July 23 Barcaldine

Wet! Wet! Wet! It started raining early last night and hasn’t really stopped since – it’s been steady, soaking rain, the type loved by farmers everywhere but not so much by caravaners. We had left the Workers Heritage Centre for today and spent most of the morning there. It wasn’t quite what I expected – I thought there would be a lot about the shearers’ strike of 1891 and while this was covered there were a lot of other areas as well. Qld Police had a lock-up and display, there was a building set up by Australia Post and another by Qld Education Dept which consisted of a one-teacher school with early 1900s furniture, most of which predated my entry into the profession in 1966. Other areas covered included power generation, women in the workforce and Qld electoral information. Almost everything in the Centre was related back to outback life so was interesting from that point of view.
It looks like we may be spending another day here due to the rain. Reports on Longreach from travellers heading east, indicate that the caravan park we were going to is a sea of mud. Two caravans left here this morning for Longreach, parked outside the van park, walked in to have a look and turned around and came back to Barcaldine. One of the guys told me it was black mud, almost up to your ankles. No, thank you very much!
We went and bought a couple of bath mats to put in the door of the van but they would be useless against that sort of mud. We’ll leave it until the morning and see what the weather’s like before we finally decide. A days delay won’t make a great deal of difference as we can pick that up along the way.
We went out to dinner tonight at the Artesian Hotel – quite good value for money but it seemed like everyone there was a traveller.