Broadwater Lake

Our 2 weeks in Toowoomba ended all too quickly and before long we were back in the caravan heading west.

About 1½ hours after we left Toowoomba we pulled into the lakeside campground at Broadwater Lake, about 30 kms from Dalby.  We are staying here for a week.  Facilities here are very good, with hot showers and flat campsites although our WiFi and mobile reception is intermittent.  Everything else is perfect.  The lake is quite shallow, only 3m deep when it’s full.  There is a great variety of wildlife.

Waterbirds and bush birds abound and many people come here for birdwatching.  We are entertained by a pair of swans with their 2 cygnets, cormorants and fleets of pelicans fishing in the lake, sea eagles catching fish “on the wing”, spoonbills and cranes wading in the shallows.  There is a group of about 15 apostle birds that do their rounds a few times each day walking through the camp.  The trees are home to crows, sulphur crested cockatoos, parrots, magpies, and dollar birds as well as kookaburras and kingfishers.  Eastern grey kangaroos and red necked wallabies bound through on their way to drink at the lake.  We’ve also seen goannas and snakes around.  There are plenty of fish in the lake, but we haven’t caught any yet – maybe there’s too much competition from the pelicans.

Nearby Dalby has plenty to see too.  We drove to Bell, about 35kms north of Dalby, to track down some family history and followed up at the Family History base in Dalby where we were successful in tracking down some Vidler information.  Still more work to do there.  At Bell we had morning tea at the Bluebelle Gallery before wandering through the cemetery.  

At Dalby we spent some time at the Pioneer Museum, which has a huge collection of memorabilia from the area housed in many buildings set up like a village.  There’s everything here from sewing machines to a dental surgery to farm machinery, all run by volunteers.  This Museum is well worth a visit as it is not just a collection of stuff and a real effort has been made to display things in context. The Rocks and Fossils collection is a real gem.  There’s enough here to keep a whole class of Museum Studies students busy for several years.

Broadwater Lake is a popular wedding location and there have been weddings here the past 2 weekends.