Gunbalanya Sports and Social Club

This is the bar at the Gunbalanya Sports and Social Club. It is open 4:30 pm to 7:00pm on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 5:30pm to 8:00pm on Friday and Saturday. Children are allowed in with their parents for the first hour and a half but must leave an hour before closing. The only alcohol for sale is light and mid-strength beer, or their are soft drinks available.

One peculiarity is that they will only sell you one drink. So it is impossible to shout a friend a drink unless you actually take them to the bar with you.


There is a pool hall out the back with three tables which is where I usually end up if I go. I usually go down with a friend from work but I'm gradually getting to know some of the locals.

There is a large garden area that has half a dozen picnic tables. This is where we usually sit when a large group of us go.

Gardening and The Groto

The plants along the front of the house may look ok, but it was a mixture of weeds, long grass and self-sown saplings that were actually growing underneath the edge of the house. So some serious pruning was in order.

There were also some trees blocking the stairway and encroaching on the carport, so they went as well.
While I was on a roll I decided to tidy up the front fence and yard as well. It probably doesn't show well in a photograph but I have created a little grotto - a green cave about 1.8m high underneath the trees in the corner of the yard.




Once the dry comes I will set up my outdoor setting under here with my BBQ nearby. That will give me a shady, breezy area to sit back, relax and enjoy the cooler weather.

Trapped!

Like most of the tropics Gunbalanya has two distinct seasons - "the wet" and "the dry" (Three if you include "the build-up").

The difference is amazing. Gunbalanya gets 1.4m (4'8") of rain a year, and over 1m of that falls in the months from December to March.

The photo below is taken from behind my classroom looking over towards Injalak, the hill with all the rock paintings I have talked about in an earlier post.

During the wet the roads become impassable. The shot below is actually one of the good sections of road.

If you try and drive east of Gunbalanya, further into Arnhem land towards the community of Maningrida you only get about 2km before the road is cut. The picture below is not a river, it's the main road.If you head west towards Darwin the road is fairly dry for about 10kms.

But about 3km from the river crossing you come to a billabong called Red Lily, named for the water lillies that grow there, and during the wet it triples in size, cutting the road completely.