It's time to cool off at Tilpa Pub within sight of the Darling River, Australia's third longest river. The locals, a few dusty travellers, and maybe a shearer or two, are trickling in, after a long hot day, until there is a crowd of us in T-shirts and singlets and shorts and boots. We've all cleaned up a little, but the dress code is still pretty relaxed out here, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest big city.

The corrugated iron walls are written thick with names and slogans, graffiti and gags, and it would make for hours of interesting reading, that's if the heat hadn't sapped all your energy.

I begin to wonder if it could be a cheap way to avoid painting costs, or just the product of too many beers and too little else to do. But when the Kiwi backpacker-turned-barmaid hands us a texta colour and tells us we can immortalize ourselves there for a $2 donation to the Flying Doctor, suddenly we see the point of it and clamber on a chair and fill in our names on one of the dwindling number of spaces on the ceiling.

Out here, a couple of hundred kilometres west of Bourke and about halfway to Wilcannia, the Royal Flying Doctor Service is a godsend. That and the CB radios all the 4WDs carry. Jan McClure, from nearby Kallara Station told us that she could possibly have died a couple of years ago in a late-night car accident, if she had not been able to summon help via the UHF bands that people monitor as a matter of habit out here.

It's a tough country and things like this become second nature to survive. It's no big deal to the locals, but every homestead has a first aid and medical pack maintained by the Flying Doctor scheme. Radio hook-ups direct them to administer whatever medicine is needed, based on the symptoms. It works well, stabilising patients at least until the plane can land.

When we visit, years into the country's harshest drought, the land itself needs some TLC. "It hasn't rained here for two years," Jan McClure tells us. And the grey dust that coats the grey trees bears her out. Yet the sheep we see being shorn at the shearing shed on one of the McClure properties - some of the station's 25,000 - are plump, their wool creamy; and the kangaroos that play chicken in our headlights that night, seem to somehow be finding a feed in the parched paddocks. The animals need to learn to cope - just like the people.

To those that live out this way, drought is nothing new. "One good year in six is the norm," Rod Thompson, our Back'o'Bourke tour guide had told us a day or so earlier as he'd driven a group of us around Bourke and the irrigated blocks in the vicinity.

Like many people on the land, the McClures have had to look at ways to diversify; ways to find methods to keep the bills paid while the rains stay locked in those occasional clouds. Several years ago they built Coolabah Lodge on their property, with several modern self-contained motel-style units, smack bang on the banks of the lazily looping Darling River and became one of several 'station stays' in this remote area. 

We visit when the water level is way down yet still deep enough for the station manager to take us out for a cruise on its startlingly emerald green waters in 'Way to Go' the station's punt. Visitor's can hire the punt for an hour so and meander up the river past resting pelicans and river gums leaning out over the river. He pointed out the high water mark to us, several metres up, yet still well below Coolabah and we wondered when (or if) it would ever get there again. The Darling and the rivers that feed it, rise way up in Queensland, somewhere in the remote and also rainless Carnarvon Gorge area, and precious little had flowed down here recently.

By Kallara Station, the river has widened greatly - in fact Bourke, upstream, was once an important river port - and while the river is no longer is used as a transport route, it is still home to massive Murray cod, golden perch and yabbies. Enough to keep a visiting fisherman happy for quite some time.

Others come just to relax, and an evening drink on the riverside deck or a dawn breakfast there, will deliver that, for sure. It's also a good place to take a break on the way through to finding your opal fortune at White Cliffs, or visiting Mildura or Broken Hill. Bird-watching, hiking, and 4WD drives fill in the rest of the time, and the McClures are also happy to take guests to see the shearing and whatever other station activities that are happening.

For those who want to get back to nature even more, there are camping facilities at Kallara, as well as fishermen's quarters with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. Then there's always Tilpa, population 10, just twelve kilometres away. And the pub.

Maybe after a few coldies, I should pay another couple of bucks and write a follow-up message on the tin wall, I decide.

Something about 'see you next time, Darling'.

- Sally Hammond

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