we need a Mad Max a-Thon when we return to Sydney.

We reached the souvenir store but there was a queue head of us.

These tame donkeys are a bit of a tourist attraction – they feature on the Silverton facebook page. Ash could not resist a selfie!

I am sure rescuing cane toads is on par with getting involved with foreign wars, so I expect to face the full force of the law on my return,

With the tide turning, we were able to mosey along the riverbank, annoying many birds, fish and rays. The pelican was the most relaxed, watching our approach without disturbing his grooming.

Past the island, the environment changed from mangroves and mudflats, to forest and sandy beaches. We sneaked up on an eagle having a bath.

Further upstream we found a few cormorants to sneak up on a threesome of cormorants or herons – I can’t really tell the difference. They really weren’t bothered by us so we got almost underneath them.

When we found on why, I began paddling quickly. Can anyone see what is to the right of my paddle-head?

Here is the cause of my anxiety. We got to within 5 metres of her before I clued up to the interesting diamond pattern in the tree.

She was about two metres long and did not move. Still, I believe Python’s should be admired behind a nice glass wall with a near label assuring me that it is not deadly. Clare insisted we go back for a better selfie, but if the snake joined us in the boat, no amount of restatement of the word “harmless” was going to stop us from swimming back to camp!