07 Jun Pandora Pass
I don’t know what I expected from the Liverpool Plains, but it wasn’t Pandora Pass.
Driving south-west from Tamworth, zig-zagging through the plains for a midday rendezvous with Megan, Marcus and Martin Kuhn, the New England hills give way to broad, puzzling paddocks of silver grey.
What crop, I wonder, leaves behind silver stubble?
The day is blue with running white clouds, my world just how I like it: 90% sky. Turning off the bitumen at a dot on the map called Tamarang, white tufts of fluff along the roadside reveal the answer: of course, cotton.
For two hours I drive towards Bundella, never quite sure I’m on the right road. Beneath a big old gum marking a station letterbox, I stop for lunch: crackers and goats cheese, corn chips and salsa, chocolate and mandarin. A ute rumbles by with a wave and a sweep of dust over lunch and me.
The day is warm – in the sunshine. Cold in the shade. Vast paddocks reach for the blue hills on the horizon.
I have a friend up Byron Bay way who says you need a packed lunch and a duck to guide you to navigate the hinterland villages of the far north coast. I’ve got my lunch. In the absence of the duck, I drive on, eyes peeled for Pandora Pass, and turn left, excited now about The Write Road‘s first official meeting with remote Australians.
I rumble up the long Kuhn driveway, dry riveted with the passageways of old rains. There to find the homestead, ringed with stark trees of autumn. Megan greets me at the door, Marcus waves from the loungeroom, Martin drags up an old tea trolley from the shed for Megan to put to use as a mobile technology hold-all.
The Kuhns are cattle farmers. Megan is also the north-west NSW regional coordinator for Lock the Gate. For the last eight years, she’s been actively campaigning against the coal seam gas mining industry knocking at Liverpool Plains’ doors.
I’m here to discuss The Write Road’s inaugural creative project: Pilliga Pen2Paper, an anthology of writing about the campaign to save the last significant remnant of arid scrubland in NSW, the Pilliga Scrub.
The Pilliga is two hours’ drive from Bundella. For Megan and Marcus, saving the Pilliga is as important as saving the landscape and lifestyle of the plains dwellers. For mother and son, the fight against the mining companies is about protecting the land itself; for Megan it’s also about her family’s health and security, for Marcus, an astute 12-year-old with a finely tuned philosophical mind, it’s about his future, his right to inherit his parents’ farm rather than a gasfield.
As I leave, Megan insists I continue to follow the alluringly named Pandora Pass all the way to Coolah. The golden dusty road marches flat across the edge of the plains then winds up over a hill where the road turns its back on the Liverpool Plains and opens out over the Coolah Valley. I stop at the top and turn about. This way the plains, misted, vast and distant; that way the Coolah Valley, green and lush, stocky grey wallaroos bounding along the fenceline.
I turn back to the plains and salute the Kuhns from the hilltop, hoping fervently their campaign to save the landscape below me is successful – for all our sakes.
Written by Stephanie Dale, author, journalist & traveling writer; founder of The Write Road and Walk and Write.
Stephanie Dale is an award-winning journalist and author with a fondness for walking and writing. She is a passionate advocate for the visibility and voices of everyday people and focuses on supporting new and unpublished writers to write and keep writing. The Write Road is dedicated to empowering people to tell their stories, their way.
