Clip-Clop.

A friend remarked recently, with the particular weariness of someone who has just driven Logwoods Road, that the hinterland is becoming Amish. Not by choice. By infrastructure.

The Amish, to be fair, planned for this. They built the barns, raised the horses, grew the food, and made a considered peace with the nineteenth century. The hinterland has arrived at a similar destination by a different route: council deferral, flood closures, and a geopolitical event in the Middle East that Canberra assures us has not yet been felt locally.

The ridge started to run out of petrol last week. Nambour's BP had empty pumps. People were crossing the dual carriageway to try the other side, which is the kind of consumer behaviour that suggests the situation has a certain texture Canberra's supply chain modelling may not fully capture.

Australia imports roughly ninety percent of its liquid fuel. The IEA has described the Hormuz closure as the greatest global energy security challenge in history. The federal government notes, correctly, that Australia holds its largest fuel reserve in fifteen years, around thirty-six days of petrol, and that the full impact has not yet arrived. We are to be reassured. There is, however, a known lag between a global supply crisis and its appearance at a rural Queensland bowser, and Mapleton appears to have received the memo slightly ahead of schedule.

Meanwhile the roads, Logwoods, Christensens, North Arm: gravel-heavy, pothole-prone, closed repeatedly through 2025 when 390mm of rain arrived and the bitumen declined to cope. More than $50 million in hinterland roadworks sits in the deferred column, a column it should be noted, that the coastal road network has never found occasion to use. It has a masterplan whereas the hinterland has a column.

The budget is explained annually with the practised confidence of Mayor Natoli, who in 2024 stood before the council and announced she was significantly increasing investment in hinterland gravel roads, $8 million, up from $5 million, a number she named with some satisfaction. In 2025 the hinterland's roads were folded into a combined $30.2 million figure for sealed and unsealed roads across the region, which has the advantage of sounding larger while being considerably harder to find on Christensens Road.

A local was doing the arithmetic this week on whether to sell his petrol to a neighbour, hire an electric car from Hertz at $120 a day, and set himself up as the hinterland's first Uber driver. The logic is sound. When the fuel runs out and the roads are what they are, whoever has a charged vehicle and a flexible schedule is, by default, public transport. A third had located his plastic tubing. Someone else noted that Queensland has recently made electric bicycles considerably harder to ride legally. It is useful, at moments like this, to know that every available exit has been considered.

The hinterland pays its rates. It attends the meetings. It waits for the reassurances to resolve into asphalt, and for the supply chain to remember that rural Queensland exists at the end of it.

The Amish joke persists because it has stopped being a joke at quite the rate it used to.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.