Cunnamulla - 24 June 2014

We visited the Cunnamulla Fella Centre (Information Centre) this morning where we spent over an hour. It is a great Information Centre, with a Museum inside as well as a Gallery. They also show a film on the Artesian Basin and have a display called The Artesian Time Tunnel, which shows how the Artesian Basin shaped the landscape. We also booked on the Town Tour for this afternoon.

The Gallery in the Information Centre had an exhibition of felting by a lady called Helen Stumkat. The pieces on display were very good. The Museum had displays of old sewing machines, a wool press, phone exchange, record players, etc. There was even a couple of uniforms from the Sydney Olympics - someone from the Water Polo team and a javelin thrower.

When they first sank the bores into the Artesian Basin they just let the water run. Enough water ran out of the bore each day to fill 2 1/2 Olympic size swimming pools. This went on for 62 years. They have started capping them all around the State but there are still some to be done including the first bore ever drilled which is here at Cunnamulla. A few of them in the town have been capped but apparently the State Government has run out of money for it.

Out the front of the Information Centre is a statue of the Cunnamulla Fella. The Cunnamulla Fella is a song written by Stan Coster and sung by Slim Dusty and every year in August they hold the Cunnamulla Fella Festival, which has bush poetry, music and bull riding.

We found a lovely café for morning tea before having a walk round town. Bruce had torn his shirt yesterday afternoon and I wanted to see if I could get some iron on mending webbing to repair it. We asked in one of the shops and we were pointed in the direction of a shop down the road - the hardware shop! As we got closer we saw it also had haberdashery, doonas, kitchenware. The lady in the shop was lovely. She said if I needed or wanted to sew the patch on by machine as well, feel free to come back as she had a machine set up in the back of the shop. She was telling us about a rep that had called in one day. He bent over and his trousers all split. She told him to take them off and she would mend them for him. She got him a towel to use while she fixed his pants. The next rep that came in, mentioned he had heard about the previous rep and asked her if she could mend his trousers as well.

We visited the Robber's Tree. A fellow called Joseph Wells had held up the National Bank in 1880. His gun went off and he thought he had killed the Manager. He took off and hid up this tree where he was found by a sniffer dog. He was the last man to be hung for such a crime in Queensland.

We were picked up at the Caravan Park for the Tour. There were 2 other people on the mini bus. They were from Dubbo. The Tour was $35 per person and lasted for 3 hours. It was very good. Pieta has lived most of her life in Cunnamulla, except for about 15 years spent in Brisbane. Her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have also lived here and she has a wealth of knowledge of the area. She took us around the town and also into the surrounding countryside where we visited a table grape farm and the Hortonvale Organically Certified Irrigation Farm, where they grow organic lamb. They have also had cotton and other crops over the years. They diversified after the wool crash in 1990. We stopped midway through the tour and had afternoon tea at the boutique hotel she bought a few years ago and renovated. It was a really good afternoon.

It was a very cool day today. We had heard there are blizzards down south. I had a few layers on, as well as a pair of leggings under my long pants. I think it will be a cool night and the heater will no doubt come out tonight.