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.