Queensland Outback Tour - Blackall to Barcaldine

Blackall to Barcaldine - 108km, Fuel 10.0L/100km

Australian Heritage Workers Centre

I'm not going to rave about fuel consumption again but a new record low again today ... just sayin.

To say we were pleased to leave Blackall Caravan Park would be to understate the obvious. Despite the rave reviews it had in several places, it was a dud for us. Sue had a warm shower this morning ... well, mostly warm but spiced with cold. Having left at or earliest convenience - Sue had to be served breakfast for Mother's Day - we sought out a cafe since we had time on our hands and a short distance to drive. By some perverse sense of fate, we went to the place where the wedding reception had been the previous night but having waited for five or six minutes to be attended to and received three "I'll be with you in a minute mate", the last with "you can see we are busy" as an addendum, I left.

It was Sunday and everything else was shut except the petrol station. Here, I encountered my only friendly face in 24 hours and his was a young man born in Pakistan.

The 100k sign couldn't come quick enough.

It was a short and uneventful trip to Barcaldine, accompaned by Melanie Safka, Sue's Mother's Day choice of music.

After booking in and setting up, we went to the Australian Heritage Workers Centre, a place we had visited in 1995 with my parents and the kids. I snapped a shot which replicated the family shot we took then. It's still an excellent museum which tells several different stories well but the most dominant is the plight of shearers in the late 19th century and the Shearers Strike of 1891 over conditions and pay. It happened after several rowdy meetings under a Ghost Gum outside of the Barcaldine Railway Station and a street procession. Barcaldine was only in its infancy as a town but the railway bought shearers to town, from where they could be taken out to the big stations at shearing time. 13 of the shearers we arrested, tried and sent to St Helena Island Prison. Most served two and a half years.

The tree became the symbol of the workers and was dubbed the Tree of Knowledge. It was under this tree that the organisation which was to become the Australian Labor Party was formed, making it bby far the oldest political party in Australia. We saw the tree in 1995, with much of its trunk cemented to keep it standing but in 2006, an unknown person poisoned the tree and killed it. The local council had already transplanted part of the tree and it now grows strongly at the Workers Heritage Centre. There are so many excellent displays and information to absorb. Included in the grounds is the huge tent used as part of the Bicentennial Australian Tour of tents and trucks which toured Australia, defining Australia until 1988 through state of the art displays.

We'll be returning to complete the exhibits in the morning as it was too much for one sitting.

The amazing Tree of Knowledge
Memorial

Down in town where the Capricorn Highway ends and the Lansborough Highway takes a right angled left hand bend and continues to Longreach, we visited the Tree Of Knowledge site. In place of the old tree, the trunk and branches have been synthetically petrified, left leafless and bare and have been encased in a giant wooden cube of slats whose base is several metres off the ground, allowing ingress by pedestrians. Inside, varying lengths of timber hang from the high glass ceiling, bumping gentle together in any breeze. In the evenings, when properly lit, the outside of the cube creates the illusion of the shape of the former tree.

It is an amazing piece of sculpture, well and truly one of the most captivating I have seen, even if only viewed from an engineering perspective. Of course, to only see its technical achievement, as such, is to completely miss the point and blind yourself to the poignancy and beauty of the installation. We walked around and under it for a long time.

Click to see today's photos

Back at the campsite at Barcaldine Tourist Park, our host Jeff had prepared a damper and billy tea cooked over coals and most of the guests sat in a sharing circle and told tales of where they had been which devolved into morning meaningful thoughts on life in general. The group then broke up and folks continued chatting in smaller groups. It was a bonza hour or so.