29 May 2026 – 84 kms – Mathoura to Wakool
Yorta Yorta/Bangerang, Wamba Wamba and Mutthi Mutthi Country
It is 3C outside the tent. I start the ritual process of easing my body into the cold. I pull down the neck buff that I wear over my nose and mouth to reduce condensation, I unzip the sleeping bag and then peel it back, trying to keep it from touching the wet tent sides. Then I slide down the sleeping bag liner to my waist, lift my butt, slide it to my knees and then pull the liner and bag from underneath me. Now exposed to the cold, I stuff the sleeping bag into its bag, roll the liner up and then lay back down to pull off my warm fleecy pants. Each act introduces the cold a bit at a time.
I pull on my riding shorts, pull off one thermal layer, put on my raincoat and then reroll all my clothing that I used as a pillow and pack everything back in the pannier. I finish packing the other bits and pieces that go in the panniers and then reach out to unzip the fly. I plonk out the panniers and then, next to them, I place the pile of straps, handlebar bag, tent bag, pole bag, stake bag, water bladder bag and flip flops. I put the map bag on top of that. Then on go my shoes and I crawl out into the cold world.
I reach back in and grab the sleeping pad and then undertake the process of tent take-down. It is complicated by the fact it is soaked inside and out. There’s only so much shaking you can do before you just move on.
Once the tent is in its bag, I load everything that goes on the back of the bike. Rear panniers go first, then sleeping pad, then water bladder bag and flip flops on top of that. Then I move to the front of the bike and attach the tent back to the front cradle. The fork bags stayed on the bike overnight as they are so fiddly to take off and reattach. After the tent is on, the handlebar bag goes on, as its straps are really what hold the tent bag snug to the cradle. Finally the map bag goes on – it has a strap that attaches to the handlebar bag and then two carabiners that clip to ziptie loops on the handlebars.
The morning routine is finished and we ride back up to the fault scarp. We ascend in a different spot and take a little bit of time to just appreciate this lumpy lift of land for a final time before we head on.
The forecast is for ‘light winds becoming westerly 20-25kph, then turning northwesterly 25-30kph’. So you know, of course, that the first 30 kms or so this morning is going west and then the last 55 or so kms is going toward the northwest. That means a pretty substantial headwind all day. Ugh.
So we are away at first light, when the day can’t decide just yet if it wants to be foggy, sunny or cloudy. Mathoura is just waking up and there only a couple cars with their headlights on slowly traversing the streets to the highway. I stop and refill my water at the skatepark and then start into our westward run to Bunnaloo.
It’s pretty flat and straight. Traffic picks up a bit, but I suspect after everyone gets to work and school in a couple hours there wouldn’t be much traffic at all.
The sun doesn’t last long. The fog lifts and settles as a mat of clotted clouds. We just turn over the pedals among the semi-arid and flat land. This is all tilted to the west of course, because of the earthquakes. But the tilt is imperceptible. It does help with irrigation, though. All they have to do is lift that water over the fault scarp (the offtake is at the bottom of the Moira Lakes) and gravity does the rest.
I play more of my “tree carcass” or “tree skeleton” classification game.
I wave to the one 4WD with a bunch of crap on its roof whose occupants honk and wave wildly at me.
About 5 kms from Bunnalooo, the wind starts to pick up. Ahhhh, the early start is justified (they almost always are) and we’ve mostly beaten the wind to the west.
Bunnaloo is a primary school, tiny 24-hour petrol station with two bowsers, a delapidated church, about six houses and a sportsground that got a big spruce-up in 1988 as part of Bicentennial celebrations and then kinda left to deteriorate since then.
I stop to have some peanut butter on rice cakes and sit on a concrete pad next to what once would have been a concession stand. The roof is mostly gone, and behind the chain link fence are rusting mowers and turf rollers whose rubber tyres have long gone flat and the rubber is cracked and flaked.
After this we start our long ride northwest. A line of trees along the railway block the wind for a bit. For a long time after, we are just out in the flatness with marginal land all around. Not much is cropped. Not many sheep are present. I see no cattle whatsoever.
Eventually the sun comes out and breaks apart the clouds. It’s clear for a bit before the cumulus clouds return and slide to the east in long, almost orderly rows.
There are two very bright and shiny, brand-new-looking silos at some point along the way. They remain shimmering little objects reflecting the sun in my mirror for a loooong time.
We get to Cardwell, where the rail line that used to go to Wakool now ends. There’s a big grain holding facility there, a house, a toilet, a picnic table, an interpretive sign talking about how much the farmers take care of the land (there is not a tree in sight in that direction) and a few cars passing on the Barmah – Deniliquin Road.
