Day 5 - Mt Abundance

Don and Pat gave us a guided tour of the Mount Abundance Homestead which they are renovating. The place was badly infested by termites which had caused a lot of the structure to sag significantly. They replaced timbers and slowly jacked the structure back into shape over three months. The gradual jacking meant that the timbers could ease their way back to shape with reduced risk of cracking. The inside cladding is cypress pine which fortunately termites do not like and therefore is almost all original.

It also had an impressive weir on the driveway in.

Dell’s brother and sister-in-law, Rob and Jan Nolan, called to arrange a meeting as they travelled through Roma on their way to Charleville. As we discussed routes to the West he told us that the distances between the main towns such as Roma, Mitchell, Moree and Charleville was about 87 kms for each gap corresponded to a day’s coach ride. The bigger towns were overnight towns. The lesser towns in between were set at the distance between changes of horse teams.