Outback Queensland road trip Day 11 Exploring Longreach

By the numbers
7.10kms
8,966 steps
1 Tour
1 random Museum
This would be our last day in Longreach and I think we have had a good time exploring in the town. The night before the people who ran the tour group thanked us all for spending money in the towns as we went as there is a little extra money floating around. I couldn’t say it was a city as it doesn’t have a Coles, Woolies, Maccas or even a KFC. I wasn’t exactly expecting that as I thought Longreach was a little bigger.

The plan for the day was to do a tour that mum had found and I decided to put in for so that we could go on it. We would get to see how the school of the air worked, these days called school of distance education. We would soon learn this school was one of many located in Queensland like in Cairns, Cloncurry and Brisbane. The students do physically show up at certain times and the curriculum is ran at home by either a mother or governess. If a child misses a subject like say English they then can access it later as a recording as they would miss the interaction. The school has changed with technology from computers we now have, from radio that have a limited range to correspondence where the school stuff was posted to the property and posted back to the teacher taking months to be marked. They also have school excursions once a year to the coast or the next year to the snow. They did go to the Gold Coast and every 2 years there is a show the school performs and this year they will be located in Brisbane. The school goes until year 10 and there are other distance schools that do years 11 and 12, or they go to boarding school somewhere like say Brisbane or Cloncurry. When part of the school physically they wear a school uniform, but that’s about it. It was good that we got a short tour around the school grounds and there were displays of statues built with off shoots of what was found in sheds by fathers helping their kids as it was during a drought to take the parents minds off it.

We took off into town to see the information centre as we were wanting to know about some roads to Hughenden. I was thinking of going from Muttaburra and then to Hughenden, but after some advice from the lady who happened to have lived in Muttaburra, it was recommended not to use that road at all. It was better to use the Winton road to there as there were more cars if you had issues like break down. Considering Muttaburra was an hour from Longreach and then to turn around would end up being 2 hours to Winton. At least we now know and wont attempt roads that we cant handle. There has been a little rain down at Windorah that has closed the road so we have been really lucky on that front. We learnt our lesson with a road trying to get to the cemetery as well. My boots collect mud over the last few days.

The Longreach wander starts from that point as we enjoyed a beautiful day in the hot sun. Next to the information centre was the QANTAS Park as you need one of them with being part of the Qantas heritage trail that heads to Cloncurry. Beside the council chambers is the marker for the tropic of Capricorn and the further we went there was a bee hive in a long that had carvings on them. What I was wanting to do was visit the train station. It was a little busy with several bus’ as they were doing a tour and loading people on. You could book a bus and train tour, although I havnt looked into this one. The train station was just a small country type station with a booking office for the train / bus tour and a couple of things from the past. We ended up on a wander to a saddlery where I got a new belt.

The next destination was to a powerhouse museum. I didn’t know anything about this museum apart from old vehicles out the front and something about a bore. The museum was more than that. It had a little about the local history and the main part of the museum was about the large machines in a room and how they generated electricity for the town of Longreach and the people who worked on them in hot sweating conditions. The machines were loud and could be heard for several kilometres and were even turned off when the council thought people could get by on moonlight. There was also changes with new buildings being built that had different electrical voltage charges as they were DC when everything had been on the voltage for AC. It was interesting walking around and having a look at everything. The substation in Barcaldine eventually took the load with Longreach only being used during peak times. There was a cottage from the NoGo station that had a static display of how a house was set up for the days in the past when they had no electrics. The nearby swimming pool had been filled with heated bore water and took days to cool down, but was eventually filled up. The pool would be excavated for archaeological treasures and there was a bit of rubbish from the powerhouse and from around town as well.

Once we were done at the museum, we went to see an arts centre in a heritage listed house that I had not noticed was the old ambulance station from the 1920s. Once I walked outside and looked I fully realised, but I thought the arts side of things was interesting. It did explain why there was a small display of medical books and about Queensland ambulance. A painting inside the building showed what it looked like when it was in operation, which was a lot different to now. By this time I wanted to get back to get some washing done before we moved on the next day. I checked the machine it was free I grabbed my stuff I lost the game of wills. I had the waiting game that worked out in the end.