Once a Jolly Swagman

Before I left Winton today I looked at bolder opals, which only come from this part of Queensland. Opalton is not far away, and Kynuna is on the road to Cloncurry. One of the other attractions in Winton is the Waltzing Matilda Centre which explores the song and its creator, Banjo Paterson. Most of the drive today was again through Mitchell grass plains. 

I stopped a bit before Kynuna to visit the Combo Waterhole, which is probably the billabong in Waltzing Matilda. Banjo Paterson was staying at the Dagworth station in 1895. I talked about the 1891 shearer’s strike, and there was another one in 1894. Things had been pretty tough as there had been drought and a rabbit plague which destroyed a lot of the soil of inland Australia. The pastoralists were desperate and they tried to reduce wages even more. Whereas, during the first strike, the strikers and the thousands of police and military had been restrained, in 1894 people were all in much worse moods. At Dagworth station the shearing shed had been burnt down and 143 sheep died, after shots were fired between the military and the owners and a group of strikers. The next day, one of the strikers probably shot himself dead. This story was told to Banjo by the owner of Dagworth Station while they were at the Combo waterhole together. It’s possible that the dead striker metamorphed into the swagman in the song, particularly as swagmen were itinerant workers, and most shearers would have been swagmen.

I stopped in Kynuna and had a delicious hamburger, but no one seemed to have their opals for sale. At McKinley I stopped to take a picture of the Crocodile Dundee Walkabout Hotel. Evidently Crocodile Dundee was filmed here, even though there wouldn’t be a crocodile anywhere nearby.

The vegetation changed before I reached Cloncurry. My accommodation is quite nice.

Blackall to Winton

Longreach and Winton have a lot of tourist attractions. Winton is the dinosaur capital of Australia. Longreach has the stockman’s hall of fame. Qantas began in Winton. Longreach is on the Tropic of Capricorn. Last year I visited both and they fully deserve the number of tourists who flock to them. They are worthy of several days, but I need to get back to my schedule, so I decided to go through Longreach and stay only one night in Winton. Once I passed Barcaldine again, the land was very flat. It’s always been a grassland and the native Mitchell grass is superior stock food. The land naturally turns over - it’s self mulching black soil country, which made looking for fossils quite different to normal fossil digs, but makes the country some of the best in Australia for cattle. But it’s pretty boring to drive.

There were a lot of cattle road trains - I counted six in a row at one stage. Eventually I reached Winton, and discovered that someone here has a date farm, and I’m having fresh dates for the first time in my life. They’re nice. 

Farmstay Day 2

Near the campground, at the edge of the salt lake we spent some time each day observing the birds. Some of the ones I saw were endemic to the area, while others occur throughout Australia, and some, like the galahs, can be seen just about anywhere. However these galahs have intense pink feathers, rather than the usual softer pink. The owner says that the oil from one of the trees gives this intensity. The spiky bowerbird that occurs here likes silver rather than blue, and campers often put out silver for it. I didn’t have anything silver, so I didn’t.

After looking at birds, she took me to the other dry lake she has. Wild rice and millet cover the lake area there, and this would have been a larder for the aboriginal community. While we were there we found two patches where the lake hadn’t completely dried out since the last rains. The wet patches were oval, with trees on an island in the middle. A particular plant that was used by the aborigines of the area for yams was in abundance in these two watery areas, although the vegetation dies at this time of year, so they all looked dead. She hadn’t seen these here before, either the plants or the watery areas, because you’d need to be here at exactly the right time, and looking at the whole landscape you could see that it wasn’t exactly flat, so these areas occurred. She was very excited by the discovery. At the nearest edge of the lake, we discovered a number of flake tools, enough for that area to have been an aboriginal campsite.

Later, we visited another aboriginal rock art cave in the escarpment which had an aboriginal well next to it. We then went to a lookout above the escarpment. Even though it’s not that high, you can see the tree covered landscape for many kilometres, and very faintly in the far distance is Carnarvon Gorge and the escarpment making bumps in the horizon.

We had roast beef and sunset from the lookouts. We also did some work with the cattle. And so ended my farmstay. I needed to leave early in the morning. While I was there some cattle appeared that had been missing for a few years, along with a steer that belonged to a neighbour. We had lots of interesting conversations and I thoroughly enjoyed my stay. I had needed to revamp my schedule when I found out about the farmstay, and I’ll have a couple of longer days driving as a result, but I’m really glad I found it. The owner is revegetating and I learnt a lot about that as well.

