Belyando Roadhouse Blues...

The first thing I noticed as I entered the Belyando Crossing Roadhouse was the kicked in glass door.
Two cowboys and a morbidly obese woman shot pool in the corner. Three dusty ice creamed faced kids played on the floor below my feet. There were two choices of liquor - XXXX or Great Northern.
A sign above the bar read:
'If the music is too loud for you, then fuck off.’
Normally in a bar like this - as big as the average lounge room, I would make conversation. But not here. Not this time. For I was nervous. Why? Because I was a lonely dissident poet one hour's drive from the Charmichael coal mine and this was a bar full of miners, cowboys and weathered women save for the young islander bar maid handing me an ice cold Great Northern heavy. Belyando Crossing had yet to age her - it would soon enough. For this is hard, dry, unforgiving country, almost 200 km to the next petrol station - down the wobbly Gregory Highway in western Queensland. The old Hemi burnt it up well; burning past whistling kites, a wedged tailed eagle or two - and enough dead roos to feed a flock of them for weeks.

Listen to the Whistling Kite.

Presently a young cowboy approached me with his hand out to greet the stranger with a black cockatoo feather in his hat.
He welcomed me not suspiciously. Cordially he approached the stranger with a smile; outstretched calloused hand accompanied by a question.
'G day mate, where are you workin? Which mine?'
'Ah none mate' I stammered a little, for I hadn’t prepared for such questions.
'I'm just passing through on my way to a mates farm in Bowen. Just done a bit of chippy work down Bajool way'
I lied.
I'd been holed up in Pete the old drover's steam train caboose, getting drunk all week and smashing dexys with a wayward witch; writing songs for an album I was about to record with JB. Paterson, Nathan Glen, Ruby Gilbert and Karl S. Williams.
‘Yeah mate, I decided to take a look out the back - take the long way ya know’
The cowboy pondered, skulled his XXXX Gold and proudly exclaimed:
'Take the Bowen Development dirt road mate - they just graded it, I went there the other day, you'll get the val through no worries’.
An argument then ensued between the entire bar about the best way to get to Bowen.
What I really wanted to know was the best way to get to the blackfella camp out at the Charmichael coal mine.
The sun wasn’t long in that luminescent Queensland sky beyond the kicked in front door of the Belyano Roadhouse Tavern. One hundred kilometres of dusty dirt road lay before me and still no contact with the mob and the leadership of the strike. As the sun descended ominously at the end of the bar to the west I gestured to the gorgeous barmaid for another beer, ‘make it two darlin’.
These were to be for the road. Nothing more was to be gained from staying here a minute longer. Thus I bid farewell to my cowboy host. Thanked the islander barmaid, the silent publican and his more than hospitable salt of the earth patrons. Determined, I pointed the old barge south back down the Gregory towards the infamous Adani coal mine. I'll never forget that bar and the good people within it. If only I could have told them the true reason for my being here. It was a need to know basis I suppose.

They need not know from whence or where I intend to roam.

Who knows what dangers awaited me beyond the Belyando Crossing Roadhouse.
I felt a strong intuition that the camp and the blockade had been abandoned.
I didn’t care. I turned off the Gregory and headed west with the descending sun towards the Belyando River. Tailed by company security guards the whole way from the highway turnoff.
This was still a public road and I - a public nuisance. Thus I lit a fire on the banks of the Belyando - washed my tired bones in its muddy waters, raised the blackfella flag in the Cypress tree above my camp and prepared to pen these lines.
The night shift workers were beginning to roll in on double pay thanks to their formidable union, the CFMEU. Also my union, the union I have represented as an elected delegate leading a dispute out in western New South Wales.

For this was a public holiday and I was camped by a public road, upon an ancient river, tailed and monitored by private security in the pay of the largest coal mine in the southern hemisphere.
It was the 26th of January 2021...
Invasion Day.
In the midst of global lockdown and pandemic, this wayward exiled Victorian had managed to make it to the infamous Adani Coal Mine.
The endless stream of semi's and mining vehicles formed a constant ominous dust cloud on the road to the left flank of my camp. I wondered where the Blackfellas were. Where was their blockade? Had they retreated? Had they disbanded? For now it was just me, the soothing sounds of the Belyando recently in flood and thoughts of the ancestors among the Min Min stars high above. I had travelled a long way to be here - yet I'd found no blockade, a protest camp or a single black fella. The mosquitoes were utterly relentless this night. In my swag on the banks of the Belyando, feeding the sacred Galilee basin I drifted off to sleep.
I dreamt of finding my car near a river that was raging and rising like the sea - Rising like a violent apocalyptic sea in flood.
The mine security parked their hilux 50 metres from my camp in an attempt to intimidate me. I rose from the fire, fastened my hunting knife to my hip and casually approached their Hilux, coffee in the left hand, right one on the damascus steel hugging my hip.
I knocked on the window.
‘g’day cobber, you want to join me for a coffee mate? I just got a brew on’ - he had no choice but to sit his fat arse down by my fire and drink a coffee. He had questions for me - and I for him. He then left, satisfied that I was no threat to his grain fed rump or the filthy corporation he was there to represent.

That morn I woke before the sun, stoked the coals and sipped a coffee to the realisation that the Wangan & Jagalingou mob had retreated - for now.
Yet it was only a matter of time til they rose again - like the dusty Belyando River under torrential summer rain the day prior to my arrival.

Rise again they would. Like the mighty Belyando, Charmichael, Murrumbidgee or Murray in a sunburnt summer flood.
They would rise again to part the ancient inland sea - the whites named Galilee.
Lord have mercy upon the occupiers whence that day she come.
Lord knows I'll be there, not far from the Belyando Roadhouse -
Neath Wangan & Jagalingou sun.

‘Lord have mercy, Lord save me from the mighty flood’
- John Lee Hooker.