Something didn’t sit right with me. Trying to get to sleep in a single bed on creaking, turn-of-the-century floorboards. Below, a bar serving the last of the whooping and hollering, the cackling shriek of a drunk Australian lady all the more painful when you know you need rest. Mind ticking over like the cycle of a misaligned wheel.

The remnants of merriment below had cowboy vibes. With Gucci trimmings. Equally at home in Fortitude Valley as downtown Linville, partying like they are 1999. On a night in 2023 when Australia received what to me at least felt a simple, unremarkable request from a broad representation of its first peoples for them to actually matter and said “yeah nah we’re alright thanks”. Whooping and hollering – as innocent as it may have been – struck a dissonant chord. And I edged closer to sleep with doubts about what it meant to be crossing country the next day.

The Brisbane Valley Rail Trail (Part II) traverses Waka Waka Country and Yuggera Country – or at least I think as much based on the little I can glean from local council pages. Today proclaimed as the longest continual recreational trail in Australia (if not the southern hemisphere), it intermittently welcomes people on bikes and horses and feet to roughly follow the course of a disused railway line from Yarraman – deep in the electorate of Maranoa – to the fringes of Ipswich. A manifestation of intrusion and industry and inevitable decline once quick riches had been cut down, torn, eradicated and washed from the earth.

In a sign of hope and rejuvenation the old rail line is now transformed into a place where people can come together on a shared journey, even if some of the newer locals remain deeply conspiratorial. Avid readers may realise this is my second time along it (and with my back now going through all sorts of agony it’ll probably be the last). From a pair of lone rangers we doubled in size as a group of four. Not quite MAMILS but only really lacking the Lycra. Starting off on brand by getting confused over where to start.

In many ways the first 20 kilometres is the hardest, adjusting to seats and handlebars and pedals and pace and the actual realisation of exercise. Things are a little undulating and already hot, and the approach to Blackbutt seems to drag on forever. But eventually bakery rejuvenation occurs, some tuning and top ups ensue, and we are full steam ahead.

The run to Linville is mostly bliss if a little jarring in places. Forest creeps in on both sides and the gradient works in your favour too. The breeze of momentum keeps you cool and a slice from Blackbutt survives well enough to sugar-rush the journey east. Beaming white in the afternoon sun, the Linville Hotel is a very beacon of balustrades and cold beer. The store next door a welcome purveyor of ice cream.

After a little recovery, day all too soon turns into night because Queensland doesn’t bother with daylight saving (probably because it is seen as another way the government are trying to control you with 5G vaccines or whatever). As much as I try, I cannot find the ideal beer to accompany a local steak and a background band mostly playing the entire catalogue of Crowded House. Only at the end, as encore way past their bedtime, do they strike up Farnham’s Voice. I cannot tell if this is a brave call, a lost opportunity, or a musical smirk.

Linville is in a pretty position among rugged hills, folded and contorted and topped with natural Australiana. Just beyond a few of the folds you’ll find Kilcoy, where in 1842 flour was laced with strychnine and given to a large group of Aboriginal people by two shepherds at a squatters station. Reports – like many of the time – are vague and swept under the carpet. At least sixty Aboriginal people were killed. A death pudding massacre.

I share this clearly not for entertainment or as a segue into some cycling incident but merely to share it, to acknowledge and make it known. I had no idea, freewheeling downhill, what happened among those hills until I got back home and decided to look into the Aboriginal origins and history of the country I had just crossed. Where the squatters came first, farms and forestry followed, towns and people sprung up and eventually a rail line was constructed. Large swathes of land were stripped of trees, including the unique Bunya Pine, which only now exists in small pockets to the west. Worse, the land was largely stripped of its inhabitants, sent to missions if not a fate more terminal.

The second day of pedalling through the present and the past is more open and exposed, the cursed removal of trees a bane to modern day cyclists exposed to the searing sun. Already the land looks a bit sick and brown from the latest evolution of drought. There are few animals, other than the occasional cluster of cows hunkering down under a lone tree or dilapidated shed.

There are also a few magpies and – miraculously – they are leaving me alone while going for the other mamils in my crew. This is wonderful, so much so that I whizz on and almost decapitate a snake that I didn’t even see until after I passed it. I feel somewhat blessed and incredibly fortunate in hindsight. It’s like they knew or something.

The towns – or what pass for towns – tick off at fairly regular intervals. Early on there is Moore with its three cafes, of which one only seems to be open and doing a good trade in weirdness and antipathy. It was here I discovered a publication called The Light which from a brief glance before I felt the urge to use it for toilet paper proclaims to shine a light on all things the establishment don’t want you to know. Likely bankrolled by such establishment figures as Rinehart, Hanson, Palmer and co.