The next section of road is gravel. It’s in pretty good condition and we fight our way into the strong northwesterly. It’s annoyingly strong. On we go. Hum drum. Hum drum. There’s no relief to the land and no relief from the headwind. We crawl along at 11 kph and get to know every bump and crack in the road.
We get up to the main road and a cluster of trucks and cars (2 cars, 1 cattle truck, 1 tradie truck and 1 TV repair/delivery truck) all come and go from the road while I sit there and have a drink before tackling the main road. I’ve not seen any vehicles at all for at least the previous 45 minutes.
Then I fight into the wind on the main road. I’m kinda over it. All the trucks give me plenty of room. Most cars do, too. The two caravans that pass give me no room whatsoever, even though the road at that point is straight, there’s a super long sight line and no cars coming. Sheesh.
The last 5kms drag forever. The wind is that 30kph and gusting higher. I’m not super fit yet. I can see the mobile phone tower in town and it seems forever until we get there.
There is not a whole lot to Wakool. It really took off when the irrigation area around it got established. Returning soldiers were given blocks of land and told what to grow.
On the strip of parkland that separates the main street from the main highway, there is a ‘walk of fame’ of sorts. Every single soldier settler family gets a very detailed signboard with their history. If you were to read all of these, you’d need weeks of time. Down the end of all that is a big board showing where each family’s farm was located. And in the middle of it all is a War Memorial. It doesn’t matter how tiny or dead a town is today, there is always an impressive War Memorial and it is always well-maintained.
The same can’t be really said about the main street. Shells of a bank, pub and supermarket remain but only the Soldier’s Club and the general store remain operational (and I think the general store went under some years ago but was then saved by a couple of women).
The general store is bustling today, though. It is also the post office. When I walk in at 1.45pm, three people are waiting on hot food orders, two people come to pick up mail and a third guy comes in for chips and milk. A super old guy comes in and thinks I must be the cyclist. He tells me his father, in the early 1900s, rode his bike from Port Fairy (on the coast in VIC) to Condobolin (a long way up in NSW from the VIC border) to look at land. He fixed punctures every day and rode at night to escape the heat.
I’ve hit the tail end of the lunch rush, but it takes an incredibly long time to get my burger from a lady who is coughing a lot. At least it’s warm inside and out of the wind.
Once I finally get my burger, I take it outside to a picnic table. After the long wait, it is just very average for a burger. Oh well, win some, lose some. At least I will not have to cook dinner tonight.
An older woman with a deeply lined, puffy face and a long winter coat comes to chat. She worked in the McLaren Vale wineries in South Australia for a really long time on three-shift rotation. She eventually burnt out. So she went for a drive up the river with a friend looking for a house to buy to take some time off. She looked at Barham and here. She says she should have bought at Barham (there’s more going on there), but the house she ended up with here had a price offer she couldn’t refuse. Well, she did refuse when it was $125,000, but they dropped it to $80,000 and she couldn’t refuse that. She thought she’d just sleep for a whole year after all those shift-work years and then go back. That was nine years ago. And now she’s 71 and can’t really be bothered anymore.
She says hello to everyone in the parade of people coming and going from the store – every body shape, eye glass style, clothing choice and station in life that you can imagine. Everyone knows everyone and the demographic skews to older, overweight and disabled.
She asks where I’m heading. I tell her Lake Mungo. She’s heard of it but doesn’t know where it is. She says I’ve reawakened her travel bug and now she wants to get in the car and go, too. She’s a terribly lonely lady and invites me over to her place for tea, a chat and a hot shower. She tells me in great detail how to get her place (it’s actually just around the corner) and tells me to stop by when I finish eating. She needs to get in the store to get milk before it’s all gone.
I do not go over for tea and a chat with her and her six cats. I ride out to the recreation reserve where there are four powered sites near the footy club rooms and an infinite amount of unpowered sites out among the horse poop and pigweed beyond the oval. There are showers, a dishwashing sink and a covered area – all for gold coin donation. The showers and toilets are quite new. The toilets run slow. I didn’t bother with the shower. It was cold today and I don’t really feel like getting wet.
I get everything out drying in the dying sun. I catch up my journal. I contemplate tomorrow and how we’re going to do the 65 kms to Moulamein into a direct headwind again tomorrow. My answer is the one I come back to over and over again on this tour: get up at sparrow’s gurgle. This is what comes before sparrow’s fart. See you then!