In 2019, Creek to Coast celebrated 20 big years on air. Over the decades, we’ve loved showing you great fishing and camping spots, awesome four-wheel driving, creek crossings, cooking, a whole lot of craziness… the list goes on. We’ve travelled from coast to country and back again, meeting people along the way.
But some of the mates we’ve made along the way, and their families, are doing it tough right now, as the big dry tighten its grip right across this land of ‘droughts and flooding rains’.
We thought: What can we do to help? The answer was to create an epic road trip to deliver food, water and other essentials to battling farmers and country communities. We went to Foodbank Queensland.
Here’s how you can get involved:
At the Brisbane headquarters of Foodbank Queensland, part of the largest food drive for charity in Australia, we caught up with CEO Michael Rose. We are a lucky country; this charity not only helps feed vulnerable Australians, it also reduces food waste.
The charity is thoughtful about not disrupting the towns’ economies and relationships with local businesses, and acts as a helping hand.
Our plan was to travel in convoy up the range to Toowoomba, Warwick and finally to Goondiwindi to take in Sounds from the Borderline, a new music festival raising money for local drought relief.
Along for the ride was Sunseeker Caravans, to assist with handing out the hampers and seeing for themselves how they can help Outback communities. You can also help, by either spending money in the rural towns to support these communities, filling up your tanks out west, visiting the local bakery or buying your Christmas presents from unique boutiques — buy from the bush.
We drove the Isuzu D-MAX and the Isuzu MU-X, vehicles that are comfortable and reliable on dirt and asphalt roads. We loaded a tonne (literally) of food hampers in the back of the Isuzu D-MAX.
We were accommodated by Big 4 Toowoomba Garden City and the Goondiwindi Freedom Lifestyle Park, who wanted to play a part and help out their communities, as well as provide comfortable cabins, drive-through powered sites and unpowered sites and plenty of activities to keep the kids entertained.
The response from our rural mates was not just happiness to have a respite, but the knowledge of the consideration and awareness of their plight by people in the cities and suburbs.
You can find the extended interview with Shannon Noll below, who wanted to speak having lost his own family property due to drought.
