Blackall

Blackall is about 300km north of our last stop, Charleville, well into the Queensland outback. Despite the fact that last weekend was a 5-day holiday, with Easter and Anzac Day, this weekend is also a Queensland long weekend for May Day - don't these people ever go to work?? For the town of Blackall it was an extra celebration with the local show - we spent an hour or so browsing the country delights, including pig races, the local version of Babe certainly got up a turn of speed!

The major tourist attraction at Blackall is the Woolscour - the only steam driven wool washing installation left in Australia. While no actual wool is washed any more, the steam driven machinery still runs, and the tour was very interesting, not least for the glimpse into a time when Australia actually did value adding to its produce, rather than just shipping all our raw materials over to China. It reminded us of the flour mills that used to exist all over Australia, before we just shipped the wheat overseas.

Blackall also had a quite interesting heritage walk.

We've now got far enough north that the weather is really starting to warm up, with days reaching the high 20s, although nights are still fairly chilly at between 7 and 12 degrees. Still, given how wet the coastal area is right down the east coast, we feel pleased to have come inland.

After leaving Blackall today we stopped at Barcaldine, about 100km further north. Barcaldine was the scene of the great shearers strike in 1891, that later led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. The strike leaders were jailed for their attempt to ensure that all shearing sheds remained closed to union members only, and agitators decided they needed parliamentary representation if they were ever to achieve justice for workers. We visited the Workers Heritage Centre at Barcaldine, which has interesting displays on the strike, plus a lot of other displays related to various workers groups and unions in Queensland. The Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine is a gum tree where early Labor Party organisers met, the local tourist board must have been gutted when it died in 2006 as it was a major tourist attraction in the town, however the dead tree stump has now been tarted up with a covering that supposedly represents the shears on a shearing blade, and it is still drawing in the tourists.