0046 Winton to Longreach 5th August

Jumbuks and dinosaurs !!!  As so often happens when you travel on the open road, things are always different from what you expect !!  And often better.

We packed up camp and headed into the Waltzing Matilda centre in Winton. As mentioned yesterday, all around here is where Banjo Patterson got the idea for and composed the song, but Winton is where it was first performed in public.  The centre is excellent, but there is only so much one can talk about a song, so it ends up being more a Winton Museum than a Waltzing Matilda Museum.  Nevertheless, it was most enjoyable, taught us a lot, and I would recommend that anyone travelling through Winton should spend time to visit.  It is right on the high street.

 After that, we bought a couple of bottles of wine at the local pub (our stocks were zero, but it is expensive out here in the country !!), and then headed out of town towards Longreach.  About 10 kms out of town is the other attraction we wanted to see – Dinosaurs !  I knew nothing about these Australian ones, apart from the fact that a few bones had been found locally. The dirt road to the facility winds through flat country, then suddenly climbs up the steep side of a mesa (or jump-up as it is called locally), and at the top is the very environmentally designed facility. The view from the top of the mesa over the surrounding countryside is stunning, and very much the kind of country where you would expect to find dinosaurs.  Basically a local farmer found these bones about 10 or 15 years ago, wondered what they were, and asked the Queensland Uni for help.  To cut a long story short, not only did they turn out to be dinosaur bones, but the dinosaurs are of a type found no where else in the world, in a quantity found no where else in the world, and also their percentage completeness of the bones per animal is as high as 70-80%, which is apparently unheard of.  So they have all these bones, and only a few people and limited funds to excavate the bones they already have, so currently have about 20 years work in their lab already, and their annual digs in the countryside find about 5-10 years worth of work every year !!  The display includes a tour of their labs and workshops, and it is stunning.  Their current hot project is called Wade, and he is of a type of dinosaur that has never been found anywhere else in the world,  If you are interested in palaeontology or dinosaurs, I cannot recommend this place strongly enough.  It is truly incredible.  And I am not really a dinosaur kind of person !

After several hours in the facility we had to leave as we still had 175 kms to go to Longreach.  The long boring road had an incredible amount of road kill on it – roos, emus, wild pigs, feral cats, cattle – At one stage I counted 10 carcases in about 1 km – That is one every hundred yards !!  And those were just the ones I could see – There would have been more just off the road !!  NOT a good place to be driving at dusk.  And the numbers of times we saw almost clouds of kites fly into the air in the middle of the road just as we got to the kill they were gorging themselves on – How we missed hitting several of them at once, heaven knows !  One is ducking inside the car in case one comes through the windscreen. 

Anyway, eventually we pulled into Longreach without hitting any wildlife, or getting any more rock holes in the windscreen, and pulled into the campsite ready to go and explore the Stockman’s Hall of Fame and the birthplace of QANTAS tomorrow.

More bush poetry and stories around the campfire in the campsite tonight, with an old drover recounting tales of his life driving  cattle right across Queensland in the 40’s and 50’s – Just amazing tales.

 

Pics here :-  https://picasaweb.google.com/117739775480775657932/0046WintonToLongreach?authkey=Gv1sRgCJLFlaj3z9DSCA#