Waltzing along the Matilda Highway

Yep…a bull riding, singing cowboy!

Longreach is known as the birthplace of QANTAS, starting out as a bi-plane mail-carrying service for the Outback towns, growing into the behemoth passenger airline it is today. A trip to the Founders Museum included a tour through a 747-200 and a 707 that had once been converted to a luxury private jet, and hired by the Jackson Five for one of its concert tours.   Longreach is also the home of the Stockman’s Hall of Fame, a museum dedicated to those unique Aussie’s who have made their home on the Outback cattle stations. Here we stayed in a massive 300+ site caravan park, not much more than a huge dusty field but Ben had booked an en-suite pitch, which meant your own little bathroom in a cabin next to your site – very civilised!

Ensuite to the right!

From here we travelled further west across to the little town of Winton (population 1,000), an area famous as the birthplace of the popular Aussie song Waltzing Matilda, written by AB (Banjo) Patterson during a visit in 1895 – Ollie & Cameron have gotten quite good at singing it now!  Winton is more recently known for its unique dinosaur fossil finds, and the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum home to two new species of dinosaurs nicknamed Banjo & Matilda. Here they also have a large working dinosaur lab where they are trying to work their way through hundreds of massive bones from recent digs – staffed by mainly volunteers with an interest in palaeontology – if only Ollie was 12 he would have signed up there and then!  Then if that wasn’t enough awesome dinosaur-ness we went to see the Lark Quarry Dinosaur Stampede, a moment 95 million years ago when 250 dinosaurs were scattered by a large meat-eater and left their tracks in a muddy riverbank, it was quite humbling.

In Winton we stayed next to the Outback’s version of a gastro-pub, the Tattershall Arms, and the tucker was awesome! Multi-talented Winton is also Opal Mining territory, and supplies over 95% of the world’s opals – but after our last back-breaking dig we decided we didn’t like opals that much.

Speaking of mining, our next stop was Mt Isa, or The Isa, as the locals call it. The town is home to Australia’s biggest mine, and it’s quite extraordinary to see the mine dominating the landscape, giving you a good idea of the scale of this operation. In true traveller style we had booked an old mine tour (health and safety means you can’t go in the big one) with a humorous ex-miner who takes you down 20 metres in ‘the cage’, demonstrating the noisy equipment and rumbling big trucks underground. The boys even got to press the explosives switch to hear what it would sound like. It was a quirky & unusual tour and typically Aussie in flavour. We also went to see the Underground Hospital here, constructed in old mine tunnels during WWII in anticipation of a Japanese air force attack, run by a couple of charming and enthusiastic local volunteers.

Underground hospital

Controlled burning to reduce risk of bush-fires.

The School of the Air is something I was particularly interested in visiting, being a teacher. This is teaching Outback style, over the two-way radio, or now via telephone and online, for over 150 kids who live on the cattle & sheep stations too far from a normal school. We watched an English lesson with Mrs Pollard, to 5 Year 2 students studying Roald Dahl that was fun and it was great to hear the kids talk about how they related it to their own different lifestyles. Many teenagers now head off to boarding school, but for the younger ones this is an invaluable service that has been running since 1960. Most stations also have live-in governesses (teachers) who work with the School of the Air to deliver the curriculum, and there are always jobs available, a year in the Outback with no neighbours for thousands of acres – interested?

From Mt Isa, we headed northwest along the Barkley Highway, where there is nothing between the roadhouses (petrol stations) for hundreds of kilometres, apart from a landscape of red dust and termite mounds, and the occasional scattering of hardy looking bush cattle. We had an overnight at Tennant Creek, an interesting place, where many Aboriginal communities live, sadly, with an air of depression, lack of opportunities and alcohol related issues, putting us in mind of the Indian reservations we saw in the USA; issues far too complex for us to have any real understanding of.

Travel classroom!

Our trusty ‘wiki-camps’ app, recommended a ‘free camping’ site, a waterhole in the bush, about 12 kilometres off a dusty track from the highway. In a seemingly never-changing landscape, it was something of a revelation to come across a large inland lake surrounded by wide grass edges perfect for camping. So lovely in fact we stayed here for 3 days, far from civilisation, electricity and noise – bliss! The stars here were so clear that you could see the milky way cut across the night sky like a large white stripe from horizon to horizon, something I don’t think I’ve seen before, and even 2 other smaller galaxies far, far away!

We were lucky to be camped within “coo-ee” distance of a fantastic couple from WA, Peter and Anne, who loaned the boys their Australian bird book, so we were soon spotting spoonbills, pelicans, darters, egrets, kites, brolgas, and herons, becoming proper twitchers by the end of it.  And at night shared travelling stories, and marshmallows around the campfire. What a surprising few days!

The waterhole at night – magical!