Next along from Moore, after one of the bigger climbs of the trail is Harlin, which appears little more than a pub and a servo. Still, giant bottles of knock-off Gatorade are welcome, as is the cooling 90 metres of the Yimbun tunnel a little further on. It’s a good place to pause, adjust padding and apply sunscreen before persevering with more open, baked-earth riding to Toogoolawah.

You know Toogoolawah is – in relative terms – big because it has a choice of two pubs for lunch as well as a sprinkle of cafes. Closer to the highway you can even find some homemade fudge and maybe decent coffee but the old rail line has other places in mind. With a local recommendation we decamp outside a pub and have a hearty lunch in the shade. Pizza topped with so much topping it takes a while to discover the base. Welcome and delicious, but I am wondering how all that salami, olives, capsicum, tomato, feta, mozzarella, parsley and bread, pepped up by a lemonade, is going to sit.

There was a bit of gas departing Toogoolawah, an uphill grind but one that I quite enjoyed. Dropping into a nice low gear and spinning gently, consistently, without any real rush to get anywhere. Bare country eventually cedes to a line of boundary eucalypts that accompany us to a cutting where the railway peaks, and it’s downhill from there. Suddenly speed is a thing again, the ruts and stones bouncier, gripping on to handlebars that much tighter, the air flow providing welcome ventilation. In hindsight it feels like this all the way to Esk, but there was definitely still pedalling involved.

I was a little concerned about getting to Esk around 3pm, just as everything was no doubt closing. But a new addition along the BVRT, a very BVRT business in fact, was kicking on into a Sunday arvo session. Brisbane Valley Roasters no doubt attracts the hairy mamil with single origin roasts and cold brews and almond milk. There are bike racks and large wooden benches and probably some of those fake succulents you get from IKEA. After such high dose rustic rural, you may temporarily feel an inner Melbourne vibe, or at least central Tuggeranong.

But then Esk happens. For some reason today all the staff appear to be about 14. There are no lightly bearded hipsters or man buns dosing double shots and feathering foam. I opt for an iced coffee anyway, given the heat outside which is now well into the thirties. A solo performer mistunes his guitar and is gearing up for some gently grating entertainment, supported by a handful of friends and family. A lady from out of town accosts us and talks about love and secret hideaways up on the Darling Downs and how hard she has worked all her life and that young people don’t know what hard work looks like and they should stop buying avocados or something. I fear 5G radiation PayPal vaccines might be next. Still, at least it’s not sitting, working, sweating on a bike.

I assumed all the young people of Esk were working at Brisbane Valley Roasters that day, but it turns out there are even more of them in the IGA. I suppose as well as providing cheap labour for hard-working business owners it’s something for young people to do other than vape. And they’re all rather friendly in the IGA, even as Jason – by now high on morphine or something – rambles on about (and looks like) the Esk Yowie while I am trying to buy some reduced price tabbouleh from the girl behind the deli counter. Young people are nothing if not resilient in the face of the weirdness they encounter.

Dinner turns out to be an IGA affair since the pub is closed and the Thai is also – due to unforeseen events – closed. We stock up on food, too much food, for breakfast as well. Thinking, quite rightly, that nowhere will be open at five in the morning. And also thinking, quite wrongly, that we could eat two apple crumble cakes reduced to 99 cents, along with several pots of yogurt, cereal bars, a tree of bananas and a two kilo bag of rolled oats at five in the morning.

It is an uncivilised hour to rise but the final day is also the biggest and longest. And some of us have a train, and plane, to catch. While initially confronting, the early hour is by far the best on the bike. The light glowing soft, the air calm and cool and infused with that dewy, earthy fragrance of something akin to dried straw and peppermint. The trail is subdued too, enclosed by forest pretty much for the whole 20 kilometres to Coominya.

The last of the bananas disappears at Coominya, meaning I force myself to buy a chocolate éclair from the bakery at Lowood, a little further down the line. Brisbane feels closer now, the river widening, water to rinse off the humidity, feed the production of insipid beer, pressure wash four million Toyota Hiluxes. Yet after Fernvale and its supposed amazing pies, there is little to interrupt until reaching the very edge of Ipswich.

In the bush and scrub around here, 12 Aboriginal people were killed in 1843 when they were pursued by a vigilante group of soldiers, settlers and stockmen, seeking reprisal following the battle of ‘One Tree Hill.’ We all cruise on by unknowing and unthinking. An ignorance that is all too common, all too often the easiest option, the path of least resistance. Because if you don’t know you won’t actually feel impelled to reconcile.

Wulkuraka – an Aboriginal word meaning either red flowering gum or plenty of kookaburras. I see neither today, but they are assuredly there somewhere. Holding on, adapting, waiting to burst forth and laugh. May well they laugh at a troupe of four sweaty middle aged men trying to cross a finish line in tandem, the youngest with a wheelie. Having crossed country where, despite it all, there is embedded in the earth and the sky a profound resilience. Something which can never be washed away, tunnelled through or eroded. A line much older, deeper and enduring. Always.