Driving from Bedourie to Boulia you go pass the rare Waddi trees  – they only grow in three places in Australia. On the fringe of the Simpson desert in Queensland and Northern Territory and a stand just north of Boulia. They grow up to 10m and can live for 1000 years. They have yellow wood with a bright red core. Explorers Burke and Wills reported seeing these trees as far back as 1861. The waddi tree has very hard wood and can blunt and axe and is near impossible to burn. Aborigines were aware of the extreme hardness of the wood and used the sticks for digging up yams and removing possums from hollows. The sticks were also used as weapons.

Boulia has one pub, a tourist shop that is never open as they cannot get staff and one little grocery shop. However it also has a Min Min Encounter Visitor Information Centre. 

Min Min Lights

What are the Min Min you ask. I had never heard of them. The Min Min lights are unexplained balls of glowing light that have appeared to travellers for decades with the first recorded sighting at a lonely Cobb and Co staging site in the Boulia Shire.

The tour was $35 quite pricey and I didn’t know what to expect. As I paid the lady tells me there are panic buttons inside if you need to come out. I thought that was a bit odd for an exhibition. I thought it would be a film show that you would sit and watch. But no they have these full size models of different characters that have seen the Min Min lights. It starts with this guy telling you the story whilst sitting on a porch outside the main door of the show. The sliding door then opens and in you go. I was the only person and I walk into this room and all the lights go out. How you were supposed to find the panic buttons in the pitch black I have no idea! When the lights come up as spotlights I can see it is set out as a bar with a few men at the bar and one guy sitting at a table in the corner looking at his fossils. They then tell you their yarn. When they finish it goes black again and another door opens and you walk through to a scene of a house verandah with this woman standing there, there are trees in there too it is so well produced. She tells her yarn and you move on to some drovers one on a full size horse and hear their yarn,  then there is a full size road train truck engine and his yarn and finally you get into this room with wooden benches and you sit down and the sliding door closes and you find out you are on a bus travelling through the countryside and the landscape around you is changing because the floor is turning. It was truly brilliant well worth the money.

I think the price puts people off as they have no idea what to expect, I am sure they would get much more visitors if they described the show in a bit more detail.