Karen Emmott was standing in her chookyard, 156km from Longreach, taking photos of her new ducklings when all of a sudden her mobile phone starting pinging with incoming text messages.
For someone who started married life with no phone at all on her remote Noonbah property, this week’s technological moment, brought on by the switching on of a mobile phone tower not far away, was a history-making event.
After discovering that she had one bar of reception, Karen made three excited phone calls and posted the news of the latest Barcoo shire mobile phone tower activations to social media.
“I just wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “It’s going to make a lot of difference. When we were married we didn’t even have a phone at Noonbah; now we can do everything from the kitchen table.”
Barcoo shire mayor Bruce Scott, who crusaded for 21st century technology for the three small towns in his shire for a decade, said Karen had probably received her signal from the new base station at the Jindalee Over the Horizon radar base.
He said the ground-breaking program was about a month ahead of schedule.
Queensland Country Life reported at the end of September that a milestone had been achieved when Telstra’s fibre optic team had dug its way to Windorah, laying the cable that would change the lives of residents and visitors alike.
Following this, Windorah’s new mobile phone tower was switched over on November 24, and Jundah’s tower came online a day later, on November 25.
“It’s fantastic to see people in the community finally able to take a picture of their children under the community Christmas tree and share it in real time, rather than have to wait until they get home and download,” Cr Scott said.
“The fibre out to the hospital, education services, police and council headquarters in each town is still to be done, but this is bringing our communities 21st century options at last, for fixed and mobile services.”
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told parliament that the decade-long campaign to provide modern telecommunications for Barcoo and Diamantina shires was reaching fruition.
Costing $16.5m, the state government contributed $6.25m, while the federal government put in $5.95m. Each shire contributed $2.15m.
“We know the importance of telecommunications to the lives and livelihoods of the people of rural and remote Queensland, particularly in terms of health, education and emergency services,” Ms Palaszczuk said.
Apart from the many well-documented public service benefits about to be realised by the remote communities – video-conferencing for the children at the schools, telehealth options and emergency case management for the health centres, and the broadcasting of emergency warnings – systems at the council will undergo a huge transformation.
Rather than staff in each town duplicating services such as payroll and creditors and debtors, information will be able to be shared thanks to access to cloud services.
Cr Scott said their accessibility to the public would increase many-fold, and they would be able to do business so much better.
For himself, driving an average of 50,000km a year around the 62,000 square kilometre shire and beyond, that’s equivalent to 22 days a year when he does nothing but drive. Now he says he’ll be able to do business as he drives.
“Our fear was that we’d not be able to attract staff without modern communication options,” he said.
“Now we expect to see enormous changes next tourist season to how visitors use our communities.
“People will stay longer and feel safer travelling our remote roads.”
Back at Karen’s Stonehenge property, she’s looking forward to being able to send a text out to the men when trucks are running late, and generally having more connectivity to the wider world.
Her ducks and chickens haven’t said what they’re going to like best about getting a signal in their roost.