Adels Grove

After a long a dusty road; finally we arrived to Adels Grove located in one of the largest cattle stations (known in Mexico as cattle ranch) in Queensland and it is called Lawn Hill. The gulf of Carpentaria region was opened up to grazing in the mid 1800s. Pastoral pioneers brought the first cattle to the Lawn Hill Creek area in the 1860s, after the gulf fever that caused many graziers to leave the area. In the mid 1870s Frank Hann purchased numerous leases, launching the beginning of “The Lawn Hill Pastoral Holding Company”, Hann accumulated 9000square kilometres. Over the next century several graziers leased the land, until the famous “cattle king” Sebatiao Maia arrived from Brazil.
Maia arrived in Sydney in March 1975. He was unable to speak English and employed a taxi driver to be his interpreter and chauffeur as he travelled the country in search of potential cattle stations in Queensland. In 1976 Maia took over the lease of Lawn Hill Station and became the largest fauna sanctuary on leasehold in Queensland. In 1984 Maia surrendered 12,200 Ha of Lawn Hill Station to the State Government for a National Park. Today Lawn Hill has around one million acres, with approximately 40,000 heads of cattle, (the above information was taken from the visitors guide).
Now back to our disaster, when we opened the door of the off road granny flat we found everything covered in red dust, it was shocking, we had to empty and clean everything and searched where the dust came from. We found two big gaps at the back of the van, these gaps were at the bottom of the fibre glass panels because the manufacturer of the van just overlapped them and did not seal these gaps, we sealed the gaps as much as we could, it was not a pleasant task.
The campground is very spacious with a lovely waterhole and a river suitable for swimming and canoeing. Next morning we did a tour to visit Riversleigh D Site, which is one of the first major fossil deposits found (apparently in the world) and the only publicly accessible. It is a World Heritage area and its fossils are dating back 25 million years. They have found turtles, fish, snails, crocodiles, lizards, and several generations of wombats. Gabriel held a stone 15 million years old, we had morning tea with the group beside the beautiful Gregory River and returned to the pick up the caravan and headed to Boodjamulla National Park (Lawn Hill) for a long scenery walk to visit the Indarri Falls and the Gorge, the views were spectacular, the gorge has a diverse wildlife, lots of different birds and a funny little fish “Archerfish”, this fish spits a jet of water to knock insects down.

Adels Grove