Farmstay day 1

During my first day at the farmstay the owner drove me around in her atv while we mustered cattle and saw one of the caves with aboriginal artwork in the escarpment that’s part of the property. I was astounded how she could encourage cattle to go from one paddock to another (these paddocks are probably all about a square kilometre in size, or more) and how much the cattle trust her. If they think they’ve eaten everything they want to in a paddock, they wait at a gate to be moved into the next one, and amble into another paddock as soon as they figure out what she wants. Another farmer wanted to use her stockyards, so she had to unexpectedly clear the paddock that lead from the main road to the stockyards, and those cattle were nowhere near the gate. However, she soon had them moving sedately to the right paddock. They were in three completely separate groups so she’d had to do this three times in her little atv.

She’s fenced off the caves with artwork, so that animals don’t destroy it. She gets aboriginal advice whenever she does something like this, and she didn’t just fence off the caves, but enough area to ensure the ecosystem remains. The cave we went to had been a place of refuge according to the experts, and there was water readily available through a soak. 

Although this is desert, this is in the subartesian area, where the permeable sandstone base allows water to flow into the great artesian basin, and springs or soaks exist that allow a small amount of water to come up. The water hasn’t reached the depths where it starts to be heated up. The desert uplands are mainly wooded, but there have been three good years, so there’s a lot of grass around. The eucalyptus trees don’t have the spread out canopy that you normally associate with eucalypts because they’re in the desert. She hasn’t counted the number of different plant species she has, but she has over 220 birds. Because she doesn’t overstock, and she’s in a biodiversity hotspot, there are a lot of different plants everywhere you look. Also, because of the size of the property, there are different types of species in different places.

Barcaldine to Blackall

Barcaldine is the location of the Tree of Knowledge. Or, at least, it was until someone poisoned it with roundup in 2016 and it died. It was called the tree of knowledge because shearers met under the tree before and during the shearers strike in 1891.

Sheep do very well here. It’s quite different now, but when I was young just about everywhere the farmland was devoted to wheat and sheep. Cattle happened where sheep and wheat didn’t. We had 20 times as many sheep as people. Queensland, which has very few sheep now, was the centre of wool production, but sheep were everywhere. And Barcaldine was the centre of the Queensland sheep.

Sheep need a large itinerant workforce of shearers, so in the late 1800s, shearers started to unionise so they could get reasonable wages for the work they were doing. In Queensland they formed three unions. They met and talked outside the railway station where there was a big ghost gum, which became known as the tree of knowledge.

As a colony, Australia was very dependent upon British prices for everything. We were discouraged from having a manufacturing industry. Britain wanted to manufacture everything - it’s the same problem that they had with the American colonies. So, although we produced an enormous amount of wool, we didn’t have a woollen manufacturing sector, and Britain dictated prices. Prices were low in 1890. The sheep farmers decided to lower the price they paid shearers, and when the unions went on strike, they imported shearers from NSW and Victoria (remember that they were different nations) to break the strike. The military were called in to protect the imported labour, and the police were also involved. Over nine thousand shearers and their dependents were camped outside towns in Queensland, there was a protest march through Barcaldine of over a thousand shearers, the ringleaders were arrested, convicted and jailed. It’s one of the three rebellions in Australian history - the rum rebellion, the eureka rebellion, and the shearer’s strike. 

It wasn’t a one off. The 1890s were a bad time in Australia. We had a severe drought, rabbit numbers exploded and they denuded the soil in outback Australia causing dust storms that removed the topsoil. The soil has yet to recover. There was another, more bitter shearer’s strike in 1894.

As a result of the shearer’s strike, the unions amalgamated into the Australian Workers Union, which is still one of our major unions, and the unions decided to encourage all their members to vote. The Australian Labor Party was formed under the tree of knowledge. When it won government in Queensland in 1899, it was the first labour government in the world. It’s still our major left party. And it started in Central Queensland, in what is currently the most right wing electorate in Australia.

Early in the morning I walked along Lagoon Creek (where the camp was). The sign there talked about the Uplands Desert biome which is a biodiversity hotspot. Barcaldine is its most westerly extent, so it must start at the western side of the great dividing range.

The Australian Workers museum is located in Barcaldine and I visited it today. I wasn’t very impressed. Somehow, people decide to build these swanky places with not much information, but with cool architecture and landscaping that turn me off. This exhibition was better than most. They used old buildings that had been relocated here - a police station, train station and school, from some of the other ends of the state. This land was originally a school, and some of the old school buildings are still there. However, information in it differed from information I’d collected from elsewhere.

There’s also an historical museum in Barcaldine. It’s full of interesting stuff - perhaps too full. But I enjoyed it.

Once I’d seen the museum, it was time to leave Barcaldine to journey to my farmstay. 

I was met at the gate by the owner, who led me to the campsite four kilometres away inside the property. It’s near a salt lake that has the remains of a number of aboriginal campsites that I could explore. The unseasonable rain and floods had made the other people who were due to come cancel their stay, so the aboriginal guide wasn’t coming either and I had the entire campground to myself. The campground had a shower and flush toilet, so it was a cut above the campgrounds I’ve been at in Carnarvon Gorge.

