It was already hot, around 28 degrees and by 8am it was 31 degrees!
We fed and watered the pooches, and took off for the Qantas Founders Museum. It was started by two young Aussie blokes - Fysh and McGinness who both fought as foot soldiers at Gallipoli and then joined the Australian Flying Corps.
They then fought together in Palestine and were decorated for their bravery in air to air combat. Between them the shot down 13 enemy planes. When the war ended they returned to Australia and set up Qantas, basically to do trick and stunt flying and do mail runs in Western QLD. Shortly thereafter, they picked up a Contract in 1931 to fly passengers and, well, the rest is history.
It was a fascinating display and very interactive as you can see from the pictures! We loved it.
Then we went across the road to the Stockmans Hall of Fame which again was really interesting, learning about Australian settlers and how our outback legends came to be. Unfortunately, our visit was cut short, because the owner of the caravan park rang to ask us to come back because Spike was disturbing all our neighbors!
We were only 5 minutes away so it was no big drama and he stopped throwing a tantrum as soon as we got back.
We were invited to 4pm Smoko aka Afyernoon Tea at the caravan park and had an awesome chin wag with them for over an hour! How nice.
The chin wag then continued back at our campsite where Shane was regaling us with stories of his misspent youth until his lovely wife Kerry came and shooed him home for tea!
We also identified another local bird, the Blue Faced Honeyeaters and the Lousy Jacks (so-called because they are covered in lice eww). Spike fancied one for tea and took after them dragging poor Sunshine behind him, together with their crate! Too funny!!
That evening, whilst we were sitting outside before bed, a mob of about 4 kangaroos quietly hopped into the park, acknowledged us, nibbled around us for about 5 minutes, then took off lazily to the next grassy patch! You could tell they were used to it and probably came every night for a feed! We even saw one hopping down the street later on, and there were tracks everywhere around town, even down the centre of the main shopping strip!
A very very good day. Longreach is a great little bustling town, full of interesting characters. A great example of the Aussie outback doing it tough but still having immense pride in our history. We liked it a lot.
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