Longreach

Longreach is in central Queensland, nearly 700km inland from Rockhampton. It makes the most of its rich history and we found plenty to occupy ourselves for a full week here.

Many Australians would know Longreach as the birthplace of Qantas. Whilst this isn't strictly true - the company was inaugurated in nearby Winton in 1921 before deciding to set up Australia's first purpose built airstrip and aircraft hangar at Longreach, as this was the end of the rail line. The Qantas Founders Museum gives an exhaustive history of the company and its founders, as well as providing a good understanding of the area and society at the time. There are quite a few original and replica aircraft on site, and we did the tours of a 747 jumbo jet and Qantas' first ever international jet, sleek 707. The latter had gone through several sales after Qantas was finished with it before ending up in the hands of a Saudi Royal. The interior is basically as it was when the museum acquired it, apart from some items such as the crystal chandeliers that the Saudi's removed before the sale. Unfortunately one of the conditions of sale was that no one is allowed to take any photos of the interior, so to get a glimpse into a world of luxury that most of us wouldn't even dream of then you have to do the tour. The 747 tour was also interesting, despite us having flown on many of these planes, as we got a look at parts of the plane that a passenger doesn't normally see. John even got to sit in the cockpit! We spent a full day at the museum, then went back for another couple of hours the next day to finish off the bits we still hadn't seen.

Another full day was spent at the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre. As well as displays on almost every conceivable aspect of outback life and history, there was a one hour live show of horses, camels, sheep dog and even a bullock team. We went back to the 'Cattlemen's Grill' here for John's birthday dinner last night - out here in the outback there aren't a lot of restaurant options that don't focus on steak!

Not content with just looking at things in museums, we also managed to experience some outback history for ourselves on a stagecoach ride. This was much more comfortable than we had expected, the bullock hide stabilisers slung underneath the carriage do an excellent job, at least while the horses were cantering along, when they broke into a brief gallop things rocked and rolled a bit much for comfort! The noise was incredible, hence the definitely non-period wireless headsets we are wearing to hear the commentary, but the dust coming in the open carriage windows was pretty authentic!

On one morning we did a tour of the local agriculture college, which was supposed to take an hour but stretched out to almost two. We also wanted to do some walking on the town common, but we found that the trails marked on the map we'd got from the info centre didn't exist in reality, and given the warning signs about snakes at the entrance gate we certainly weren't interested in forging our own path through the long grass.

Longreach is inordinately proud of Harry Redford, who stole up to 1,000 head of cattle in 1870 and drove them down to Adelaide. Amongst the herd was a white bull specially imported from Britain, and when sold in South Australia the bull was recognised, which ultimately led to Harry's arrest and trial. Despite everyone acknowledging that Harry had indeed stolen the cattle, he was found not guilty, apparently causing the judge to say "I thank God that the verdict is yours, gentlemen, and not mine". We drove 45km along a 4wd track to the lookout supposedly used by Harry and his men to keep an eye out while they were gathering the cattle, it would certainly have been a good place for it as it was the only hill rising out of the flat plains that stretch out as far as the eye can see. We spent the rest of the day visiting Muttaburra, where the virtually complete skeleton of a dinosaur was found in the 1950s - the replica in town is almost as cute as its name, Muttaburrasaurus Langdoni, Aramac, with a statue commemorating Harry Redford's famous white bull, and Ilfracombe, which didn't have anything much but we walked around checking it out anyway.



Just when we thought we'd done everything we could fit into a week, we heard on the local radio that sheep dog trials were being held at the Longreach showgrounds, so went down to have a look. To our surprise we were the only spectators who weren't actually involved in showing dogs themselves, everyone was very friendly and explained the rules of the game, which required the owners to get their dogs to herd three sheep to various marked out areas, including over a ramp and finally into a pen, all within an allotted time of 12 minutes. In the hour or so we spent watching the best score we saw was 88 out of a possible 100, with several dogs failing to get the sheep around the course in the allowed time. Having seen such trials on TV when we lived in NZ it was interesting to see it in real life, although the course was a lot dustier than the NZ ones!