Blackall to Winton

The next stop on our outback adventure was Barcaldine, where we spent three nights. Barcaldine is home to the Tree of Knowledge, the reputed birth place of the labour movement in Australia following the 1891 shearers’ strike. The ghost gum grew in front of the railway station for about 180 years until 2006, when it was poisoned and died. It has now been preserved and placed under a very impressive timber structure, made up of 4,913 pieces of timber, 3,449 of which sway in the breeze, giving the impression of a canopy over the tree. Impressive during the day, it is truly magnificent at night illuminated in green.

Nearby are several monuments and sculptures, including a large windmill manufactured in 1917 and originally erected on the site of the first flowing artesian bore in Queensland. A Tropic of Capricorn sign indicates that the line runs through Barcaldine but our map shows it to be around 15km to the north. However as the highway through town runs parallel to the tropic, I guess near enough is good enough! For WA readers, the tropic is about halfway between Carnarvon and Exmouth on that side of the country.

The streets of Barcaldine (and many other western Queensland towns) are very wide, wide enough to turn a bullock team, and on many of the intersections there are no ‘give way’ signs, with the ‘give way to the right’ rule applying. The streets of Barcaldine are named after trees; in Blackall it’s all flowering plants, in Longreach they’re named for birds and in Winton for some of the surrounding station properties.

We spent several hours looking through the many exhibits at the Australian Workers Heritage Centre, which celebrates Australia’s working history and achievements, and the formation of the Australian Labor Party following the shearers’ strike. The complex is set in landscaped gardens which include an artesian bore-fed billabong and ‘Young-un’, the only direct descendant of the Tree of Knowledge. Many heritage buildings have been relocated to the site, including the Bicentennial Theatre tent from Expo ’88, Australia’s oldest union office and hall, a one-teacher school from the early 1900s and a railway station built in 1915.

Moving on from Barcaldine we headed west for the first time, to the little town of Ilfracombe. Its claim to fame is Machinery Mile (actually only 700m, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it!) with old machinery of all types lining one side of the highway through town. We free camped just out of town for a night on our way to Longreach and witnessed a spectacular sunset.

Longreach calls itself the capital of outback Queensland and is certainly the largest town we’ve visited yet, with lots of shops and experiences vying for the tourist dollar. All the caravan parks were full so we spent one night at Apex Park on the Thomson River, along with hundreds of other vans, and for a mere $5 jagged one of a handful of sites with water. We found another Tropic of Capricorn sign, and while this is nearer to the actual line, it’s probably unlikely to run right by the Council Offices! Walking through town we saw two horse-drawn Cobb & Co. stagecoaches returning their load of passengers to town.

Rod went alone to visit the Powerhouse Museum, which tells the story of power generation in Longreach from 1921 to 1985, and displays a huge range of generating infrastructure, from coal-fired through to diesel.

We will return to Longreach, but in the meantime we moved on to Winton for three sunsets. We camped at the showground where again there were hundreds of vans not able to get into a caravan park, many on their way to the camel races at Boulia.

Winton is famous for dinosaurs but we’re not into them so we concentrated on its other claim to fame, Waltzing Matilda. At the Waltzing Matilda Centre, the first museum in the world dedicated to a song, we learned how AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote the lyrics in 1895 while visiting nearby Dagworth Station, after hearing the tune played on a zither. Also on display was more history of the region including the birth of Qantas in Winton in 1920, the discovery of dinosaur footprints in 1962 on Cork Station and boulder opal at Opalton in 1888.

Late one afternoon we went to the stunning art deco North Gregory Hotel to hear Gregory North (yes, really!) recite some of Paterson’s poems and narrate the history of Winton at the time.

Corfield and Fitzmaurice, once Winton’s general store established in 1878, now houses a life-size diorama of the dinosaur stampede at Lark Quarry 95 million years ago, and displays including the wool industry and the store itself.