The station is in the Uplands Desert Biome, and like all the ones around, it’s a cattle farm. 

Aramac

It’s reasonably common for a town to be named after a person, but this town was named after Sir Robert Ramsey Mackenzie, who carved RR Mac into a tree when he was exploring the area. Consequently another explorer named the watercourse Aramac Creek, and the town eventually became Aramac. It was originally Marathon, which is a town in the Queensland Railway song. However, it must be a different Marathon. This partly explains why I decided to visit Aramac today. When they were planning railways in Queensland, they decided to put the railway line through Barcaldine rather than Aramac. However, the good people of Aramac (which is one of the oldest towns in the area) decided to build their own branch line joining Aramac to Balcaldine, and thus the Aramac Tramway was born. It ran until 1975. I don’t think there are any other railway lines in Australia that were run by town councils.

A more important reason I visited Aramac today is that this was where Captain Starlight had his adventures. He was a cattle duffer - he stole cattle, walked them to another market (in this case South Australia) and sold them there. This wasn’t a venture for the faint hearted, as it’s a very long distance, through desert. However, that year there had been exceptional rains in the area, and it worked. Or it would have, except that one of the 1000 cattle stolen was a prize white bull specially bought from England for 500 pounds. White bulls were quite unusual (one might say unique), and it was traced. When Captain Starlight was tried (in Roma), he refused to have anyone who was well dressed on the jury, and the jury decided he was innocent. The judge said “Thank god, gentlemen, that verdict is yours and not mine”. The court in Roma was adjourned for two years after this. In his subsequent career as a cattle duffer, he was later acquitted of two other charges, but was finally convicted on a third occasion. He is quite famous as his exploits were recorded in “Robbery under Arms” a fairly popular Australian book. It’s thought that one reason he was acquitted was that he’d developed a new droving route.

While I was in Aramac I visited the library museum and the tramway museum to find out more about these.

However, the other reason I visited Aramac was to see the 200km sculpture loop. This was fantastic! Milynda Rogers has created 40 sculptures and placed them along three roads, forming a triangle. Most of the sculptures are impeccably located and beautifully executed. They enhance a scenic drive. Only one of the roads is paved, and the recent rains have made short sections of the dirt roads somewhat challenging to drive, as the churned up mud has solidified. But it was still very worthwhile.

Emerald to Barcaldine

Before I left Emerald this morning, I visited the Big Easel. It’s an easel twenty metres high, with the largest reproduction of a Van Gogh painting in the world. You have to ask why? Evidently Emerald used to be the centre for sunflower production in Australia, and the painting is one of his famous sunflower paintings. I also visited the Emerald Railway Station which was built in 1900 and is quite pretty. I got a pie from the shop that advertises itself as making the best pies in Central Queensland. It was a great pie.

My journey today from Emerald to Barcaldine was quite different from the past few days. It was along the Tropic of Capricorn, a road suitably named the Capricorn highway. So one side of the road was in the subtropics, while the other was in the tropics. I couldn’t tell the difference. 

This road was much more populated. Emerald is the largest city in the central highlands and there’s a large dam nearby which allows the area to be irrigated, and to grow orchards and other crops including cotton. Not far from Emerald are the central gem fields, one of the largest producers of sapphires in the world. There are plenty of places where anyone can go fossicking, and there is a lot of tourist infrastructure including campgrounds to support this. But there are a number of other small towns further along the way - one called Alpha where I got a really nice smoothie, and one called Bogantungan which is somewhat infamous. Bogantungan features prominently in the Queensland railway line song. However, there was also a train crash where the bridge over the river had disappeared because of a flood just before the train tried to cross over. This happened only a year after the song was written. The train still goes through these towns but they’re too small for it to stop at either of them.

I was also going west, toward desert, rather than through country that had similar weather conditions. The Great Dividing Range was gradually disappearing behind me. For a long time, I was going through fairly flat country with a range in the distance. About 130kms from Barcaldine, there was thirty kilometres of windy road to negotiate. Just about at the end, there was a notice Great Dividing Range 444 metres - similar to others I’ve seen which indicate that you’re at the top of the range. A few metres further on, a sign told me that I was now in the Lake Eyre catchment. I’d just crossed the continental divide - only 100kms from Barcaldine! That’s a lot further from the coast than I would have thought.

From there on the land was absolutely flat. It still had trees and grass - it’s mainly grassland, and it’s pretty, but it’s definitely flat.

The Queensland roads people think that drivers travelling along this highway are prone to fatigue, so they have a trivial quiz along the road, and suggest that you play trivia questions as you travel it. 

At last I reached Barcaldine, found my caravan park and settled in.