Small Town Big Hearts

Old timers say it’s the worst drought they’ve seen and it’s devastating small towns across NSW and Queensland. Samantha Trenoweth visits Thallon and meets a community that won’t be beaten.

The flight north to Moree crosses an ocean of smoke – trees, rivers, homesteads, townships, all lost beneath thick, blue-white eucalypt smoke, all the way to the horizon. North-eastern NSW is ablaze, but the northwest has other problems. On the far side of the Nandewar Range, the sky clears to reveal the western plains below – grey and black and dusty brown, crisscrossed by parched riverbeds and dotted with empty grain silos. “Drought is insidious,” says Theresa Pilcher a farmer, wife and mother of four, who lives just beyond the tiny town of Thallon, two hours’ drive from here, across the Queensland border.

“Drought is not like flood or fire, where you have it but then it’s gone and you start pulling your life together. Drought is like a cancer that slowly grows and grows and grows.”

Driving north to Thallon, the road is littered with kangaroo carcasses. This is the northern tip of Gamilaraay country, once a land of rushing streams, abundant Murray Cod and Golden Perch. Now, the Moonie River has stopped running and there hasn’t been a drop of rain worth mentioning for more than three years – nor a grain crop. Hundred-year-old trees are dying. On the historic Bullamon Plains station, paddocks are entirely barren. There is nothing but dry, ochre-coloured earth. The old-timers say it’s the worst drought in living memory.

Yet the people of Thallon are fighting back with everything they’ve got. And that’s why The Weekly has travelled here this Christmas – not to see the country at its worst but to celebrate human nature at its best and most inspiring – to introduce our readers to some of the people who call this country home.

The greatest gift