Walcha to Bingara via Manilla and Barraba

The travelling party was given a tip for a top place to dine in Walcha on Wednesday night - the Apsley Arms Hotel. After studying the menu at great length it looked odds-on that the restaurant in the hotel would be serving us up with one of its specialities, the mixed grill.

The description on the menu for the grill had us watering at the mouth - T-bone steak, lamb loin chop, butcher's beef sausage, bacon, eggs, onion and chips. Priced at $24 a head, we thought we were on a good thing. But, out of the blue came a recommendation from another diner in the restaurant, "Get your laughing gear around the Wednesday night house special - T-bone with salad n chips or veges. You blokes will have trouble finishing it off, the T-bones are gi-normous!"

We could read that bloke like an open book - he was frank and upfront and knew his stuff.

So, having ordered T-bones, the party settled in for refreshers that came in the form of nicely chilled Boags in schooner glasses.

Almost before you could say "Jack Robinson", the T-bones arrived at our table. And, without a word of a lie, the steaks were half the length of my outstretched arm. Mine was medium rare and melted in my mouth. We took the recommendation of staff member Wayne and had a glass of house red ($5) to accompany the meal. And what great value that red wine was! it came from a bottle of Penfolds that sells for over $25 when it's on special.

The evening was rounded off with a lively forum in the hotel's public bar where topics covered included Racism in Oz in 2010 to local rugby, the ups and downs of local businesses and the bloke/sheila on the land .

Speaking about The Land, when I went along to the local newsagency on Thursday morning to purchase a copy of the local paper, the Walcha News, which is published just once a week - on Thursdays - the owner of the newsagency told me the business had the highest sales for The Land of any outlet anywhere in NSW. To prove the point, I was shown the details for last week's sales - 321 copies were sold last week!

After a solid breakfast, had at Cafe Graze (again!), the touring party departed Walcha and headed off to Bingara.

Along the way, the party inspected Bendemeer, Manilla and Barraba. Sadly, solid evidence of towns in serious decline was observed in all three locations, but it has to be said that Manilla has all the appearances of being a cot case - emergency resuscitation could be called for, but the vital signs of life are perilously low that if a second opinion is called for, then it could well be that a decision might need to be taken to euthanise the patient.

Barraba and Bingara are impressive small country towns. They have a real sparkle about them. Local residents who we had short yarns with seem pretty happy with their lot in these places.

A site in Manilla created a bit of curiosity for the party. What's the background to the naming of the bridge shown below? Doesn't it seem odd that the name is still being used? Wouldn't you think the local civic fathers and mothers would be a bit more politically correct and move to have its name changed?

Bolt's lack of research exposed yet again

If the rest of the Australian mainstream media and blogosphere made as many factual errors as journalist Andrew Bolt there would barely be a handful of people left in this country who were using the Internet to read news and current affairs.

Crikey's Pure Poison outed Bolt for his latest blunder in The Herald-Sun on 31 August 2010 set out here:

Something a little more likely and potentially a lot more devastating for the global warming alarmists to fret over:

An asteroid more than a mile wide is heading for earth, posing the greatest threat yet by an object approaching the planet, scientists have warned.

The asteroid – called 2002 NT7 – was spotted only three weeks ago, but could strike on 1 February 2019, the US space agency Nasa said…

Gerrit Verschuur, an astrophysicist and radio astronomer at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, said the impact would create a fireball so intense it would kill anyone who could see it, after which material thrown into the air would shower half the world with flaming debris. "It would be as if the sky itself had caught fire," he said.

The heat would set fire to forests and cities, after which dust would fill the atmosphere, obscuring the sun for a month. That in turn would kill plants and animals, so that only creatures that lived underground would have a strong chance of survival.

Same apocalyptic scenario as the global warmists' own, but missing that vital ingredient for a new mass faith - a narrative of human sin and the punishment to come.

(Thanks to reader Warwick.)

Now a sensible person would have looked at that link to Newshoggers and double checked with NASA and its Near Earth Object Program, but not Mr. Bolt - that would have spoiled his dig at climate change science.

For those who are interested in seeing how few objects pose a real risk there is NASA's Sentry Risk Table . As I write there is only one risk impact on a scale of 0 to 10 that is presently indicated as meriting "careful monitoring" and, it is not Bolt's asteroid of doom (discovered in 2002) and it is not due until sometime between 2048 and 2057.

