We visited a few of Longreach's tourist sites: the Qantas Founder's Museum, the Stockmen's Hall of Fame, then head east to Emerald after deciding that Salvador Rosa section of Carnarvon Park isn't quite worth it. The highlight of the day, though, it the Longreach School of Distance Education--formerly known as School of the Air, where kids on remote stations are taught via HF radio.
A quick cuppa, as they say here, then we're down the road to our first stop, the Longreach School of Distance Education at 9am sharp. This, as it turns out, was the highlight of the day. The LSODE, as they call it, is the successor in Queensland to the School of the Air and the Correspondence School. It's goal is to educate the 200 some-odd children that are on remote stations; to qualify, a child has to be 16km away from a school bus route. This doesn't sound like much--it's all of 10 miles--but in some of the boggy sticky mud we've seen, those 16 kilometers might as well be 100.
Anyway, LSODE is one of seven distance learning centers in Queensland, and covers a huge area, roughly 402,000 square kilometers--about the same size as California. There are forty staff at the nicely appointed school, with several studios where teachers talk to their students for a half hour every day. Most of the students are in years 1 to 7, with some pre-schoolers and some high-school aged students as well. Interestingly enough, they use the same curriculum as regular Queensland schools do so they can transfer in and out if needed. Most of their homework is sent out in the mail with correspondence packs, and there's a designated home tutor (usually Mum or the governess) to help the kids with their lessons. Sometimes they come to the school.
We were shown around quite a bit in the hour tour. We sat in on a Year 1--and as it was a Monday, the kids were eager to share news of the weekend. One of the stations had a bull sale, which really excited one kid. After the catching up, the teacher did a read-along of "The Little Red Hen", I believe.
After the studio, we wrapped up by touring the rest of the school. There's a set of dorms for students and visiting parents; sometimes they have mini-schools get togethers for special topics, and field trips to places like Sea World on the Gold Coast and Canberra to see Parliament. I was impressed by the very well appointed library, and how computer literate the students were. The Year 7 students, for instance, were finishing their PowerPoint presentations on rainforest ecology, and the computer center at the back of the school was holding extension classes in Photoshop and PageMaker. Much of the student's work these days was done via email. While they may hold class over HF Radio, they're not that isolated at all.
I was also greatly amused by the question that a strange looking man from Brisbane asked. He was in his sixties, with shorts and those odd knee length thin white socks that wouldn't look out of place on a British Army captain's summer wardrobe for India. This guy asked 'Do the students also have the weekly half hour of religious education?', to which the tour guide said 'Of course, just like the rest of Queensland schools!' Yikes. I'm not sure I really like explicit religious teachings taught in state-run schools!
Anyway, that tour by far was the best--and at $5, it sure beat the $20 admission that the Stockman's Hall of Fame charged. This museum, a Major Tourist Attraction, was all about the Outback and the people who settled it--and it was an expensive let-down, taking us just forty five minutes to exhaust. The museum hadn't changed in twenty years since it had opened, and in that early 1980's style, there were the same jangled displays, same Helvetica font, and same brown/plum/orange color scheme everywhere. It also annoyed me that there wasn't any obvious flow to the museum, you had to go up a ramp across an empty atrium to see something, then down some back stairs to another part, then underneath one section you'd find something. The museum also lacked focus, too--why should a museum of Outback heritage and culture start with a discussion of geotectonics and the breakup of Gondwana, or discuss Pleistocene megafauna like the marsupial lion and the diprotodon (a giant wombat)? Better and more focused curation would sure help here. The most interesting thing at the museum was a wall with 'bush jargon'. We found the book at the gift shop--had we known, we'd just have bought that and saved the $40 admission fee for us both.
