Touring Knights

When we left Dunblane the plan was we would pretty much be on the road moving daily until we reached Griffith, NSW. So with 3-4 hours on the road every day , that doesn’t give me much material to blog about  , but you can usually find something. Barcladine: shearer’s strike and the tree of knowledge  In the history of Australia there has only been two armed insurrections  between white settlers and government backed forces. The first was the 1854 Eureka revolt, the second was the 1891 shearers strike in Barcladine. In May 1891 at least 3000 striking shearer’s marched under the Eureka flag , protesting against poor working conditions and low wages , beneath the boughs of the tree of Knowledge ( a ghost gum) located outside the Barcladine train station. Unfortunately their strike was unsuccessful however  The strike and the dramatic happens thereafter at the base of the “Tree of Knowledge” Marked the beginnings of the working man’s voice in Queensland. In 1892 at the f...

Dunblane station is a 15 000 hectare commercial sheep station about 8 kms west of Barcladine. We found this place by chance, I was scrolling through a travelling  face book group I follow, around the time we decided to change our path to Melbourne, earlier in the trip and seen a post saying how much the person has enjoyed staying there . I mentioned it to gadget and he looked into it and booked us in.  Our campsite was remote , so no one else around, no. Passing traffic, just us , the sheep, cows, Kestrels, Emu’s and Kangaroos. The site had power available and water if we needed it. We brought some fire wood off the owner and it was waiting for us on our arrival. We settled in and just relaxed. The water tank had several nests , and we soon learned we had a baby and adult Kestrel. We lit the fire and gadget got to work making our famous family favourite, Hobo stew. Basically it’s when we just throw any left overs we have into the camp oven with mince and canned veges and other...

We didn't stop at Longreach overnight,  we had previously stayed there back in 2019, but unfortunately on that occasion we didn't get to visit the QANTAS museum , so we decided to grab that opportunity this time. The plane in the above image behind our tour guide Mark is a perfect replica of the first QANTAS plane. I’m not going to document the full history of QANTAS because it is really quite a large and interesting story. However QANTAS commenced with Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness whom met whist serving in the Australian flying corps during world war 1. They recognised the commercial potential of Aviation, this was further solidified whilst they assisted in surveying and assisting to build runways for the Great Air race  from the UK to Australia.  With the backing of Fergus McMaster a grazier, QANTAS was incorporated in 1920 in Winton, Western Queensland. They were later joined by Arthur Baird an aircraft engineer and this was the founding members of the company. ...

On our second day, we again chose to do a tour with Red Dirt tours out to Carrisbrooke station and the lark quarry dinosaur stampede site.  A lot of people often comment to us about why would you pay for a tour? Well because you learn a lot and often get more information than you would learn yourself and you get to see things you wouldn’t otherwise see. It also supports the local economy. Our lovely tour guide Ange was very informative about the area and had us all enthralled , as we drove along she pointed things out, like the fence posts made from a particular type of local tree, that is extremely weather resistant, explaining that the fences we could see were potentially 80 or 90 years old. She also explained why the area has very few trees growing. It’s because they have a black soil plain. This is due to the area 95 million years ago having sand and silt deposits from the retreating inland sea. It is because of this soil that they find the dinosaur fossils , as the soil and th...

We travelled from Cloncurry to Winton on the 30th of July, it was windy and we were driving straight into it. Absolutely awful for fuel economy , but we made it safely which is all that matters. I was tidying up some lose ends on the crochet rug i’ve been working on, on and off and just couldn’t resist taking this photo. Anyway to the interesting stuff We went to the  Australian Age of Dinosaurs museum And we loved it. Despite the lovely blue skies it was freezing. The museum is located just out of Winton on what they colloquially call a jump up. Basically a hill but it has shear drop off’s on the side, i ll try and explain it later. Anyway it was blowing a gale.  Above is what they call a negative fossil, this fossil is fifty four metres long and was found by accident by a local farmer. It was named the snake creek track site.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately as i will explain in a minute, it was left in the paddock for several years before its importance was recog...