Days 11 and 12 (Warren - Nyngan - Cobar: Weilwan, Ngiyampaa countries) 14/05/22
We spent most of Friday morning looking around Coonamble. A tired town with a beautiful river (the Macquarie), the Art Gallery we visited yesterday (they must have a thriving artist community) and an interesting museum (Museum Under the Bridge) and some interesting old commercial/church buildings. Pretty much everything else is run down.
The Macquarie River in fine flow
The old police station is now the Museum Collection of cow/bullock/goat bells
An original, restored Cobb and Co. Coach and some beautiful stables. Unfortunately the stable building is unsafe, but the local Council has acquired funds to restore it. I hope they do - it is beautiful inside.
Not atypical of other parts of town
With so many road closures in the north-west we have decided to head to Wilcannia instead and see how things are when we get there. Not really looking good. All dirt roads are closed from Coonamble west and north-west so onto the bitumen and down to Warren. Well, I'm glad it wasn't a dirt road! About six water crossings later we arrived in Warren. This was the deepest at just over 300mm.
Warren is notable for its Information Centre, a veritable minefield of information, displayed outside, ranging from information about famous people, aboriginal history past and present, fauna and flora of the region, geological information +. Worth a visit just for this incredible display.
Next door is a wetlands well worth visiting when you can't get within cooee of the Macquarie Marshes. A few of my photos from there can be viewed on the following link if you are interested.
A few interesting buildings around town, including a hairdresser with a novel display for promoting breast cancer awareness.
And of course, a new place and a good venue - a free camp outside town - meant a good place to set up a moth trap and go stalking night creatures on tree trunks. I wondered how many moths I would find given that the area around Warren is real cotton growing country. 
As I suspected, not very many moth visitors.😞 However, there were quite a number of other critters and the nightlife on the tree trunks proved fascinating with a mix of spiders, ants and slaters. Click on the link to some nightlife photos if you are interested. Warren Nightlife.
Today it was onwards to Cobar via Nevertire and Nyngan. While Nevertire has nothing much to inspire me wanting to visit again, one thing was of interest, the Nevertire Solar Array, occupying 500 acres (2 sq km)!! It feeds enough energy into the National Grid to power 42,000 homes.
Nyngan plays on its place in the Bogan Shire with, of course, the Big Bogan!
In addition, the beautiful old railway station houses the information centre and museum (didn't go in). It is such a shame that these buildings aren't used for their original purpose still. At least some still exist. The second photo is another of the old railway buildings.
Another piece of fascinating Nyngan history was the Chinese part in the cemetery. Chinese came here predominantly as timber cutters and market gardeners in the late 19th and early 20th century. Apparently Nyngan is one of the few places in the country where Chinese who died here were given marked graves. These and the incense burner have been given National Heritage Listing. As seemed to be our custom everywhere, even in death, the Chinese were separated away from everyone else in the cemetery, in the same way that Catholics and Protestants couldn't lie side by side.
COVID seems to have given rise to quite a number of projects around the place and one is the Indigenous "Listen, Hear" walk in Nyngan. A good interpretation of local flora. This is a sample
When we reached Cobar, I was glad that we hadn't visited the museum in Nyngan - I get a bit of museum overload even though I find them fascinating - because the museum here is excellent. Well worth visiting. Housed in the old Mines Office, it documents mostly the mining history of Cobar (a copper town). It also has one of the old Far West Baby Health carriages that provided an important service originating in Cobar, giving women of the west with some support in raising their young children.
The extent of the mines in the early 20th century is hard to believe. One local who wanted a yarn, told us of how no trees were left in the area, all of them being used for buildings in the mine, for fuel before they managed to procure better fuel, for props in the mines and of course for buildings and fuel for locals to live. There are very few old trees left for miles around the town, although now there is substantial regrowth. Copper mines and to a lesser extent gold mines still operate here.
Mining was, and still is, a dangerous business and another project that was only completed in September last year is a memorial to the hundreds of miners who have lost their lives in the mines here in Cobar. Outside the memorial are bits and pieces of old mining equipment.
Cobar is also home to the hotel with the longest wrought-iron verandah in Australia. It is impressively long!
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