Avon Downs, Northern Territory

“On 21st January 1882, the ‘Herbert River Blocks’ on the Barkly Tableland were auctioned in Adelaide. … Thomas Guthrie, a Victorian grazier, was the successful bidder on four blocks and Avon Downs was born.”

This information comes courtesy of a Barkly Highway plaque at South Latitude 20° 1′ 27.9228” – Longitude 137° 29′ 19.5504”. The plaque goes on to say that Guthrie’s drover, Wallace Caldwell, completed “the longest sheep droving trip in Australian history” when he took 11000 sheep on a 3500 kilometre 16 month endurance trial from Northwestern Victoria in 1882 to Avon Downs in 1883.

The Herbert River was renamed the Georgina in 1890.

The Barkly Highway is a sealed roadway that runs across the Barkly Tableland. William Landsborough had named the Tableland after the Governor of Victoria while searching for Burke and Wills in 1861.

Mary Durack writes in Kings in Grass Castles that in 1876 Sydney and Alfred Prout set out to pioneer white settlement of the Barkly Tableland but were not heard from again. William Carr-Boyd (bush raconteur and newspaper columnist known as the Potjostler) went in search, says Gordon Buchanan in Packhorse and Waterhole, but was too late: they’d died of thirst.

Gordon’s father, Nathaniel, and ‘Greenhide’ Sam Croker crossed the Barkly Tableland on horseback in 1877. They were overlanders, nineteenth-century European Australians who warmed to the silence of the bush despite the existential threat, hardship (sixteen hour days in muddy bogs, for example), privations (thirst, food rationing) and downright unfairness being a drover entailed. Herding livestock across the Barkly Tableland to the Roper River and beyond to the Kimberley became Nathaniel Buchanan’s preferred way of life.

Fifty years after Buchanan had done so on horseback, the author of Hell West and Crooked, Tom Cole, hitched a ride across the Tableland in a solid-tyre truck that had been reduced to a ramshackle state by what back in 1927 was nothing but a rough track.

The rough track was upgraded to a road during World War II. Defence Road (as it was called) was the Australian Army’s supply route, the road transport corridor linking the Mt Isa railway terminus in Queensland and its counterpart at Birdum in the Northern Territory. The Camooweal-to-Tennant Creek section is now the Barkly Highway.

Tom Cole helped unload provisions for Avon Downs Station at the drop-off point on the Ranken River before its confluence with the Georgina and then left for Brunette Downs Station, 100 kilometres northeast of Frewena.

After a couple of days at Avon Downs I drove to Frewena – the site of Defence Road’s number 3 bore in early 1941. The bores had been sunk at regular intervals because of a dirth of reliable surface water on the Barkly Tableland. Number 3 bore was also the third Bulk Issue Petrol Oil Depot on the supply route – the first being located at the Mt Isa railway station in Queensland and the second at Camooweal.

Next week’s post will feature Aramac, Queensland.