Cawnpore Lookout

Cawnpore Lookout

Check out this amazingly dramatic landscape? It almost makes you want to reach for the tubes of paint and the canvas, and to reproduce these amazing colours that Mother Nature has thrown together? Or did she throw these together? How did we come to have countryside so spectacular??

This is a picture of Cawnpore Lookout, near Middleton, which is between Boulia and Winton. 95 – 98 million years ago, this area was covered by an inland sea, known as the Eromanga Sea. However, about 95 million years ago, the sediment that was carried to this huge sea by massive inland rivers eventually contracted and reduced the size of the inland sea so that it no longer existed. This landscape which you can see is the sediment that was left behind by the Eromanga Sea.

Interestingly, my mind thinks about the many millions of tonnes of dust whipped up by the dust storm that has blanketed the East Coast of Australia in recent days. This dust is dry sediment from the spectacular floods that inundated the Lake Eyre Basin earlier this year, which is being carried by the winds across the countryside and out to sea – to become part of the ocean. Are their any parallels between what was happening 95 million years ago, and this week?

I invite you to take a look at this Cawnpore Lookout scene, and visualise it as an inland sea. Better still, why not plan a driving holiday, and come out and personally experience the 360 degree vista that Cawnpore provides you with? The Western Rivers Carer truly feels immensely humble when she climbs to the top of a mesa, and imagines the landscape of 95 million years ago.