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 win 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 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.