Rough dirt roads

[willedoo]

The first time I ever went out to the far SW Qld. country was in the early 80's and some of the roads were horrible back then. I flew out to Durham Downs so didn't get to experience the roads until later that night when a mate conned me into sharing the driving to take an empty float down to the NSW border to pick up a D7G. The trip from Durham to Noccundra literally took hours; we hardly got out of second gear. Not so much corrugations, more just rough with bulldust holes and silcrete rocks sticking out of the road surface. We had a couple of hours sleep at Noccundra and headed south from there at first light. In some places there was no imported road surface, just the natural ground surface that had chopped up to bulldust. I remember one area where the road was about 200 metres wide consisting of bulldust tracks where vehicles had been driving out wider and wider to find a hard surface. When we got to the border, there on the NSW side was the clay topped, formed up and wide Silver City Highway that you could have landed a plane on.

 

There wasn't many tourists in those days. The roads are much better now due a lot to the grey nomads contributing so much to local economies. Councils now do a lot more road maintenance and a lot of those roads on the Queensland side are now formed up proper roads. The other contribution to better roads is the development of the oil and gas industry out there. When I was first there in 1982, the Jackson oil field wasn't even a thing.  My brother and I did a job there camped by a creek bed like swaggies, living on tinned food; there was nothing there execpt us and the dingos. 18 months later there was bitumen, an airport, all the usual oilfield facilities, contractor's yards and donkey pumps all over the place.