2023 Mellenbye Adventure: Day 2—Arrival at Mellenbye
In my first article in this “2023 Mellenbye Adventure” series I covered our arrival at Morawa. It had been a few years or so since I last visited my home town of Morawa. And, from memory, that was in November. I think the temperature actually got to 40˚C on one of the days I was there. Note to self—avoid visiting Morawa close to the summer time.
This Mellenbye Adventure was in the first week of June. Surely a much better time to visit Morawa and the station country. I would much rather be cold than be very hot.
As mentioned in the previous posting (“2023 Mellenbye Adventure: Day 1—Morawa”) my niece and I left Morawa and headed for Mellenbye station about 3:00 in the afternoon. According to the odometer on my car it is exactly 60 kilometres from Morawa to the Mellenbye homestead.
In the picture above we are at the main gate into Mellenbye.
The Mellenbye sheep station lease is being operated as two businesses. Firstly, it is a working cattle outfit. Secondly, it is a commercial station stay. The gate is closed to keep the cattle in and any unwanted passers-by out.
All the stations around Morawa used to be viable, even lucrative, sheep station leases back when Australia ‘rode on the back of the sheep’—as the saying used to be when I was young. All but one of these station leases are now no longer being operated as businesses.
Barnong station, to the north-west of Mellenbye, is basically in what I would call ‘care and maintenance’. There is nobody on Barnong. Not when we went there anyway.
Kadji, to the north-east of Morawa, Lochada, to the east of Morawa, and Karara, to the south-east of Morawa, have all been merged into the Karara Rangeland Park and Campgrounds and are no longer operating leases. You can find out more about the Rangelands here.
In the following picture we are at our station stay cottage, unpacked, and enjoying some champagne before I put my camera over my shoulder and go for a bit of a look around.
For those familiar with ‘station country’ you will be familiar with the sparse vegetation and low brush that you can see in the picture above. Goodness knows what the cattle actually find to eat. I suspect that they are provided with bails of hay from time to time.
We had a visit from a friendly butcher bird while we were unpacking and setting up. See. Things can live out in this country.
The following panorama of the station stay area at Mellenbye was taken from the top of the cocktail bar. Yes. They have a cocktail bar there. Who would have thought?
The weekend that we were there was the long weekend in June. You can’t really see them in the picture above but there would have been about 25 caravans there and both of the cottage and both of the cabins were occupied. The ‘mansion’ on the hill was also occupied. There are also two motel units each of three rooms and I think one of those was fully occupied. So, all in all, there was probably something like 90 people at the station stay on this particular weekend.
Shown below is the cocktail bar, which is a converted shipping container.
Unfortunately the cocktail bar was not opened up during the time that Kim and I stayed at Mellenbye. As you can see, on top of the bar are some seats that you can sit in and look at the sky. These seats spin around. I tried them out.
Above is my last picture from the day we arrived on Mellenbye. The sun is setting over the motel units on the station with a couple of larger trees sticking up above the brush.
