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...There's never a dull moment,'' says Burke Shire Mayor Annie Clarke, whose tiny council oversees the 225-km stretch from Burketown to the border. Floods create much of the drama: monsoonal rains and cyclones regularly swell Gulf Country rivers and send stormy seas surging across the low coastline. Early this year, floods inundated 6,000 sq. km of Burke Shire, turning Highway 1 into a chain of atolls; supplies had to be dropped to some settlements by helicopter. At Floraville station, 73 km south of the town-and 80 km inland-the homestead was an island for two weeks...
...When the floods subsided-after months, in some places-the road was covered with piles of sand that towered above graders and took weeks to shift. Not for nothing is the roadhouse 50 km east of the border called Hell's Gate...
Every Thursday night for the past 19 years, Rudolph Valentino has wordlessly fought the same rival and lost and won the same woman above the fading velveteen seats of the Majestic Theatre at Pomona (pop. 900), 30 km inland from the Sunshine Coast. And on most of those nights, Ron West has provided the silent movie's voice on his Wurlitzer pipe organ, playing swirly harp sounds when the heroine swoons, shifting to a sinister key when the villain appears, and pulling up short when the hero reins his horse...
...this soft-spoken gentleman, the term doesn't do justice to the quiet watchfulness of his profession. But a dogger he is and his frontier is the dingo fence-not the 5,400-km great wall of wire that runs from the Great Australian Bight to Queensland's Bunya Mountains, but a mere 500-km stretch bordering one of the Nullarbor's largest sheep stations, near Cocklebiddy. His painstaking task is to patrol and repair its parameter of chicken wire, laying dog baits as he goes. Little escapes his eagle eye: the other week, marauding camels charged through the fence...
...There's hardly an exhibit in the Beck Museum-housed in a hangar and shed beside his home at Mareeba, 60 km west of Cairns-that the retired farmer doesn't have a story about: from the recoilless cannon built for a Russian czar to the empty 250-kg chemical bomb from Australia's World War II stockpile, to the Vietnam-era Centurion tank...