Off and racing at Maxy
The Outback is full of weird and wacky tales that seem too incredible to be true, but JOHN ANDERSEN reminds us that fact is often stranger than fiction
THE Maxwelton Races are on today out there on the golden plains between Richmond and Julia Creek. This is one of the great bush race meetings and is a terrific experience especially if you haven’t been to the races west of the Great Dividing Range.
There’s three houses in Maxy. There used to be a pub, but it stopped trading in the 1990s. I interviewed the late Des Smith in Maxy once. Des spent his days and nights sitting in his “shouse” (shed home) drinking home brew.
On days when demand exceeded supply he would drive his jalopy into Richmond and replenish his stocks with the canned, town-lout product from the Mud Hut or the Federal Palace. Des was living proof that you can never undervalue the support our Australian social welfare system gives to blokes who are more into home brew and philosophy than crowbars and shovels.
Des reckoned Maxy was the centre of the universe. There was another bloke who lived there, who upon meeting someone for the first time, would drop to all fours and bite them on the ankle while growling like a dog. They called him Mad Dog. He got me once in a pub in Charters Towers.
I don’t know about Maxy being the centre of the universe, but the Maxy races, hands down, are the centre of the bush racing universe.
TOP SPOT FOR A CUPPA
SYDNEY has the Blue Mountains, Melbourne has the Grampians, Brisbane the Scenic Rim. So what? Townsville beats all of those hands down. It has Paluma, 892m above sea level and the southernmost habitat of the cassowary. I mention the rainforest village of Paluma just 90 minutes or so north of Townsville because the Ivy Cottage Tea House there is up for sale. There are generations of Townsvilleans who can remember cozying up inside the cottage on a cold winter’s day, scoffing tea and hot, homemade scones before venturing off on a rainforest hike or on a drive further out to Hidden Valley, the Running River or even the upper Burdekin River. Sometimes we’d stay in Paluma or camp at the dam, but always we’d say, “gee, we have to come up here more often”, but we never did even though it is so close to Townsville. The Tea House is listed through Down to Earth Realty at Ravenshoe.
MINER’S POLISHED LOOK
I ONCE chanced on a tin miner who lived in a hut out in the bush on a back track
He told me he’d got drunk in Ingham and passed out in someone’s house and woke up with his toenails painted red
between Paluma and the upper Burdekin
River. He was building a submarine in his hut. The welded and rivetted steel ‘sub’ was a bit over 4m long and looked like the real deal.
The bloke’s toenails were painted red, which was a bit out of place for a tin miner in this part of world, especially one with a sub (non-nuclear) in his hut.
He told me he’d got drunk in Ingham and passed out in someone’s house and woke up with his toenails painted red. I wrote about it at the time and a lady got in touch with me to tell me she had been the one who had painted his nails red in the Ingham house.
The lady I recall was some sort of academic at JCU. The bloke in question was later found dead near his vehicle. His mother, who lived in NSW, contacted me months later to tell me she suspected he had been killed by drug dealers.
Marijuana farming was all the go in the wider Hidden Valley area in the ’80s and ‘crop jumping’ was one of the criminal by-products.
I passed her concerns on to police who had already investigated and found nothing untoward. Southern drug kingpins would come up and fly planes and helicopters at low levels looking for drug crops. When they found one they would move in the crop jumpers who
would force out the blokes growing the dope and take the crop over for themselves. Townsville advertising salesman Ron Robinson branched out into a drug farming career. Ronnie fancied himself a gunman and had fabricated a past life as a white mercenary in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Police later told me this was fiction. Ron was shot in the head and killed by a sniper, presumably a crop jumper, while out walking up there in the scrub behind Hidden Valley in the late 1980s.
COPPING IT ON EV SUBSIDIES
NORTH Queenslanders are being dudded when it comes to the state’s government’s $3000 electric vehicle subsidy. It will be northerners who are subsidising via our taxes, electric vehicle buyers in the southeast corner of the state where charging stations are numerous and distances travelled, shorter. The $3000 is capped at $58,000 when it should be at least $70,000 given the price of most zero emission vehicles. Ms Palaszczuk talks a big game on electric vehicles but when it comes to vehicle emissions’ reduction and subsidies, the talk fades to a whisper. You could go further and say she should be offering the subsidy or at least a portion of the subsidy for plug-in hybrids (PHEVS) as well.
These are the vehicles that run on battery for 60-80km before switching over to hybrid mode, which is a mix of battery and internal combustion.
These vehicles reduce emissions anywhere between 15 and 55 per cent. PHEVS will be more popular in the regional areas purely because the driver is not as reliant on charging stations. Ms Palaszczuk is discriminating against those of us who live outside the southeast corner.
There are complaints that the Morrison government’s beer tax is discriminatory against women, but what about a subsidy for EVS that will really only benefit Brisbane and its surrounds?
It’s not as if we haven’t copped the rough end of the pineapple from governments before, but hell’s bells, we really are copping the leafy end when it comes to EV subsidies.