Then we scooted over to the Qantas Founder's Museum. The museum's new building had just opened in March, so it's not even quite two months old. It's mildly interesting, but a bit sparse--an aircraft hanger with a few exhibits scattered about is an apt analogy. It tells the story of the beginnings of Qantas. Note the emphasis is on beginnings. There is little info on things after 1930, so if you're wondering 'how did Qantas become a major force in Australian domestic travel' or 'why did Qantas decide to fly internationally', you're better off looking elsewhere for answers. It's a museum that's of the 'here's the planes, here's the eighty-something-year-olds telling their stories' variety. I was really curious on why Qantas decided to grow, and didn't get any answers. I will say, though, that the cafe was tasty.
The third museum was an hour east, in Barcaldine, and was yet again a disappointment. This was the Australian Worker's Heritage Center, ostensibly a museum devoted to the worker, but in reality a hodgepodge collection of displays from various unions around Queensland, and a circus big-top tent that toured Australia during the 1988 bicentennial year. There's the Queensland Police union's display, the railway worker's union mockup of a station and train car, the teacher's union display of an old one-room schoolhouse... and since these unions funded these sections, all the display text has a vague pro-union stance.
As a sidenote, I've noticed how unions have much greater sway in Australia than they do in the US. As we were leaving Brisbane, the union constructing the new Sunway Metcorp sports stadium stopped work for two days because the two cranes on the site touched each other by accident. They said they wouldn't work until they got assurances from management that all safety procedures were in place an being followed for crane operation. In Sydney, there's a big building at the corner of Goulbourn and George Streets with the first three or four floors completed, and rusting steel rebar sticking out of the concrete. It's obvious it's the base of a huge high-rise, but the unions refuse to work on it, so a few vendors in temporary trailers below sell remaindered books and ice cream. This is all a bit odd for me.
Anyway, back to the Australian Worker's Heritage Center. The last display I looked at before throwing in the towel was the one sponsored by the Australian Labor Party (currently the opposition party). It was interesting to see how much the ALP supported the White Australia policy, even into the 1960's, supposedly as a bulwark against Asians swamping Australia with cheap labor and shifty business practices. Now that the Labor Party is the more pro-immigration of the major parties, with vocal proponents like Victoria Premier Steve Bracks advocating a large increase, while the Liberal Party led by PM John Howard is taking a very law-and-order approach to immigration. The Labor Party isn't all pro-immigration, though-- NSW Premier Bob Carr can veer fairly close to racism when he says he doesn't want immigrants because they're all attracted to the bright lights of Sydney.
So, I'll be blunt: we spent $49.50 each on tours today, and the best tour was the cheapest--the school tour, at $5 each. The others (Stockman's, $20; Qantas Founders $15; Worker's Heritage $9.80) were just kinda mixed, and seemed more like they were there just to fill up the tour bus operator's itinerary, to give the retirees from down south a taste of the Queensland Outback. We certainly did notice at each place that we were by far the youngest people around. Ah well.
After Barcaldine, we drove south a few kays, then decided that Salvador Rosa would probably not be a good use of time. It's 250km on dirt roads, it'd been raining in the area, and while the ranger said it was OK when we called him in the morning, it just didn't seem wise. Plus, after visiting Mt Moffat and not seeing much, we kinda expected the same at Salvador Rosa--a good five hours driving for maybe twenty minutes of interesting things like eroded sandstone formations and natural artesian springs.
So we drove back through Barcaldine, then east the 300km to Emerald. After Alpha, we started seeing really cool rainbows, then as we hit the Drummond ranges at sundown the rain just pounded down. Chris drove through the dark and pounding rain an hour to Emerald, where we had a greasy pub meal--chicken skewers and chips for $4.80, washed down by $3.50 XXXX beer (no, not XXXX Gold, real XXXX, what they call XXXX heavy). We then checked into Motel 707 after the friendly Central Inn said they had no rooms--then checked out five minutes later, as the cold cinderblock room lit with two bare florescent tubes just didn't' appeal, even for a cheapish $60. I vaguely thought I'd get lice from the beds. We got a better room up the road, and slept.