Cloncurry

We arrived in Cloncurry on the 27th of July

Cloncurry is a lovely little neat country town, with a pretty important role in outback Queensland’s history.

For me this is a name that echoed from my childhood, as my mums (well our whole family really) favourite TV series was a town like Alice, and in the series she has to fly into Cloncurry.

We set Ruby up at the Caravan park and went out for lunch and supplies.

One of the things i loved in the Main Street was they had speakers playing music all down the street.

The next day we got up to explore the town. Sadly on our way through to Cloncurry we passed the Mary Kathleen mining site and it was a fair drive to go back to see, so we gave this a miss and left it for “next time” we are in the area.

We went to the tourist information /museum park in town 

Here we wandered around learning about the local history, how Burke and Wills had passed through this area. 

Outside the indoor museum in the Mary Kathleen sculpture park they had lots of other displays. 

The above sculpture and water tower was created to commemorate the huge resilience of the town. It depicts the devastating 2019 floods , depicting cattle stuck in the mud, or using the railway line as “higher ground” to stay alive.

This ambulance was created in 1925. It is designed to travel on the railway lines, ensuring that outback Queensland had the ability to get sick or injured people to help as quickly and efficiently as possible.

After leaving here we visited the John Flynn place museum

Where for some reason i didn't take any photos.

The museum was excellent with so much information and memorabilia.

John Flynn was  a presbyterian minister who developed a deep passion for the Australian outback.

In 1911 he arrived at a mission in Beltana , SA 

And discovered first hand the difficulties of  outback life

Including the lack of medical care available to the people.

In 1912 he prepared a report for the Presbyterian church outlining his concerns.

His recommendations to create inland missions that provided medical, spiritual and social care to the inland residents and travellers was accepted and he was appointed as the head of the Australian Inland Mission (AIM) service.

In 1917 he received a letter from Lt C Peel, a passionate (24yr old) medical student who inspired Flynn to use aircraft to provide medical care to the sick or injured.

In 1927 he signed an agreement with QANTAS to lease a plane , and the first flight took place in 1928.

And the rest is history. The Royal Flying Doctors Service (RFDS) continues to provide an essential service to the outback

Continuing Flynns mission of “providing a mantel of safety”.

It was in Cloncurry that my musings about everyday deserving its own story really set in my head. I was contemplating what to write in the blog ,

Its all old cliche stuff really, but i think for me at this point in the trip it really solidified in my mind and spurred me to continue this blog and a journal , because everyday deserves to be a story and to be recorded for future generations. 

Until the next blog 

The Touring Knights