Today was a bit more of a relaxed day. We had a few things we wanted to check out around town, but we also wanted to opt for having some time of doing nothing much at home, ahead of a few days of visiting places and driving over the next 5 or 6 days.
This morning we dropped into the Waltzing Matilda Centre; not to visit the proper display, but just to get a couple of information things and see what was there from an info point of view. After grabbing a coffee and a bit of information from the info centre, we headed for Arno’s Wall – an amazingly unique wall in the centre of Winton. It stretches 70 metres, and is more than 2 metres high, and it has a ridiculous amount of random items built into it! Motorbikes, kitchen sinks, TVs, engines… so many random things. Before we left on this trip in April, Debbie put together an activity book for each of the kids, and one of the activities was an Arno’s Wall bingo. So the kids were really engaged looking through the wall for a whole bunch of different things. They also had to draw a picture of one section of the wall.
Next, we headed just up the road to the Musical Fence. It was originally created in 2003 by a percussionist called Graeme Leak as a giant string instrument in the form of a wire fence connected to a roof which is the acoustic resonator. It also includes a “junk and found” percussion park, which probably gets more of the attention (it certainly did with us!). We all had a great time hitting all the junk things loudly – and particularly on the drum kit.
Behind the Musical Fence is monument to Winton as the birthplace of Qantas. That immediately piqued my interest, because I’d always thought of Longreach as being the birthplace of Qantas! Apparently the locals say that Qantas was conceived in Cloncurry, born in Winton and grew up in Longreach. Winton was the place where the Qantas company was first registered, and the first board meeting was held. The first runway was also established in Winton, right where this monument now stands. Cool bit of Australian history!
We came home for some lunch and to work out what to do next. We did think about heading back to the Waltzing Matilda Centre (which shares the building with the visitor information centre we dropped into this morning) but given we’ll be visiting a bunch of other museum-type centres and displays in the next few days as we get to Longreach and Barcaldine, we thought we would try and save up the kids’ attention spans for those next few days (and I feel very naive thinking that there’s somehow a bank of their attention span that we can save up!). So this afternoon has been enjoying the air-conditioning indoors, playing a couple of games, and also just having a bit of quiet time (for us – but noisy and silly play for the kids… but they love it).
Tomorrow we hit the road again, continuing the Central Queensland adventures as we visit Longreach and end up at Barcaldine.
