16 June 2026 – 125 kms – Pooncarie to Menindee
Barkindji Country
The older man is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed even though it is dark and just before 6am. As I pack the final bits on my bike, he emerges from a donga opposite. He asks some questions and I respond in almost a whisper. It is very early to have to answer ‘the standard six’.
He is travelling with friends from Tasmania. They are going to Broken Hill today. They’ve hired a car and a holiday home there to spend a few days. I have no idea why he is up so early. It won’t take them long to get to Broken Hill. They are travelling by small plane! Pooncarie has an airstrip which is why they spent the night here.
The click of my freewheel is the only sound after that, as I wheel my bike around the pub and leave the room key on top of a freezer as instructed. I roll over to the filtered water tap on the side of the community centre, fill up five litres and then we are on our way.
We’ll have a headwind in the 15-20 kph range all day today. Consequently, I’m not sure if we’ll reach Menindee, even though this road has been fully sealed since 2023. So I’ve brought 5 litres of water along and we’ll just see where we end up. There is no public land anywhere along this stretch, so if we do camp, it will just be somewhere off the side of the road.
The first 30 kms fly along before the wind wakes up. We enjoy the sunrise with the pink cloud texture looking like peeling paint on a piece of old wood furniture. We don’t see any vehicles for the first two hours. Pedalling bliss and quiet solitude – that’s a nice start to the day.
The road follows the Darling River to Menindee, but not closely. We’ll only see the river once in 125 kms. The first half of that distance, the road sorta follows the edge of the floodplain so that we’re up in the red sand hills instead of down on the wide floodplain itself. This means the veg is a bit more interesting and there’s some topgraphic relief to make the pedalling a bit more interesting, as well.
We see lots of belah and mallee through here. Random tall sandhills are speckled with greenery and open expanses of sand.
The goats are all over the place. The graziers here make money off of them. There is a big market for them in the Middle East, so the graziers let/encourage the feral goats to roam their properties. They muster them a couple times a year. You can get $10-15 a head for them – with the only caveats that they must be alive for live export (duh!) or butchered at a halal abbatoir – the closest of which is a long way away at Bourke. It’s a cheap side hustle that is more than a side hustle for some. Feral goats don’t require docking or drenches or really any care at all, unlike sheep, so they are a no-cost, no-risk commodity.
No one seems to slow down for the goats, but the goats seem pretty road savvy. However, at one point, as I’m riding along through a bunch of them on both sides of the road, an SUV overtakes me in the opposite lane. Some of the goats that were running ahead of me have decided to cross the road just as the SUV is fully in the other lane. The driver brakes, some goats nearly get hit, and one little goat is so close to the right rear tyre, I have no idea how it spun and got away. Later, there’s some goat carnage – the bodies of five strewn across the road and bits and pieces of goat for awhile beyond that. A truck must have hit them overnight. But generally, goats seem to be better at avoiding vehicles than kangaroos.
We start seeing emus, too. They are a very funny bird. They walk like stalkers, neck extending then stop, neck extending, then stop. Over and over. They’ll walk or jog alongside the road for a bit, and then all of a sudden they’ll get in a flightless tizzy and run this way and that, their bodies always a bit out of sync with their head. In contrast, the goats seem up themselves in the way they prance. It they knew how silly they look when they run, they wouldn’t give off such a high and mighty air.
The guys go in the pannier for about 20 minutes for a passing dollop of drops that makes the pavement wet and the smell of the earth rise. But the rain is just like a decoration of icing sugar instead of thick frosting, and further up, the road is not wet at all. It’s just so I can keep up my rain tally days on this trip, I guess.
About halfway through the kms, we climb to high dunes with large callitris pines in attractive open woodlands sprinkled with white flowers and grass that is probably not normally that green. Then we get a long downhill into a new local government area (with crappier chipseal) down onto the floodplain.
And then the mind-numbing boringness begins. The scenery stays the same for 65 kms. It is not particularly inspiring and I can’t believe that some people do the “Darling River Run” and follow the river from Wentworth to Bourke. Hundreds and hundreds of kms of this – I don’t think I could bear it.
But Aussies have this peculiar thing about wanting to follow the rivers. My old friend Don always wanted to do a bike tour following the Murray and I’ve met plenty of other cyclists over here who have mentioned the same. I think it would be torture to be stuck in the same bioregion for the entirety of a trip! The flatness would drive me nuts, too.
Never mind, we slog along it today, into the wind, under a grey sky. Blah. Blah. Blah.
Karoola reach comes along at 62 kms. It’s the only spot you can see the river. It’s still on private land though. There are some very faded and crinkled signs about aquatic species research in this section of the river. The signs have CMA logos (a defunct gov dept), so it’s probably from 2012 when there was money from the beginning of the Murray Darling Basin Plan implementation and they were establishing reference sites.
