We are in Banjo Paterson territory now. This is Combo waterhole on the Diamantina River. Banjo was here on Dagworth Station when he wrote the words to Waltzing Matilda while flirting with Christina Macpherson at the same time stringing along his fiancé Sarah Riley for 8 years.

The Combo Water Hole is part of a series channels in the Diamantina River. The holding capacity of the water hole was extended on the 1800's by the owners of Dagworth Station. They constructed a series of stone overshoots (weirs) to increase the water lever in Combo Water Hole.

Our old house in Meldrum St. Cloncurry is still standing and is for sale. 🙂

No photos but did have a chat in the mains street with a couple of fellow explorer owners.

We had purchased the Cloncurry Trails booklet and were keen to explore a few of the out of the road places between Cloncurry and Mt Isa.

This is Kuridala from on top of one of the spoil piles. Kuridala was a mine but more prominently a smelter for a lot of smaller mines in the district.

When the smelter closed down most of the machinery was sold off. This is the largest piece of the smelter left. I am not sure what part of the process it was but it is right next to the slag heap.

The slag heap.

You can even see the shape of the crucible in these pieces of slag.

One of the lonely graves in the Kuridala Cemetery. While there are a lot of graves without headstones it was interesting that a lot of the people who died here are men killed in industrial accidents as opposed to a lot of other older cemeteries where it is younger women and children.

The Cloncurry River at Malbon.

White Chested Herons on the Cloncurry River.

Clem Walton Park is just downstream of the dam wall for Lake Corella. This was the water supply for the Mary Kathleen township and mine. The leaks in the dam wall mean  there is always water in this section. It is also a very popular free camp even though the road in is gravel and not maintained.

There were not too many spots left when we got in but as it was only one night we didn't mind not having much "beach" between us and the water.

The permanent water means there is a lot of birdlife. Nankin Night Heron.

Leaving Clem Walton Park we didn't stay on the bitumen for long. Turning south onto the gravel we soon came to this fallen down fence the remains of some Afghan camel yards.

This is the Rosebud Weir. It used to provide water for the town of Bulonga and its smelter. There is really nothing of the town left and although we had a mud map we didn't manage to find the slag piles of the old smelter.