Pub with no beer? Worse!

I'm sitting in the Ironbark Inn's open-sided dining room at dusk with kookaburras chortling away in the gum tree above, a lizard chirping and no doubt a cloud of mozzies whining round my ankles if I could only hear them above those raucous 'burras.

Lots of driving today from Carisbrooke Station the other side of Winton, where we were shown around the farm with no stock. Eight years of drought have meant almost all the animals sold - and now the rains have come, there's nothing to eat all that grass, and no-one wanting to rent grazing because everyone has grass at the moment. I don't know how they make a living - apart from showing tourists over their very pretty property, that is. It's tough in the Outback.

They know how to shrug it off though, and in a couple of days' time there'll be a lot of fun down the road here in Barcaldine at the Tree of Knowledge Show, with goat racing a feature. The Tree is an old gum tree that was mysteriously poisoned a few years ago. Making the best of things again, they've erected an $8 million arty reincarnation of it over the gnarled and silver trunk, and visitors come for miles to see it.