--OK, that is me in my profile picture. I was younger then. I believe this was 1991. I had completed a stint taxi-driving nights in Darwin. My boss, the taxi owner would take the car off my hands about 0600hr so he could drop me at my digs and get to the airport for the first business flights.
--Around 1330-45hr he would ring my door-bell and wake me to drive him to the golf-club for his liquid lunch. After about 1400hr I would grab something to eat and drop in to a house where several drivers lived and relax playing 51. A Greek card-game in which (don't tell the law) we gambled our 5c's. Before 1600hr I would start picking up fares as the day shift started changing, earn my dollars by 0100hr then drive a couple of hookers for security for two or three hours, then head back to the nightclubs to start taking people home. If it was a good night (a few hundred $) I might have a drink and have my flatmate drive me in my car to outside the boss's and freshen up walking home before the heat.
--Anyway, I had earned a holiday having driven over hours every night for two and half years, so my then lover decided I aught to visit my friends in the tablelands on the way to taking her to her daughter in the channon country of Northern Rivers Shire NSW. Just a few thousand kilometres south through QLD.
--Here, in my favourite 'holy' pink t-shirt we have just come out of the Simpson Desert around Camooweal. Camooweal is a small town near the Northern Territory border which is 'a suburb of Mt Isa mining town', about 190km west and a bit north of the Isa. We are on our way that morning to Charters Towers, about 2hrs to Mt Isa, then a further 770km to the Towers. At Charters Towers we would turn left, still going east but north a bit, up the range to Innot Hot Springs which would, after an 8hr drive from the Isa bring us late eve and then, six hours through Innot to Ravenshoe about 40mins, 36km past the Springs, and about 26km from the house overlooking Tully Falls, where an old friend lived.
This is the only photo from the house by Tully Falls. And those photos of the Falls are no longer extant either due to bush-fire and flood. That house is on a private block with a lovely dirt drive through rainforest. I took a shower in an outdoor shower-room from which one can see the swimming hole at the head of the Falls. The door of the shower reaches from just beneath the knee to about shoulder height on a six foot person, and the room is made of forest, woven green. The house, should one ever get permission to visit, is a series of hand-built rooms, lean-to's, on the trunk of a tree with a girth of more than two men hand in hands. The floors of each room are at different heights, and the gutters of the roofs lead to a large container suspended next to the trunk of the tree. A tubular heat chimney from an agga stove is insulated and chicanes up into the overhead branches. The main living room or lounge windows are set back under overhanging eaves but look north across the water hole and fall's head. It is a very impressive residence, but apparently requires much maintenance as the rain forest is continuously trying to reclaim the spaces.
--Brisbane is about 1825km away and the channon country behind Byron Bay a further three hours, so with a full twenty-three hour drive ahead, we can not stayed for two nights going swimming next morning, and visiting Cairns, a 120km away to watch a movie we hadn't seen playing there. (I think it was The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) And then 120km back to Tully Falls, so we could leave for the south next morning, planning on a slow 23hrs, spread out to arrive afternoon of following day.
--Overall a fun, happy trip, in which I drove almost continuously, but at least a couple hundred km per day, from Darwin to the Channon, about 4,970km or 3,106 miles, to take a girlfriend to her daughter's, then after a day there, return the 200km back north to Brisbane.
--That old Falcon flew me for two years, clocking up some 100,000km back and forth across SEQ and the northern rivers. They changed the old steel motors to alloy and unleaded, so when she died, I got a Hyundai with racing pedals and wheel and tinkered her to a faster version. Today, they have steel cable walls on the roads, and red-light cameras, so it's no fun travelling distance any more, because in an emergency one cannot just get into the paddock. 😇
