Briefly Winton

Yesterday we drove north from Longreach to Winton, where the Koa people are the traditional custodians of the lands and waters.

Winton's one of those country towns that's completely different to what you'd expect. Or at least, what we expected. We've passed through many small mining towns on our travels and while they're all different in their own way, they all have a certain rough-around-the-edges, hard-working feel about them. But Winton's a bit different. It's full of life and colour and character. It's also full of nomads, which is why we only stayed one night. There was literally no room at the inn and we were lucky to bag the very last camping site available behind the pub.

Winton has two main claims to fame. The first is being home to Banjo Patterson when he wrote Waltzing Matilda. For trivia buffs, Banjo wrote Waltzing Matilda as a poem in 1895 and it was then turned into a ballad by Christina Macphershon.

The second thing Winton's famous for is dinosaurs. We're talking about the extinct animal kind of dinosaurs, not the old fashioned thinking kind. In 1999, while mustering sheep, a bloke called David Elliot discovered the giant fossilised femur of a Cretaceous Sauropod that roamed Winton around 95 million years ago, and just like that, Winton became the dinosaur capital of the country.

Our visit coincided with the annual opal festival, which is also a thing in Winton. So we spent a pleasant afternoon strolling the main street looking at opals before consuming a huge meal at the pub (courtesy of my temporary travelling companions) in return for being allowed to camp in their car park.

This morning we had a long drive ahead of us and got an early start to the day. But this was mostly because it was just too cold to stay in bed after all the heat had been sucked out of the hot water bottle. We were lucky enough to catch a spectacular sunrise though, so it wasn't all bad (the photo doesn't do it justice, but you can see some of the stars). We hit the road and headed 350km further north to Cloncurry (another small mining town) in our epic pursuit of warm weather. Haven't quite found it yet.