Not many pictures, but they were a lot of effort in the making – a four-hour round trip.

First, this is my brand-new bull bar:

This is why I came to Tamworth.  Now my car has a better chance of surviving if I hit a kangaroo on the roads.  I saw a couple on my long drive today, plus a wild pig.

And, since this place has a ‘big guitar’, I took a picture of that, too:

Then I set out for the black stump, two hours’ drive away in Coolah.  Several places in Australia claim to be the location of the famous stump, and Coolah’s claim starts with the name the local Aboriginal people – the Gamilaaray – had for the area.  They were said to call the place Weetalibah-Wallangan, meaning ‘the place where the fire went out and left a burnt stump’.

Then, in the 1820s, Governor Darling attempted to control the settlement patterns of the colony by issuing a regulation limiting settlement to the Nineteen Counties that surrounded Sydney.  The boundary line for this limit passed along a property known as ‘Black Stump Run’, and it’s thought that this is a possible origin for the phrase ‘beyond the black stump’ referring to beyond civilisation.

The stump:

Sadly, this is only a replica – the actual stump burned down in 1908, along with the Black Stump Wine Saloon that had been built near it.  Now, this is photographic proof that I have been beyond the black stump:

Granted, not very far beyond it, but it still counts.