DAYS 142 - : GOLD COAST

18 August, 2010.     We arrived in Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast having travelled about 5,000 kms from Broome....    The caravan park is tucked away between the towers.....

 Playground and Park in front of Burleigh Beach Caravan Park.......

 Entrance to Caravan Park...............

Our spot - site 85.........

 Towards evening hundreds of Rainbow Loriceets fly into Trees of the Caravan Park, I shot these Pictures through the Rooftop Vent of the Caravan.

 First Class Amenities..............

 That's looking from the Park towards the Beach.............

 Looking south...........

Wolfgang walking north on the same spot...... Surfers Paradise in the background.........

The next two photographs are from Wolfgang's trip last year - they show the comparison of a similar shot and one taken when the dust storms from outback Queensland obliterated the scene........

Currumbin Beach looking towards Coolangatta......

                                                 looking from Coolangatta towards Surfers.........

 

Bush Turkey at the Lookout.....

 Looking down onto Rainbow Beach this spot is good for Whale watching......

Paradise in Trouble

 The following Pictures show how a recent Storm which badly eroded the Beaches on the Gold Coast....

Southend of Burleigh Beach, a 2 meter drop only a few meters away from the Foodpath

 

 

Three days after the Storm most Beaches are still closed and the damage is substantial

the following Pictures are taken from Broadbeach..........

This is looking at Burleigh Beach from the Lookout at the Surfers end and it is not

looking too bad most of the damage was done the other end were the Towers are.....

That's looking towards Surfers were the Beach has virtually disappeared ,enlarge this Picture

and you will see the erosion's on the Dunes....

  

The Beach at Surfers is devastated...

 

In the Background you can see Council Officials checking out the Damage..

Repair work is already underway....

A bit over a week after the Storm hit the Gold Coast,  everything is back to normal and as good as Gold

even the Sea got its sparkling blue color back, maybe that's why the call it the Gold Coast.....

DAYS 139-141 : AUGATHELLA, ROMA, TOOWOOMBA

15-17 August, 2010.   In Longreach I (Bev) ended up at the hospital with a rash on my legs and arm which was beginning to get out of control....   I itched to death and didn't get much sleep, then with all the medication the next few days passed in a bit of a whirl.....   After leaving Longreach we drove to Barcaldine, then south through Blackall and camped about 40 kms north of Augathella.....   On the road the next day we stopped in the pretty little town of Morven for lunch..... .....

  geese welcomed us in the park

There was an interesting little museum with an old kerosene tin hut..... during the Depression kerosene was used for fuel and heating and people used the tin containers to build cheap housing....

(click to enlarge)

At Morven the highway turned east towards Brisbane.  We continued on through Mitchell (named after Major Mitchell) and had a late lunch in the lovely town of Roma.... 

A further 40 km west we spend the night free camping at Wallumbilla Showgrounds, here you see the
welcoming entrance to the Showgrounds.......

...  There were provisions to hook up to Water & Power but was not needed as we still had enough
      resources on board......

 The next day we travelled on through Miles, Chinchilla, Dalby and Toowoomba where we free camped again on the bend of a river.....

DAYS 137 & 138 : LONGREACH

13 & 14 August, 2010.  Longreach is a great town with lots of things to see and do.... among them the famous "Stockmen's Hall of Fame"....   a tribute to the history and pioneers who made this country what it is...

Inside the hall are all sorts of interesting exhibits.....

The Qantas museum where it all started as the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service.....

An early Qantas plane dwarfed by a set of 747 wheels in front..........

The 1916 wooden Longreach Railway Station......

DAY 136 : COMBO WATERHOLE

 12 August, 2010   A short way out of Cloncurry we turned further south onto the Landsborough Highway - otherwise known as the Matilda Highway - as this is that part of the outback which inspired Banjo Patterson to write "Waltzing Matilda".  100 kms down the road we stopped at the town of McKinlay.... here is the
Walkabout Creek Hotel which was the pub in the film "Crocodile Dundee". 

On the side of the pub was an old iconic Australian sign for XXXX Beer

In a pretty little park we had morning tea and shared our food with the gregarious Apostle birds.... they love to roost together and cuddle up.......

About 80 kms further on, just past the town of Kyuna, we headed off the road for about 12 kms towards Combo Waterhole.  In the early days the owners of  Dagwood Station here "dammed" up their waterholes with stone overruns* and several stock routes and, later, Cobb & Co coaches stopped at these permanent water sources.  It was while Banjo Patterson was in the area visiting his fiancee's family that the owners of Dagwood invited him on a picnic to the Combo Waterhole and it was there, so legend has it, that he wrote "Waltzing Matilda".

On the road into "The Combo".....

Cobb &  Co in the area in earlier days......

Our caravan next to one of the waterholes.................

In a Tree next to the Caravan a Galah was feeding his young....

The stone over runs helped to dam the water.  These were probably built using Chinese labourers but their workmanship was so good that they still do the job over a hundred years on.........

An over run today...........   *When the river was high the water could still "over run" or flow over these structures but when the water was low they served to contain the water in a kind of dam.

A monument marks the spot where Banjo wrote his famous poem.... later a song.   (It was while Banjo was visiting this area that he learnt about the expression of  a swagman carrying his swag as "waltzing Matilda".  During this time there was a lot of unrest with the shearers and farm hands striking because of low wages.  He would have heard the story of a local man who set many farm buildings on fire in protest but when the Police or Troopers came to arrest him he jumped into a billabong to avoid arrest and drowned.  Out of this "unionised" movement the Australian Labour Party was formed and Queensland had the first Labour government in the world.)

This pretty, tiny wattle has been a curse in this cattle country with its long, spiney prickles....   millions of bushes impeded the movement of cattle and sometimes kept them away from water........

.....  another "interesting" weed.......

The waterholes attract all sorts of birds..... including this Masked Woodswallow......

And a Black-Faced Woodswallow......

Not a very good photo..... this little fellow was so neverously active that he was hard to shoot....he's a White-Plumed Honeyeater or "Native Canary".....