The river is steep-sided, and exposed tree roots angle out in all directions reaching for purchase. The river flows a green-grey clay colour far down in the depression. It looks so sad and sick, as does all the dieback in the trees along its course. If the Murray River is very, very sick, this river is critically unwell and needs life support. There are blue-green algal alerts all the way down the river to its end from Wilcannia at the moment. There are signs at Pooncarie saying not to come in contact with it. It gets ungodly hot out here in summer, but yet you can’t go swimming in the river.
Algal blooms, mass fish deaths, stagnant pools and poor drinking water quality for communities along its length are just everyday reality for those that live out here. The river is an absolute environmental disaster and has been failed by the objectives in the Murray Darling Basin Plan. Everyone blames the huge cotton farms upstream, though the data shows there is a lot of complexity in the sources of the problems. It definitely can all be traced back to not enough water or flow volume allocated to the river and its ecosystems, but the spider web of issues gets exceptionally complex beyond that problem root.
I’m starting to think at km 70 that I’m going all the way to Menindee today. There’s been nowhere I’ve seen that I would want to spend an afternoon or evening in the tent battered by the wind amongst the sand and thorns and smelly goats on the side of the road. So I might as well use up the time just pedalling along, churning away, turning pedal over pedal into the wind.
Whenever there is a driveway, every 10-15 kms or so, I stop for a break and a drink. Every bit of vegetation on the side of the road wants to puncture your tyre, and the rain has provided much vegetation growth, so I stick to the chipseal and only stop if there is a substantial amount of cleared ground and hope the thorns have not blown there. It’s a long way between driveways out here though!
I’m stopped in the driveway of Tolarno Station when I see an SUV slowing, indicating and pulling over. It’s my three new friends from Mungo on their way to Broken Hill. They are very excited to see me. They said they had just been talking about me, saying I’ve made good time if I left Pooncarie this morning (they probably thought I left like 9am or something, but really, I only push 13-17kph all day).
They report that they are figuring out how to turn off the car’s obnoxious features and that the Old Wharf Cafe in Pooncarie is fantastic and does good coffee. They spoke to some people there and mentioned me, and those people said they had seen my tyre tracks on the Top Hut Road, so I’m probably ahead somewhere. Narelle, Carla and Gaye are full of good vibes and energy – good stuff! They wish me well, noting that the wind is a bit blowy today, and then they are off.
Pedal. Pedal. Churn. Churn. Into the wind. Proceed forth slowly. Get excited when the road angles away from the direct headwind for a km or two. Pedal. Pedal.
About 2pm, I stop to eat the remaining veg and schnitzel from yesterday. It was to be dinner tonight, but I know I’m going to make Menindee, so it is a very nice lunch that peps me up for the remainder of the ride. I can definitely tell I’m stronger now than at the beginning of the tour. I pull off in a driveway, angle the bike such that I can lean against the panniers and keep my back to the wind. I take my time – just sitting out there in bumfuck watching an occasional vehicle go by.
As I get to the outskirts of town, I come across an old man with an Akubra hat and a right-sided limp walking down the road with a golf putter slung over his shoulder. He says hello and I smile and wave back. I then come upon a whole bunch of shacks along the river. They’re largely elevated, made of corrugated sheeting and accompanied by yards of decaying buses, cars and all manner of junk among the chaotic growth of bushes and weeds. Old trellises and rotten fence posts line the other side of the road. Next to the bridge is a defunct caravan park being over taken by low bushes, gravity and a lack of maintenance. It’s not a particularly welcoming and attractive town entry – definitely wild west.
Then, as I’m just about over the bridge, a bogan ute with four barking dogs tied in the back decides to overtake me and pass me within inches, instead of waiting maybe 5-10 seconds, as an oncoming car progresses toward us. The ute then proceeds to stop at the pub just 100 metres beyond. What a nice welcome!
I decide to see if there is a room at the motel. The caravan park is 5 kms on the other side of town, into the wind. The pub here doesn’t get great reviews for its rooms. I also don’t want to have to trek far for a toilet. That Pooncarie water (heavily treated because of the algae and poor water quality in the Darling) has made my guts feel gurgly and uncomfortable all day.
There is one room left. I get it. The room has vaulted wooden ceilings, fridge, microwave and everything you need, including a nice, hot shower that sprays water all over the floor. It’s also got some sharp metal road base scattered about on the floor that really hurts to step on. It’s like the vacuum sprayed it out instead of picked it up. It’s not just my room. You can hear ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING through the walls, and I hear the next door woman say “ouch” and complain to her husband about that being the second one she’s stepped on.
The water out of the tap here is best described as ‘chunky’, so I go diagonally across the road to the pub and buy a 1.5 litre bottle. I’m tired enough I don’t even bother with dinner. The bed is extremely soft and hard to extricate yourself from, but I’m really tired from 9 hours of riding and 125 kms of pedal turning that I fall asleep quickly and don’t wake til 6am when the RFS workers staying here start up their big trucks.
