Lake Maraboon is the mass of water behind the Fairburn
Dam which supplies irrigation water to farms around the Emerald area.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 45th
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
