In the heady turmoil of exorcising my ass-feelings of anxiety, shame and acute embarrassment by blogging about it in unnecessary detail on the internet, I forgot to describe some of the great things we saw on our way down to Geraldton. Although I know that secretly most of you are wishing that I could go that extra step and post photos taken with a torch & an iPhone (and why not? once you've had complete medical strangers saying the words 'your anus' in loud, cheerful voices as many times as they could find an excuse to say it in a busy, intimate public surgery ward, it seems absurd to deny others the titillating thrill of revolting medical photos in a ludicrous attempt to pretend you have any dignity left) - but let's move on to less interesting topics, like the Queen of the Murchison Emporium in Cue.
110 km south of Meekatharra, Cue ("Mind The Tumbleweeds") used to be a boom town back in the 1800's. The stone buildings are spectacular. We stopped to pop in to the famous old Emporium (general store), which is run by Gary's ex-copper mate Ross and his wife Pixie. We're stopping to take photos on the way back. It's an enormous old shop and still has the old money-canister wires running overhead - the cashiers at the different counters would pop money in the canister, then pull a wire which sent the canister whizzing across the shop to the accountant's desk. The old silver-embossed cash register is still there too. They've left some of the original cabinet displays up, so among all the modern stuff you come across a little wood & glass cabinet of old Bex headache powder boxes, Granpa Elmer's Liver Tonic and rusting contraptions that look they're probably called things like Dr Grackleworth's Stereoscopic Ear Flap Suppressor For Young Ladies.
All the old countertops and cabinets are still there, plus original posters for stuff like Nurse Brand Custard Paste, wooden storage containers marked "Ginger", "Pepper", "Arsenic" etc. Filed on the lower shelves in a fruit box I found a sleeping cat; we shook paws and said hello before moving on to a large woolly mat which turned out to be a dog. Ross brought out an ancient wall photo of Cue in 1897; it was a cluster of buildings in the middle of treeless dusty desert, full of people, horses, camels and pubs.
Out on the footpath, we ran into several people we know from Meeka - Carl the meter man, doing his rounds for the meters in Cue, then Bill, who's my neighbour Phil's best mate, and of course the usual honks from passing utes & trucks who recognised us ("Was that Dave? It looked like Brian's old truck" "No, he sold that to Greg, I think that was Steve in the old council ute" "Nah, the council ute wasn't a Nissan, I reckon that was Wazza's missus's old truck that they sold to Normie" etc etc ad infinitum).
Despite this exhausting frenzy of activity we still had enough energy to stop in Yalgoo, an even smaller town 2/3 of the way to Gero. Everything in the town is tiny. At the pub, you can get a key to the weensy old stone church and the museum; we'll do this on another trip, when I am not encumbered by a soothing home-made ice pack wedged into my underpants.
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