And I have fallen behind – it’s been many weeks since the last blog but we have been busy. We’d promised ourselves any number of times that that we wouldn’t race from spot to spot in an effort to see lots of “stuff”, to take a more measured pace along less travelled roads, but the chase is addictive and there is always more “stuff” to see.  So, some decompression was needed and Blackdown National Park provided it.

As ever with National parks, it’s run by the state government (?), each of which has separate Ts&Cs.  It was Queensland’s turn this time so we duly battled with their clunky website and booked a campsite for a few nights.  The website did not allow for caravans but other informants said they were fine (drive to the conditions!).  The park was a hair-raising, narrow, winding and steep drive up the mountain with Lesley passengering on the cliff side (she hated it!), followed by deeply rutted dirt roads at the top but it eventually led to a great campsite in the bush.  Plenty of room for a big caravan if the reverser was skillful (he wasn’t but he was persistent).  A lovely flat site, a big firepit and ATGANI was home again.

Amazingly, the road runs in and out of the National Park in several places.  Collecting firewood in a NP is (as they say in Brazil) a no-bail offence.  But outside parks, roadside collection seems legitimate.  It’s hard to find out the actual rules, but there’s any amount of internet “opinion”, ranging from “knock yourself out” to “you’re going to hell”, but we wanted a fire, so we chose to seek forgiveness rather than permission and nobody took the slightest bit of notice – except for us of course, ‘cos we had excellent fires.

Blackdown has three main attractions – some aboriginal art, some beautiful walks and its proximity to Blackwater (a mere country handful of kilometres away).  The art at Goon Goon Dina is reasonably well protected behind a fence to stop people scratching at it or adding to it.  Mostly a bunch of “hands on a wall” but there was no “sponsored by Dulux” sign in sight.  Does it get re-touched?  Nobody’s sayin’.

The walk to Rainbow Falls, Gudda Gumoo this time, was through scribbly bark forest on top of the cliffs with expansive views down the valley and ended with a 200+ step climb down to the simply gorgeous, sandy-bottomed swimming hole at the bottom of the aforementioned falls.  The water was crystal clear and as cold as charity.  It also boasts its own natural infinity pool.  On the way back up, we passed a small ochre pit where many modern artists have chosen to leave their hands on the wall too – tempting, but we passed the opportunity up.  Cultural misappropriation no doubt!

Back through Blackwater and finally heading west, we aimed at the Gemfields.  Along the way, we saw mountains of coal on the side of the road – presumably, even bigger mountains off the road.  There’s a Coal Discovery Centre but we were unable to find a mine tour.  Sadly therefore, for those many of you wanting to know, I cannot give you the coal extraction yield rate.  This is also magnificent, highly valued grazing country and, as far as we could see, cattle and coal were existing in cheerful truce, if not total harmony.  A day or three later, much closer to the Galilee Basin, we detected a fair bit of enthusiasm for prospective mining there.  Time will tell.

Knowing nothing about Queensland’s Gemfields, the towns of Sapphire and Rubyvale still had a certain ring to them (oh yes, he’s still got it!) but looked pretty disheartening on arrival.  Sapphire seemed no more than a collection of shanties and so we were glad we’d gone for Rubyvale where there was a caravan park, a pub, a strudel café and a jewellery store!

It turned out that the only significant gems found in this part of the world are sapphires and zircons, the sapphires in particular coming in a range of many colours.  Pink sapphires are coloured by chromium and aren’t quite the same as rubies, but we were reliably informed that Chromiumvale didn’t sound quite glamorous enough, so Rubyvale was retained.  All this and more was discovered on the Miners Heritage underground tour, including the resident population of micro bats.  Later we took a drive out to one of the mining claims areas maybe 10km from the pub.  Each miner can make a 50mx50m claim but has to actually work it pretty much all the time.  Any number of forbidding “trespassers will be shot” and “savage dogs” signs, backed up by said savage dogs, encouraged us to remain in our vehicle and try our hands at prospecting elsewhere.

Enter Lady Luck.  Pam runs fossicking tours for folks like us and took us out to dig for gems.  Bucket loads of rubble were dug out of likely ground, sifted through a couple of mesh pans and put in other buckets – all very laborious and dusty.  Then those buckets of sifted gravel were equally laboriously washed and spread out on a table where we picked our way through it, looking for sapphires.  An entire morning was spent cheerfully finding a very small quantity of completely worthless sapphires.  Apparently, some people get the bug, but for us it was yet another example of something that was great fun to do and that never needs doing again.  We left the gemfields far more impressed than when we arrived and we’d even had great strudel from Muggachino’s, made, inevitably, by Lady Luck’s dad!

We then headed for Lake Dunn, a stretch of water that the locals use for water skiing and yabbying.  It also has a range of campsites run by the adjoining (possibly even owning) cattle property “The Lake”.  Its main attraction though, by a country mile (and you know that’s big) is the Sculpture Trail.  A 200km long triangular drive with corners at Aramac, Lake Dunn and the Jericho road, has some 40 scrap-metal sculptures along the way, all by local artist and all-round-genius Mylinda Rogers.  This was so good that a separate post is required – pics tell the story best.

Moving down the page we were passing through Barcaldine, where we spent a few happy Sunday hours (so, not bustling), having a bad coffee and a good look around.  Barcaldine’s pride and joy is the Tree of Knowledge – not unlike the Table of Knowledge that many of us have been known to sit at, where all the problems of the world are resolved, even if somehow the solutions are forgotten by the morning.  The actual Tree was poisoned by some moron in the early 2000’s and has been replaced by a clever and moving (both senses) wooden structure that now defines the space where the dead tree’s branches once lived.  It’s another piece of genius (credit: Brian Hooper and m3architecture).

The Tree is important as it’s where shearers first got serious about striking for better pay and conditions and where graziers first got serious about resisting them, way back in 1891.  Naturally, like the majority of big strikes, it failed in the short term but made for changes in the long.  On this occasion it turned into the birth of the labour movement and eventually the Australian Labor Party as we now know it.  The grazier resistance also led to today’s National Party by a more circuitous route. 

Even knowing all this, we were still determined to head for a sheep station south of Barcaldine, and it was nearly time to shear the rams. What could possibly go wrong?