St George, it's your time to shine

I wouldn't normally bother visiting somewhere like St George in Queensland.

The town's motto is 'Resources - we exploit the buggery out of them'. Actually, I made that up, but with Cubbie Station to the south and the fracking paradise of the Surat Basin to the west and north, it's something the Shire Council should consider.

Cubbie Station from the air

Checking the place out meant a 250km detour on the way to my next stop (Lightning Ridge) but that didn't matter, because I was on a mission.

St George, you see, is where our former acting Prime Minister learned to count.

The former Deputy Prime Minister

That's right, Barnaby Joyce developed his accounting chops in St George.

I was excited. As I walked along the banks of the Balonne River, I wondered if I might bump into the great man himself?

I mean Barnaby's known to like a bit on the side. Perhaps he might be supplementing his backbencher's salary by visiting his old stomping ground and helping with a few BAS statements?

I was out of luck. So I went looking for a BJ memorial instead.

After all, Goonwindi has built a tourism industry on the back of a horse which was a runner-up, so surely there'd be a statue of Barnaby, perhaps punching numbers into a calculator?

Or a mural of the Beetrooter fiddling with somebody's ledger?

All I found was his old office. It doesn't even have Barnaby's name on it these days.

Like most country towns, St George has a war memorial, a heritage centre and a heritage trail. 

It also has a self-drive cotton trail which I didn't need to do, as I'd been driving through Cubbie Station all morning.

Apparently Cubbie is the largest irrigated property in the Southern Hemisphere. I'll leave the debate about efficient use of scarce natural resources to others, but I'll say this about Cubbie Station - fuck it's big. As are its irrigation channels which run for miles.

On this trip, I clocked up around 4,000 kilometres through outback Queensland and NSW. With all of NSW and parts of Queensland declared drought-stricken, nearly every riverbed was dry. Not Cubbie's irrigational channels though - they were overflowing

It's no surprise that most of Australia's great country towns are built on a riverbank, and there was a bit of water in the Balonne River as it wound its way through St George. Perhaps Cubbie doesn't drain that bit until it reaches a bit further south.

And St George is a nice enough town. Thanks to the serenity of the river, I'm rating it a solid C+.

The Balonne River. Image taken when there wasn't a a drought.

To lift that rating to an A+, here's my tip to Balonne Shire Council: Build a Barnaby statue. Australian's love big stuff, so don't skimp on the size. Make it a bloody big one. You could call it Balonne's Big Barnaby.

Watch the tourists flock then.