Cecil Plains, Queensland

Autumn - April, 2014
Population: 678

Too long cooped up in the city - I needed to get out and feel the wide open spaces and big skies.
A day trip 1 hour up the road (north-west) to Cecil Plains on the banks of the Condamine River.
A little town in the centre of a large agricultural area - cotton, sorghum and corn growing at the moment.
All the crops look bountiful and healthy thanks to recent heavy rains - in fact, pools of water were everywhere
and the resultant mosquitoes nearly carried me away.
Cecil Plains has everything you could need - a bush nurse, a library, a skate park, a post office, a swimming pool, a pub,
a primary school, a shop, a petrol pump, a recreation oval and a cemetery - oh... and a saw mill and a cotton gin.
We had lunch at the local pub (shepherd's pie) and the landlady told us Anzac Day (which is coming up in the next couple of weeks)
is huge in Cecil Plains - dawn service and breakfast at the pub.
The memorial is very simple and appropriately in the shadow of the town's grain silos
- a simple stone, a flag-pole and a small avenue of trees planted 20 years ago
(they are tiny for 20 year old trees, aren't they? Well, I suppose they lived in drought for many of those years).
It has a very different feel about it than other memorials I have visited.
Less formal, more familiar, more friendly(?).
I also found another memorial stone in the local cemetery
it was stuck in the middle all by itself - it looked very lonely.

photos: iphone - 7th April, 2014
Cecil Plains, Queensland