Camooweal: Cold Beers and a Rest Day in Queensland’s Tiny Border Town

We’ve made it to Queensland. Camooweal, to be exact. Population: enough people to keep two caravan parks in business.

The town sits just eleven kilometres from the Northern Territory border and was established in 1884, back when explorers were still wandering around the country looking for other explorers. William Landsborough passed through here in 1862 while searching for Burke and Wills, which seems like a remarkably Australian thing to do. We sent men into the wilderness to find two other men who had become lost in the wilderness.

Accommodation options in Camooweal are straightforward. You can stay at the caravan park attached to the roadhouse or the caravan park attached to the pub. This wasn’t really a decision, asking us to choose between a pub and a roadhouse is like asking a Labrador to choose between a tennis ball and a stick.

The town itself is surprisingly tidy. The grass is neatly cut, there’s no rubbish lying about, and aside from the constant procession of caravans and road trains thundering through, it’s remarkably peaceful. It’s the sort of place where you can sit outside with a beer and feel you’ve stumbled upon the last functioning country town in Australia.

The beers are cold and cost about ten dollars a schooner, which now apparently qualifies as reasonable. We ordered our usual pub meals, a chicken parmi for Will and a schnitzel for me. Both were excellent, proving once again that country pubs have somehow mastered the art of deep-frying things and serving them with chips.

We’re staying for two nights because we desperately need a rest day, there’s washing to do and very little ambition between us. We also need to work out how to cover the 188 kilometres to Mount Isa over the next seven days, as we have a package arriving there on the 2nd of July, and somehow we’ve turned a two-hour drive into an expedition.

There’s a billabong not far from here where we can spend another night. After that, we’ll continue east along what locals proudly call the world’s longest main street, eventually arriving at the Mount Isa post office to collect our parcel.