We made the 170 km from Mitchell to Charleville in good time.
The TIC at Charleville pointed us in the direction of the local attractions before we repaired to the caravan park.
In the afternoon we sat in on a bush poetry happy hour in the caravan park. Merv Webster and his wife Chris are apparently award winning bush poets who make their living doing busking in caravan parks, pubs and anywhere they can get an audience. They were good and very entertaining and we enjoyed ourselves muchly.
In the evening we went to the local National Parks and Wildlife Service for a presentation about Bilbies.
There is a Save the Bilby fund established here and its story is quite remarkable.
Peter McCrae is a biologist with the Queensland Dept of Environment whose passion is the biology of Bilbies. One of the surviving populations of this endangered marsupial is located just west of Charleville in the Mitchell Grass Plains around Bedourie.
A number of years ago he befriended "Frank from Charleville" who also works for the DoE as an enforcement officer. Peter had a dream of saving the Bilby from extinction by captive breeding and release back into the wild. In the course of his study of the animal he has concluded that predation by feral foxes and feral cats is probably the cause of the dramatic decline in Bilby numbers and range. His breeding program works well and he supplies Bilbies to zoos around the nation and to release programs in appropriate parts of the country. Sadly all these release efforts are thwarted by the local predators and none have survived.
What was needed was a large predator free area to allow the released population to build up to survivable size. The minimum cost for a suitable feral-proof fence would be of the order of $300,000.
His efforts to get this kind of money from any kind of government source were unsuccessful.
Enter Frank Manthe who decided that it needed to be done and that there must be a way. He set out to raise all the money by donations from the public. Any normal person would say he was off with the fairies.
To date, he has raised $200,000 and was able to buy all the material for the fence before the GST increased his cost by 10%. He is presently recruiting volunteer labour to build the fence.
He is a man of considerable talent. He decided that a Bilby memorabilia marketing scheme would help his cause so he bought some plain plastic stubby holders from Silly Sollies for 20 cents, marked them with a Save the Bilby sticker he talked a local sign printer into donating and sold them for $2. With the money raised, he bought Save the Bilby caps. With the money from these he bought Save the Bilby T shirts and so on. He now has a wide range of merchandise all the way up to silver Bilby ornaments and the like raising lots of money.
He has attracted donations of paintings and sculptures by well known artists for a 10,000 $2 ticket raffle.
He has had support from the Queensland Commissioner of Police who arranged for a front page piece in the Police Gazette urging each of his 9000 men to buy a panel of the fence. Not 100% successful but Frank has beaten the rap on a speeding offence by quickly asking the poor copper if he had bought his panel of the fence as suggested by the Commissioner.
All his efforts on behalf of the endangered Bilby are in his own time, and he is very proud of the support he has received from ordinary Australians. He is now of the view that he would refuse any government money so that the whole project will belong to the Australian people without the heavy, and oftentimes destructive, hand of the bureaucracy being able to claim any of the credit.
I think this story needs wide publicity to prove to the populace at large that you can achieve anything if you have a good cause and a lot of will power and energy.
When it is finished in a few months time, the fence will enclose about 2500 hectares (6000 acres) of Currawinya Lakes National Park which will have its population of feral cats and foxes reduced to very small numbers before Peter's captive bred Bilbies are released into it to develop their own population. Bilbies breed nearly as prolifically as rabbits so its fairly certain that without feral predation the numbers in the enclosure will increase dramatically. A program of feral predator elimination in the surrounding park will allow release of part of the protected population into the rest of the park with some control of the chances of survival.
It may be that all this will result in wild Bilbies returning to, and surviving in, west Queensland.
We did a little shopping a little reading and a little tea drinking, attended another bush poetry happy hour and spent the evening at Skywatch. This is a great site for stargazing as the terrain is very flat, the air is relatively undisturbed, and the weather is beautiful.
The intro pieced is a film called " to Infinity", a pretty accurate but upbeat description of the cosmos. The setting is modern and would appeal to a wide audience rather than just astronomy junkies. The telescope garden is well presented and the crew knowledgeable.
The finale is a promo for the grand scheme for a Charleville Cosmos Centre with a space station theme and lots to attract tourists which is being to be built on the site. The theatrette and the telescope garden are in fact the first two parts of the complex which should be fully up and running in a couple of years.
The project is a local government initiative aimed at replacing some of the towns lost agriculture income with a significant tourist trade. It all sounds silly but it looks really good and it would be petty not to wish it lots of success.
Towns like Charleville are doing it really hard in these economically rational and globalised times and it is impressive how hard each town works to provide a sustainable existence for its inhabitants.