David (looking rather thin from all our camping exertions) at the Qantas Hangar at Longreach
We were out of Longreach Tourist Park by 8.30 in the morning and I was glad, for it was the most featureless, least prepossessing campground that we had ever encountered. There was no grass, only gravel, and the rigs were packed as tightly as fat lambs in a dusty yard being drafted for market.
To make matters worse, some caravan owners released their grey water directly onto the unmade tracks between each packed block of caravans, thereby creating puddles in which children paddled. Eww.
Some bright spark in the landscaping department had decided to make several decorative fake rocks to scatter around, rather than plant trees. That sums up the type of place it was.
We had been drawn to Longreach by the Qantas Founders Museum just outside the town, which I enjoyed more because of the human stories than the aviation details. All the same, I tried very hard to pay attention during our tour of the hangar, led by a passionate young man called Jonathan, who had been involved in working bees there from the age of 4. His knowledge of 747s, one of the planes we toured, was encyclopaedic. He explained how the lavatory hatch worked and I was relieved to discover that the waste products were piped out and disposed of responsibly (unlike the grey water at Longreach Tourist Park, sorry for harping). Getting within three metres of a running motor, Jonathan informed us, would be dangerous, since you could be sucked into the works.
One of the children asked: “You mean you will never come out?”
Jonathan replied: ““I mean, you’ll come out. You’ll just be in lots of little bits.”
This reminded me of my former life as a teacher, when answering fundamentally unanswerable questions could lead to cheery absurdities and farcical exchanges.
From Jonathan I learned that a 747’s maximum weight for taking off was heavier than for landing; that a 747 flew 19,000 cycles (taking off, flying somewhere and landing) before being retired; and that a single new tyre cost $3000.
My favourite piece of aviation trivia was the story of the Captain Cook Lounge, an early luxurious bar provided upstairs near the cockpit for first-class passengers to sit, drink and feel important in, until someone realised that this was no way to make money. It is somehow both ironic and satisfying to learn that this ultimate proof of our anything but classless society should have been scrapped to fulfil capitalistic ambitions.
The founders of Qantas seemed to be surprisingly humble men who perceived a future in aviation even while others doubted their vision. They wanted to overcome the tyranny of distance, an aim that I can just dimly appreciate after travelling in relatively comfortable circumstances around this vast land. One wag in Longreach evidently quipped in the early years that the original Qantas hangar would be more useful as a shearing shed. Yet the founders persisted.
The isolation of the outback was a motivating force in the founders’ dream. The part of the museum that I liked most was the oral histories about the lonely lives of women in the outback. One woman treated her burns with mutton fat and kerosene. Another raised two young boys on her own in the bush while her husband was mostly away working, but when her infant daughter died, she could bear it no longer. I would have escaped long before she did.
After we set up our tent in the Charleville Bush Caravan Park (not one puddle of grey water), we shot off to the Cosmos Centre to look at the stars with the help of Cam, a guide who reminded me of the professor in “Back to the Future”. He was just as loveably geeky as the fossil scientists of Riversleigh and he was as familiar with the night sky as I am with my best-loved knitting patterns.
With the help of a 30-inch reflector telescope mounted in our little real-life planetarium, we looked at the sky through Cam’s eyes and saw, as Banjo Paterson described it, “the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars”*. Among other distant phenomena, I looked at one of the stars of the Southern Cross beside a smaller red dwarf that would not normally be visible to the naked eye. The first star was bright and brilliant, the second slowly burning out its dying energy.
I am becoming weary of travel, while David is as eager and energetic as ever. Whereas I just want to get through the “orange zone” of NSW, have a COVID test and then isolate myself in our heated lounge room, he is still busily googling, booking activities and planning our life in the cosmos. I am swept along by his enthusiasm. In our shambolic team, Davey is the bright and sparkling star in the Southern Cross, while I am gradually losing my powers like that fading red dwarf.
* From “Clancy of the Overflow”
Final Notes
Accommodation:
- Winton Wanderers Caravan Park (our tent site was in the garden!)
- Longreach Tourist Park (definitely not recommended)
- Charleville Bush Caravan Park (peaceful, pleasant, log fire lit to ward off the bitter evening cold, stars galore)
If Only:
As we drove through the little town of Ilfracombe, only 25 kilometres further along the Landsborough highway from Longreach, we saw a grassy, homely little campground (see the picture at this link) near a welcoming pub. If only we had stayed there instead of in the crowded, soulless paddock at Longreach, we thought.
