We are using the free WiFi in McDonald's in Blackwater, a relatively new town built to service the "heart of the coal industry in Queensland". All the coal mining is done underground so the land is not scarred. Only the hundreds of rail cars full of coal are testimony to the size of the extractions.
 
We have spent the last 3 nights in the bush, one on a roadside with only inquisitive kangaroos for courting pheasant coucals for neighbours and the last 2 in Blackdown Tablelands National Park. It's only 890 metres above the surrounding plains but it got deliciously cool at night. It's a gorgeous forest of Blackdown stringbark gums and spotted gums and assorted ferns and wattles that grow nowhere else.

My collection of rock photos grew phenomenally in this park. If you Google it, you'll see why. This morning, as we made one last visit to the horseshoe lookout over the immense sandstone cliffs and the plains below, I was again struck by the immensity of this country. In the places we go, when you're away from the towns and cities, there is almost perfect silence and almost no visible evidence of human occupation (unlike southern Canada where you are rarely out of sight of homes, roads, hydro poles, etc.)

We're on our way to Carnarvon Gorge NP and I hope I'll be able to get some photos ready there for the next blog post.