Normanton and Lawn Hill National Park QLD (June - 4 days)

After a night in small-town Georgetown and a visit to ‘Terrestrial’ (an amazing gem and crystal display from around the world) we headed to Normanton for two nights. Here we felt truly outnumbered, being the only young family at the caravan park (or so it appeared!). We were put next to a very grumpy and intolerant older couple who looked quite distressed when we pulled up with four young children. We tried to be polite and smile etc…but they were stony faced. The only communication came when the husband very gruffly informed me that our mobile phone had been ringing while we were cooling off at the pool. We then went to the small local library to escape the heat and do some schoolwork, but were clearly not completely welcome here either! At night the frogs and toads were out and the kids had loads of fun spotting them with torches. It was a different story when the kids wanted to use the porta-potti at night and could hear the frogs rustling through the dried leaves at the back of the van!

We thought we would bypass Kurumba as we couldn’t tee up any accommodation and didn’t want to face the midges again so soon. So we headed further west to Adel’s Grove, our base camp for visiting Lawn Hill National Park. Here at the Grove the man at the check-in desk laughed at Tim’s genuine request for a grassy site. The whole campground was just dirt and leaf litter, but there was good shade and it was really quite peaceful. Harrison delighted in the camp fire we had next to our site, collecting wood for it, lighting it and stoking it endlessly. We all enjoyed charred marshmallows and the warm glow of the fire at night.

We spent a day and a half walking through Lawn Hill National Park, canoeing down it’s breathtaking gorge and swimming in a lovely billabong (where we kept one eye out for freshwater crocs). The colours of the red escarpment, yellow savannah grasses, smooth white gums and splashes of green were a stark and amazing combination. We visited ‘Wild Dog Dreaming’ a sacred Aboriginal site (that we were not permitted to photograph) where we looked at remnants of Aboriginal camps and very old artworks on the rock formations. The kids found it hard to appreciate the significance of this site at first, a little disappointed that the ‘artwork’ did not resemble in any way the precise and brightly coloured dot paintings they were familiar with. Canoeing the gorge was eerily quiet, especially for Kate (as the children opted for Daddy to escort them on their ‘turn’). It was magical being dwarfed by the sheer red walls of the gorge and hearing only the native birds and the gentle lap of water under the paddle.