Today we headed back up the road about an hour to Longreach. When we were planning out the holiday, we wanted to do things in both Barcaldine and Longreach – but with trying to squeeze so much into the holiday, and wanting to try and avoid overnight stays in towns unless we needed to, we decided to do two nights in Barcaldine and just travel back to Longreach.
The first stop was at the Longreach School of Distance Education. We had visited the Alice Springs School of the Air, but we were still looking forward to seeing how a things might be different in another state. And Longreach definitely is quite different to Alice Springs, even if the principles are all the same. We heard so many similarities about the history of distance education, and how important it has become to kids living remotely. Kids still come into town regularly for what they call “clusters”, where all the students gather together. But one interesting difference we found was how much bigger the Longreach school is – there are 27 studios (which are their online classrooms) where the teachers teach from. In Alice Springs, I think there was only a handful. Each grade in Longreach has their own teacher, and two in some instances, across the 190 students. It definitely seems to be a really well resourced school. As well as hearing about how school works for the kids and teachers, we were taken on a short tour of the school property, which was great to see. They’ve just finished repurposing a building on site which has now become “Quarters” where up to 80 kids can stay on site, which makes things so much easier for families when kids visit town.
The second stop to day was at the Qantas Founders Museum, virtually across the road from the Longreach SODE, at the eastern end of Longreach. We started with some lunch in their cafe, which was lovely and simple, but delicious. And then we headed into the museum. It was full of so much information about the history of Qantas, and some incredible artefacts that have been collected over the years. We wandered through there for quite a while, and there were a few exhibits also aimed at the kids which freed Debbie and I up to just look and enjoy.
After a while, we headed outside to see the DC3 aircraft that is on display, and climbed in for a look around. The next part of the tour took us into the original Qantas hangar, which houses De Havilland DH61 and DH50 replica aircrafts. Both are just amazing, and it’s incredible to think this is how commercial aviation started! There is a bunch of information around the hangar as well, including a display on light towers that were used across Western Queensland in some of the first night flights – kind of like huge lighthouses, but for inland!
After finishing up at the Qantas Museum, we started the trip back towards Barcaldine. But we pulled up only 15 minutes down the road in the little town of Ilfracombe. On the side of the road through town is a display of old farm and other machinery, called the Machinery Mile. We’d spotted it both on our way into Barcaldine yesterday, and again this morning on our way back to Longreach – so we decided to pull up and go for a wander along and look at everything. Such a huge display of machinery from across a long stretch of decades! After we finished, we checked out the Wellshot Hotel just across the road – well known for its fun barstools! We had a juice and some soft drinks and a bit of afternoon tea and then got back on the road to Barcaldine.
Packing up again tonight – tomorrow is a long drive out to Rockhampton! And hopefully we’ll have a bit of time to do a couple of things in Emerald as well.