In fact the asteroid Bolt mentions seems to have been removed from the Sentry Risk Table sometime between mid-2002 and 2004 because the risk was so low as to be negligible over the next one hundred years.

Sweetest headlines of them all this week

Fred Nile caught in web porn scandal

The Sydney Morning Herald September 2, 2010 - 6:29AM

Nile’s porn excuse doesn’t hold water

Crikey Thursday, 2 September 2010

200,000 connections to porn sites on the Netz?

Wasn't me and researcher didn't inhale?

Tut, tut Reverend Nile!

Update:

In Teh Oz on 4th September - News site 'adult' in audit of MP usage

Chr*st on a bike!

Just when it felt safe to get back in the water, along comes this from the abacus of Antony Green over at Australia Votes 2010:

Senate Results - South Australia

Elected Candidates

	Candidate	Party
1	Alex GALLACHER	Australian Labor Party
2	Mary Jo FISHER	Liberal Party
3	Anne McEWEN	Australian Labor Party
4	Sean EDWARDS	Liberal Party
5	Penny WRIGHT	Australian Greens
6	Bob DAY	Family First Party

Detailed Results

• Percentage vote counted: 82.57%
• Quota: 125724 votes

On Twitter:

AntonyGreenABC
#ausvotes Bob Day of Family First pulls ahead of Liberals in race for SA Senate seat. May be only temporarly http://bit.ly/bLdMVT

Uralla, Walcha and their hinterlands

First stop today was Uralla. The town centre's streetscape is highlighted by the New England Highway that runs north-south through the town's business district.

A panoramic view of Uralla can be had from a lookout on Mt Mutton which is to the west of the township.

If one spends any length of time in this small township then one simply has to check out the grave of C19th bushranger Fred Ward alias "Captain Thunderbolt".


A very interesting conversation was had with a local wool merchant who provided us with a detailed account of how the wool buying firm purchases (mainly) local fleeces and exports them to China.


Morning tea was had at Uralla's Galloping Gourmet. The cake we had featured apples, dates and coconut- it was absolutely scrumptious. If you're ever in Uralla you simply must taste the GG's cakes.


We then journeyed to the east of Uralla and visited the Gostwyck area where the focus is a quaint little village that is now privately owned. Although we were not able to visit the village or the nearby Deeargee woolshed we did manage a stopover at the Gostwyck chapel.


Then, it was off to Walcha, via Kentucky. This very productive sheep and cattle country appears to be set for a very healthy spring and summer. Dams are full and streams are flowing. Actually, we were somewhat surprised to find one causeway was still covered with water and that necessitated a committee decision about whether we should navigate the waters or opt for an alternative form of action.

After much deliberation the consensus of the touring party was that we couldn't wimp it - no such obstacle was going to prevent us reaching our planned destination, Walcha.

We arrived for a rather late lunch at Cafe Graze, which proudly boasts that it enjoys 2010 SMH Good Food Guide status. Lunch was a very generous helping of Sweet Potato and Pear Soup, accompanied by thick crusty toast - just the tucker for us as we prepared for a coolish afternoon.


An afternoon walk around the township enabled us to chat with a number of locals. One couple of mature-aged citizens gave us a very detailed description of major flooding the Walcha township experienced when it was inundated by a raging Apsley River in the early 1960s. These days the town is protected by flood walls on both sides of the river.

Another local, a long-term teacher at the local central school, gave us a detailed account of buildings in the town's centre.

Australian Labor Party redeems itself in historic agreement with The Greens in Federal Parliament [Transcript]

The Australian Labor Party entered into an historic agreement with The Greens on 1 September 2010.

This agreement comes into effect when federal government is formed after the results of the 21 August 2010 general election are declared.

It resets the national agenda in relation to climate change, constitutional recognition of Australia's first peoples, situating local government within the constitution, parliamentary reform and political donations among other matters.

As the goodwill this agreement represents does not appear entirely dependent on Labor forming a minority government, it also potentially creates a formidable force the Coalition and Tony Abbott may have to deal with as a political reality for the next three years at least.

Full transcript here.