Tibooburra

Carmen Friend
Mar 15, 2018
2 min read

Leaving Noccundra, we hit the red dirt again. Margaret had given us a run down on the road – top end pretty good, middle terrible bone jarring and then pretty good once you crossed the border and crossed the Sturt National Park to Tibooburra. Her description was pretty spot on as was the time it would take us to drive to Tibooburra – 4 ½-5 hours!

Most of the drive again was dirt with dry river crossings and sand dunes. We came across a few roos, goats, sheep and an occasional beef cattle plus Brahman. We have passed many stations along the trip and this part of the journey was no different.

We had been travelling along well – between 60-80km/ph when we hit 30km of the worst road ever! Down to 20-30kmph we were crawling along trying to find the least corrugated and rough bit of road – nope there just was not any!! It was a very long section for us all. Poor Georgia was huffing and puffing in the back of the car as she was over it!

Finally, an end was in sight and we saw the Dingo Fence and the gate into the National Park and onto Tibooburra. This part of the drive was interesting. Large areas of what appeared to be dry lakes, hills and open plains were visible and completely different again to what we had already seen. We went from red dirt of mixtures of limestone and red dirt with smaller rocks.

Driving into Tibooburra is an unusual landscape. Large granite stones surround the town everywhere. They look almost stone henge esk but have not been placed here by others. Is unique in a place which is basically in the desert.

Tibooburra is a small town with a couple of old pubs – The Family Hotel has murals painted on the walls which you can photograph only if you donate to the Royal Flying Doctors. There is a roadhouse, motel and camping ground, school of the air is also here and some other small shops. Tibooburra has a Royal Flying Doctors medical centre outpost here with an Emergency Airstrip some 100kms away in the middle of the Silvercity Highway!!

Charles Sturt was one of the first Europeans in Tibooburra becoming trapped near here due to drought. Burke and Will also travelled through this area during their exploration in 1861. Gold was found in this area in 1880. The area was first called The Granites because of all the large Granite boulders surrounding the town. The town is named Tibooburra, an aboriginal name meaning /heap of boulders’. In 2014 due to the dry and drought conditions, Tibooburra almost ran out of water. It is extremely hot in the summer and can be cold at night in the winter – record high of 47.9 and record low of -2.5 degrees.