This story is part of our Australian Back Roads & Remote Travel series. Read more here.
My two brothers and our wives – who unkindly named our journey the Hughes Boys’ Pub Crawl – had worked our way along the Queensland border, relaxed at Cameron Corner, and were now headed south to Milparinka, NSW (by necessity, we did stay at a lot of pubs). After a few hours on the dirt we stopped in Tibooburra for a resupply, and lunch at the pub. As Tibooburra has the luxury of being on a tarred road, we then sped off towards Milparinka.
Shortly after, the convoy came to a grinding halt on the side of the road. The half inch thick bolt that had embedded itself in a brother’s tyre a few days before, didn’t like the speed on the tar and explosively exited the tyre into the mudguard (monitored by the tyre temperature and pressure sensors it had caused no big issue on dirt roads). However, a couple of plugs and a squirt of air later, we were again on our way.
Milparinka sits just off the Silver City Highway which runs north-south between Mildura and the Queensland border. Wiki alleges a population of 12 and there is a pub, caravan park, one house and half a dozen restored historical buildings. An 1880 gold rush put the town on the map. At its height, it had a newspaper, police office, chemist, two butchers, courthouse, school, hospital and four pubs. We stayed in the Albert Hotel, named after the nearby Albert Goldfield and built from locally cut sandstone. It has been trading almost continuously since 1880 and most of it is largely unchanged. Our adjacent accommodation donga luckily had a netball court right outside our door. But for the line markings being somewhat faded, a lack of ability and knowledge of the rules, and I’d forgotten to pack a ball, we could have played some great netball there.
Since the goldfields failed and World War 1 left few young people in the area, Milparinka has been largely a ghost town. We spent hours wandering along the outlines of streets with piles of stones dotted along them that are the collapsed remains of dwellings. Among the stones and scattered elsewhere are shards of crockery, broken glass, and twisted and rusty remnants of metal objects that used to support the daily life of long-dead residents. A community group has restored heritage buildings and built new ones to create a heritage precinct with a history centre and museum to cater for the tourist trade upon which the town now relies.
An expedition led by Captain Charles Sturt arrived in the area at the height of summer during a drought in 1845. For many months the party camped by a waterhole now known as Depot Glen (about 25km north of town). Many of the men were ill with scurvy and James Poole, Sturt’s second in command, died and his body was buried under a beefwood tree. The tree was marked with Poole’s initials and given that it must have been relatively mature at the time, is now at least 180 years old. The headstone/obelisk next to the tree is thought to have been erected around 1883. For health and morale purposes, Sturt had his men trek 5km to a nearby hill to erect a large pyramid of stone as a survey point, which eventually become a monument to Poole. Today, the hill is called Mount Poole. Eventually more favourable weather allowed the expedition to move on.
The country is so barren and inhospitable it’s hard to imagine what it would be been like to stumble over rocks for 5km, haul your way up Mount Poole and lift boulders to make a substantial cairn in 40+ degree heat and sun. Having knees and back that feel much older than the rest of me, I avoid up/down treks so I looked for interesting rocks while the others made the ascent and took in the impressive view from the top.
About 5km west of Milparinka, Mount Browne was a town on the Albert Goldfield. It existed briefly and is now just a few ruins. The town cemetery is remote, borderless, inhospitable and sparse, again typical of the area. Although, just to break up the barren brownness, vast expanses of country in the broader area look like they have a dusting of snow, which is tons of white quartz rocks lying about.
So much to see and such little time – after a couple of nights we’d barely scratched the surface of things to do around town before we had to pack up and set sail for White Cliffs.
Want to read more of Neale’s outback travels? Check out his accounts of the small towns along the NSW/Queensland border and the oddities around Cameron Corner.
Neale is a former defender of the nation with a natural inclination to avoid most people. He enjoys travel to random, hopefully sparsely populated, locations with interesting architecture, old trains and cemeteries. He is retired and lives near Newcastle in a large patch of vegetation.