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.
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