More Qantas Before Packing Up

This morning I headed to the Qantas Founder’s Museum to have a look at the history of this great Aussie icon. I found the displays informative and interactive and I learnt a lot - not least of which is that the name Qantas originally was an acronym for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service.

I enjoyed learning about the founders and their dream, and how Qantas won government contracts to become an international service.

I returned to the caravan, where Gadi had spent the morning trying to rid the caravan of dust. We drove off from our camp along the Thompson River in Longreach heading north to Winton.

In Winton we checked out the visitor Centre before eating lunch in our caravan. We looked at our options of things to do in Winton and decided not to do the dinosaur museum or the stampede of the dinosaurs at Lark Quarry, about 100km away. We also decided not to do the newly built Waltzing Matilda Centre (after fire destroyed the old one in 2015). You can’t do every attraction - and some are quite pricey meaning you have to make choices, especially when you are on the road for a long period of time.

First we stopped at Willie Mar’s Chinese Market Garden to learn the story of this extraordinary dedicated man (and later his son) who single handedly created and tended his market garden, sold produce in his store front and also did deliveries in his beat up old truck. Willie Mar Junior is considered the last of the Chinese market gardeners in Western Queensland.

We checked out Winton’s musical fence, a wire fence designed by Aussie composer Graeme Leak that can be plucked and bowed like a giant string instrument. Apparently the fence was officially opened with a full orchestra playing it’s strings. Next to the fence is a junkyard band that can also be played.

We also visited Arno’s Wall, a two meter high by 70 metre long wall built by an immigrant miner made of local mined rock and filled with hundreds of household appliances, cars, motor bikes and other metal objects.

We spent a bit of time in town in the late afternoon, contemplating whether to stay at the back of the North Gregory Hotel (where you can camp for $10) but decided it was too restrictive not being able to bring Cadbury to the beer garden. The North Gregory Hotel is supposedly the hotel where Banjo Patterson first recited Waltzing Matilda.

Anyway, we decided to push on and get a few more km out of the way before stopping for the night at a rest area well off the highway, with some interesting rock structures and plenty of wildlife about. We stopped just on ‘golden hour’, that magic time of day before sunset when the sun seems to cast a golden glow across the landscape, bathing the earth, trees and any rock formations in a yellow light.

It gave us the perfect opportunity to have a glass of wine while watching the colours change in the sky and across the rocks. Gadi and Cadbury climbed up a rocky outcrop and i took lots of photos.

It was definitely hard to drag ourselves indoors tonight, to eat dinner and settle in for the night. Tomorrow we will continue our journey north to Julia Creek.Read more