Day 226 Cobar, NSW

The road between Wilcannia and Cobar is much the same as yesterday - yes even the potholes!   But there are heaps more goats along the side of the road.  We can't decide whether they are feral or just escapees as they are both inside fences and outside.  We received our answer when we visited the museum today that said feral goats are a declared a pest by the NSW Land Protection but they have been a godsend to droughted farmers in past years who have mustered the wild goats and received $5/kg for them.  I don't think there is any urgency to eradicate them.

We are staying at another G'Day Park in Cobar and it is certainly another one of the better ones with cement slabs and wide patches of grass between the well spaced sites.  There is hardly anyone here, just like we have found at most caravan parks over the past couple of weeks.  Most of the grey nomads have returned home I believe.

We haven't done much walking over the past couple of days so once we arrived at Cobar we decided to walk the two kilometres to the Great Cobar Museum.  It is cold.  The wind is blowing all around us and the top temperature today was just 17 degrees.  With the wind blowing it feels like 7 degrees, but the sun is shinning so that is a blessing.  The walk takes us through the main street of Cobar and once again the streets are lined with heritage buildings dating back to the 1800's.  

The Great Western Hotel's claim to fame is the longest verandah in Australia.

I loved the old butcher shop, but the sign on the footpath that said "Where the Butchers are Rough and the Meat is Tough" gave us a good laugh.

Cobar's claim to fame was the discovery of copper and the opening of The Great Copper Mine - the largest copper mine in Australia.  When copper production peaked around 1912 the mine employed 1000 workers and another 1000 indirect workers.  But sadly after WW1 the price of copper crashed and the mine closed in 1919.  Cobar has really been a town of boom and bust but at the moment the open cut Gold Mine around 6km from Cobar is a major source of employment and is expected to remain open until 2035.

The Old Copper Mine

The Great Cobar Museum is a beautiful building and I read a plaque inside the building that said it was built and owned by the Copper Mine back in the early 1900's and sold to the Cobar City Council for the princely sum of $1.  It is a well laid out museum with "rooms" depicting the history of Cobar - Mining, People, Town, Country to name a couple.  We were most interested in the "Country" area the had a lot of information that centred around the wool industry.  Something we are all too familiar with after running sheep at Julia Creek many moons ago.

The last touristy thing we wanted to do at Cobar was to visit the Fort Bourke Hill Lookout that overlooks the Peak Goldmine.  What an absolutely incredible lookout!  It is perched right on the very edge of the massive open cut mine that is now underground.  The mine is 150m deep, 380m long and 180m wide and I really had the heeby jeebys looking down into that giant cavern.  You can see the opening where the dump trucks enter.  There was no movement while we were there but it was after 5pm so we think the mine only operates in daylight hours.  

On our way back to the caravan park we drove past the impressive Christopher O'Toole Catholic Church.  The church is an iconic landmark and dominates the Cobar skyline. It seems that Cobar is pretty big on its quirky signs.  The one outside of the church says "Our congregation is like fudge.  Mostly sweet, with a few nuts"!

Our destination tomorrow will be the remote country town of Bourke.  It is not a long drive at just under 200km so we will once again have plenty of time tomorrow afternoon to explore the township.