Lake Maraboon to Charters Towers

Lake Maraboon is the mass of water behind the Fairburn Dam which supplies irrigation water to farms around the Emerald area.

View of Lake Maraboon from caravan

There are huge citrus orchards around the area as well as cotton and lucerne crops that all rely on the water from this dam.
After travelling for just over 6 kilometres across the lake in the Zodiac to check our red claw pots, we came up with absolutely nothing which was disappointing.  With the pots relocated we headed back across the lake for breakfast and then off to Anakie to have a look at Gemfest.

Parrots carved from rose quartz

As the name suggests, Gemfest is a festival of gems held every year at Anakie which is a little town in the gemfields about 45 kilometres west of Emerald.  Gemstones are displayed which have been found around Anakie, Sapphire and Rubyvale as well as other gemstones from other parts of the country and the world.

These parrots which have been carved from rose quartz were brought in from overseas.

Some people do well out of mining Sapphires!!

  As well as gems on show, there were also some really nice cars and other means of transport as well.

Camel transport at Anakie Gemfest

  Arriving back at the lake in the evening we saw that Bill Shorten had visited the lake during the day to promise drought relief to farmers in the area.  What surprised me was that the reporter said that the lake was down to 22% of it’s capacity and the farmers are only getting 6% of their allocation.  They also said that if they don’t get good rains in September and October, irrigation allocations will be cut all together.

Red Claw - This one was just under 12" long.  Made a nice sandwich

  Red Claw are all the talk at Lake Maraboon but we didn’t have a lot of luck.  This one kept our hopes up but sadly it was the only one.  

Fairburn Dam earth filled wall

Lake Maraboon was formed when the earth filled wall was constructed across the Nogoa River for the Fairburn Dam back in 1968.  The dam has a surface area of 37,000 acres and has a catchment area of 16,320 square kilometres.  When full it has a depth of 31.70 metres.  My GPS tells me that we travelled almost 40 kilometres backwards and forwards across the lake in our little inflatable boat trying to catch red claw, but not much luck.  Those that were getting a few were travelling between 12 and 14 kilometres diagonally across the lake, too far for us.  

I read somewhere that the anniversary stone for 45 years is sapphire.  Given that we celebrated our 45^th wedding anniversary this year, I thought it fitting that we visit Sapphire in the gem fields and have a bit of a fossick for sapphires.

Rainbow Lorikeets have NO manners

The Sapphire caravan park is in a bush setting and we were visited by Rainbow Lorikeets every morning and evening looking for a feed.

Wallaby with joey in it's pouch

  Wallabies  also come around in the evening looking for a hand out as well.  The easiest way to fossick for gem stones is to head off to one of the many miners that sell buckets of “wash”.  We found the people at Armfest to be very helpful and their “wash” came from their mine 30 feet underground.  The idea is to sieve the stones known as “wash” through 2 sieves stacked one on top of the other.  The top sieve has a larger mesh than the bottom sieve and the idea is that as you wash the stones in the Willoughby.

Using the Willoughby to wash the stones

  The heavier gem stones fall to the bottom where they are easy to collect.  We went along most days and found lots of small sapphires and some star sapphires which are black, and when polished show a silver star.

The darker coloured stones in the middle are sapphires

  On our last day we were a bit more successful and found a nice stone which can be cut to make a nice piece of jewellery.  From Sapphire we kept heading north, across the Tropic of Capricorn through the towns of Capella and Clermont.  Both of these towns have huge coal mines around them and huge mines means huge equipment.

Dragline bucket at Clermont

This drag line bucket weighs 39 tonnes and can hold 50 cubic metres of soil. This bucket came out of service in 2007 and was replaced by an even bigger machine which is in use to this day.  The Clermont mine produces 12 million metric tonnes of coal each year and is expected to have another 9 years life.  Coal mined here is transported by an overland conveyor to the rail head at the nearby Rio Tinto mine where it is loaded onto rail and taken 287 kilometres overland to the coal loading terminal at Hay Point, which is about 420 kilometres south of Townsville.

The trip between Sapphire and Charters Towers was a bit too big for us to do in one day so we stopped over at a little roadhouse called Belyando Crossing for the night, then continued onto Charters Towers the next day.  Back in the mining boom days from 1871, Charters Towers was the second largest city in Queensland.  Gold was discovered here quite by accident when a young aboriginal boy named Jupiter Mosman was sent out around Towers Hill to fetch some horses and he came back with the horses and a hand full of gold.

View of Charters Towers from Tower Hill where gold was first discovered

The gold rush began and many mines opened up around town which were quickly followed by rock crushing plants called batteries.

Stone crusher at the battery

  Venus Gold Battery is Queensland’s largest remaining gold battery.  This battery was built in 1872 along the banks of Gladstone Creek as it takes 7 tonnes of water to crush 1 tonne of gold bearing ore.  Large amounts of water were also used to feed the 2 cylinder compound steam engine that drove the whole plant.  I was disappointed that the steam engine is no longer at the plant but was surprised to hear that the engine was built at the foundry in Castlemaine in Victoria.

5 head stamping box at the battery

  During it’s operation, this battery produced 15.5 tonnes of gold until it closed in 1973.  Gold price today is $52,897 per kilogram so 15,500 kilograms of gold would be worth just under $820 million.  Our tour guide was asked how many people worked in this battery and he said 13 thieves.  Apparently small amounts of gold were smuggled out by workers under the tobacco in their pipes, and the use of brill cream in their hair was very popular, as any specks of gold on their fingers would come off their hands when they rubbed their fingers through their hair.

Ghostly stories told on an impressive display

  It is rumoured that there are still many ghosts of people from the gold rush era still haunting the various properties around Charters Towers, and some of  their stories are told on a very impressive display at the battery.

WW2 Ammunition Bunker

During WW2, Charters Towers had the ammunition bunkers for the army as it was considered that the Japanese didn’t have enough fuel in their planes to fly so far inland without running out of fuel on the way home.  These bunkers are dotted all around Towers Hill and now tell the story of how bombing raids were made on enemy targets.

Texas Longhorns

Just out of Charters Towers there is a station owner who has turned his attention to breeding Texas Longhorn cattle.  This chap is an Aussie but he seems to know more about the history of these cattle than the Texans do.  The cattle here are direct descendants of the millions of Texas Longhorns that walked the great trail herds from Texas in the late 1800’s, and this is the home of the largest herd of these cattle in Australia.  The tour of the farm was magnificent with Mick telling many a story along the way, some may have been true and others were definitely not.

Authentic Texan Chuck Wagon

    We started with smoko served from their authentic Chuck Wagon, consisting of billy tea and damper, backed up with Anzac biscuits and  homemade Chocolate Texas Brownies.  As there are no unrelated Texas Longhorn bulls in Australia, Mick’s wife Lynda went to vet school to learn how to artificially inseminate their cows.

She showed us through their “Love Shack” and gave us a detailed description on how the process is done.  They produce about 30 calves a year.  The farm also has Asian Water Buffalo, American Bison, Scottish Highlanders and African Watusi.

Percheron draft horses and wagon

The highlight of the tour is the ride on their covered wagon, drawn by 2 Percheron draft horses which takes you down amongst the cattle.  The pride of their herd is a steer called JR who made it into the 2013 Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest horns measured tip to tip of all cattle in the world.

JR was the world record holder in 2013 for having the longest cattle horns in the world

His horns are still growing and now measure more than 3 metres from tip to tip.

From Charters Towers we moved on to our northern most destination of Townsville.