Diamantina River
by Keith Collicoat 2009

There’s a river with its source in western Queensland
where it’s hot and dry, yet on the other hand,
it also rains for days on end which turns the place to mud
and makes the Diamantina flow and flood.

It rises up on Kirby’s Range, tanned by blazing sun,
just forty ks away, from the mine at Cannington,
where BHP is busy, digging silver, lead and zinc,
tons of it I think, as quick as you could blink.

The stripling stream, heads north-east, out to Dagworth Station
where “Banjo” had a holiday, some time in relaxation,
and he wasn’t there that long before he wrote his famous song,
about a jumbuck and a swaggie camped beside a billabong.

In the dry it’s only puddles, a chain of waterholes
linked by clay and sand, and dusty oblong shoals.
A downpour in the catchment makes the mighty river flow
It’s fed by creeks and streams which help it grow.

Surprise, Mistake and Oondooroo conspire to deliver
a little extra flow, into the Western river
which later meets the Wokingham and very very soon
it joins the Diamantina just upstream of Kalkadoon.

Downstream of Tulmur Station, near Verdun Valley homestead
where the land is flat the river starts to spread.
The water fans out forming, veins and arteries galore
it’s nothing like a normal river now or evermore.

Into its shallow lakes, the flow can be quite fickle
and on the gibber plains it’s only just a trickle.
But when it rains, for a week or two, up there at the source
the water spreads for miles and miles, outside it’s normal course.

Across the channel country plains the ample waters roam
soaking crusty clay pans, stony flats and sandy loam.
South-west the water spreads a huge slow moving lake
leaving saturated country, basking in it’s wake.

Floods don’t happen often and once the waters pass
the whole place turns into, a sea of Channel country grass
cockatiels and budgerigars and pink and grey galahs
chorus their applause from sated coolabahs.

The two towns on the river are many miles apart,
Kynuna is the first, way up near the start.
She sits, close by the river, on a sweeping right hand bend.
Birdsville is the second; it’s not far from the end.

Named “Diamantina Crossing”, by drovers years ago,
when walking stock to Marree was the go,
it was renamed Birdsville later, this isolated place,
now famous for it’s pub, and annual picnic race.

Not far south of Birdsville the Diamantina ends,
emptying into Goyder Lagoon, after innumerable twists and bends,
and when the lagoon is full, it flows straight out of there,
south again in the Warburton and into vast Lake Eyre.