3. A full day in Moree

/ Garrulous Gwendoline

Saturday 14th October 2023

This is a day that will go down in our history books, as we voted on a referendum to enshrine an Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Voice in our Constitution.  25% of Moree’s population is indigenous but the mood in town around the various polling places appeared to be business as usual. Even one of the Aboriginal employees at our motel still hadn’t made up her mind which way she would vote. If I get the time, I will write a separate post on what it was all about. Meantime, as we had pre-voted, our first sightseeing was to the Moree Botanic Gardens.

This is not your average botanic garden. It is an open expanse meandering the banks of the Mehi River and features semi-evergreen trees, shrubs, vines and ground covers.

But the best part of being in the garden relatively early was the variety in birdsong. I couldn’t work out how to record it, so I made a video. Reducing the file size has screwed with the vision, but it is the sound I wanted to demonstrate in any case. Then I remembered I had Voice Recorder on my phone, and I took a number of samples. But! How to get that off my phone and into WordPress? In the end, I uploaded via Soundcloud, but when I inserted that, there is a whopping great (old) photo of me! Which I didn’t want, but don’t know how to get rid of. So, I’ve pushed it all to the bottom of this post and let the reader decide whether they want to listen to Australian birdsong from Moree 🙂

Meantime, back on tour, we headed to the Bank Art Museum – that’s the grand building featured in yesterday’s post. It is the only public art gallery in Moree and the surrounding region, and “promotes and enriches the cultural life of the community through a continually changing schedule of touring exhibitions from major cultural institutions”. It was living up to that boast, as it was displaying all the finalists in the Wynne Prize which runs under the auspices of the Art Gallery of NSW and is awarded annually for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists”. I couldn’t take any photographs due to copyright, but if you have clicked on the link, you can see them there. This prize has been running since 1897 and what is noticeable is that with one exception in 1941 all the winners were white males, right up until 1971 when a white woman won. In the run up to the millennium some more women won on and off, and then the final breakthrough came in 1999 when an indigenous woman won. Since then, the bastions have been breached, and the finals have been dominated by works by Indigenous artists living in communities in central and northern Australia. This year was no exception. If you are interested in knowing more, you might like to read this article: From gum trees to cities to sweeping deserts.

As we strolled back to our motel for a bit of lunch and downtime, we explored art of a different kind by cutting through a park displaying the recently installed Open Space Aboriginal Art Trail which is a collaborative effort of five Kamilaroi artists. I was most taken by the carved logs … and I couldn’t resist taking more pictures of the beautiful gum trees (eucalyptus) in the park.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, the temporary closure of the Artesian Spa meant we were in Moree with time on our hands, so what better way to fill it than to head half an hour back down the road we had come into town, to visit a small town called Pallamawalla for the big event of the day … drum roll …

This was the first time we had ever been to a pig race – or more correctly, piglet race. They were so cute! I have a number of videos of the different races, but it is beyond me to play around further tonight trying to get them small enough to upload.

The pigs were enticed around an obstacle course by a trail of some liquid (milk?) until the leader would eventually find a trough of it and they would all pile into slurping it up. The final race we watched required them to climb a hay bale for the yummy prize, and it was amusing to watch them run back and forwards in confusion until one smart one worked out that it was above them. This was a fundraiser for the Westpac Rescue Helicopter which plays a vital role in getting sick and injured people to major hospitals, and we duly made our contribution by buying sweepstake tickets (that did not win) but stopped short at being drawn into the auctions which were going for several hundred dollars a pig (you didn’t actually take the pig home – rather a cut of the winning money pool).

We ended up sharing a bench with a young couple – she a local high school teacher – and spent a good deal of time chatting with them about their life and future together. It’s a real treat to get the perspective of people outside your regular circle. The afternoon was a great country community event, attracting locals and tourists alike, and was a heap of fun which we would never have discovered if our original plans had not derailed.

The polls were still open in Western Australia by the time we got back to our motel and headed off for dinner at an Indian restaurant, but it wasn’t long before the news came through – the Referendum amendment was voted down. Not much more to be said about that on this post.

Here’s those bird sounds I mentioned earlier. Squabbling parrots dominate some but listen for the other birds in the background. And apologies some of these photos in this post take up so much screen. I’m out of practice with posting on WordPress.

19 thoughts on “3. A full day in Moree”

  3. What a trip, Gwen! To catch up I read all three posts one after the other. I´m amazed that you can write in the car on your laptop, but that certainly saves a lot of time when one travels for so many hours.
    Although I love roadtrips I prefer them to be much shorter, but as Australia is such a large country what I would consider long really is like a little hop and skip to you. I always marvel at all the place names that sound so strange and exotic to me, and often wonder how one would even pronounce them.
    I can just imagine how surprised and happy your granddaughter was to have had you surprise her to celebrate her birthday.
    The pig races brought a smile to my face, as I can just imagine how much squealing there must have been. What a fun discovery after your initial disappointment.
    Looking forward to the rest of the series.

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    • I was able to load the pig racing videos to my Facebook. Not sure if you use that. I’ll have another go at compressing them for WordPress when I get home.
      Just New South Wales alone is a vast state. It was just yesterday I was marvelling that we have organised this trip into “little” three-hour hops. So far we have covered around 2400klm, but are pointed east – towards home now.
      And yes, how to pronounce place names. Sometimes, you just have to be guided by the locals.

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  5. It was interesting reading about your stay in Moree as we were there recently in our caravan. We couldn’t get into the park with all the pools (they weren’t answering the phone) but stayed in a pleasant caravan park with a small hot pool beside a cold one. It was fun to chat to other people as we luxuriated in the warm water.

    You certainly got around and the pig races sound like great fun. I’ll be interested to hear your take on Mildura. It was where I was born and my mother met my father. I still have relatives there, only discovered in the last ten years. The history of the Soldier Settlers is interesting.

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    • I distinctly remember an overnight stay in Mildura Xmas 1970, as it was my first ever experience of staying in a motel and being served breakfast through a hatch at the front door. It was SO exciting.
      I thought I must have visited again when driving between Sydney and Adelaide, but when driving in today from Broken Hill, and then going out to dinner tonight nothing looks familiar! It looks a great place to live, wide streets, plenty of shopping, and we had dinner in a fabulous Thai restaurant. It must have a large population and serve many surrounding districts.
      We spent all afternoon today sightseeing in Wentworth, tomorrow we will be all day in the Mungo National Park, and then the next destination is Hay, so I’m not sure how much time we will get to explore what Mildura has on offer for this trip.
      And yes! The Soldier Settlements is a very interesting, and often deeply sad, story. Have you looked up newspapers on Trove for any stories about them?
      Here is one recent news article about them:
      https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-03/red-cliffs-soldier-settlement-celebrates-100-years/100961004
      And here are two that were published contemporaneously:
      https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/75390639
      https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/4617756

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    • Hi again Derrick,
      I had intended to delete and reload the photos but have run out of time today. Meanwhile I’ve checked it on my Lenovo android laptop, 2 Samsung phones and a Samsung tablet and all is displaying correctly. From memory, you are using an Apple Mac, so I am wondering if it is a compatibility issue.

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        • It’s no bother Derrick. Just another WP mystery. But perhaps you can help me if you have time. As I loaded them in different ways, Image, Gallery & Slideshow – the answer may lay there.
          Which pictures were missing?
          Woodland map and overview shot
          Woodland gallery of 4
          Aboriginal art trail slideshow
          Pig poster image
          Piglets gallery of 3
          Then the inserts of birdsongs.
          Tree Carvings
          cheers!

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