Capricorn Highway 18/10 to 22/10

Capricorn Highway is in Queensland and runs west from Rockhampton to Longreach along the tropic of Capricorn.

Emerald and Rubyvale 18/10/07

Emerald and the nearby towns Sapphire and Rubyvale are famous for there precious gems. We went looking for gems, this is called fossicking. Callum found the best gem a blue sapphire that could have been cut into a shape. There was 100 year old underground mine that we toured. A boy found the largest Sapphire ever found, while walking home from school, it was the size of an adults fist.

Ochre is used for aboriginal paint, it is brown, orange, red, yellow, and white, and it tastes like salt.

Barculdine 19/10/07

Barculdine houses a museum dedicated to the workers of Australia. There are rooms dedicated to each type of job. Richard and Callum are taking a lesson from teacher Mitchel in the one room classroom. A typical class would be made up of all years from K to 6. Mitchel's favourite room was about the building of the roads (Main Roads Department). Callum's favourite was the big tent that showed prison punishment cell (very scary).

Longreach - 20/10/07 - 22/10/07

Longreach is on Tropic of Capricorn and is flat (very flat and hot!). We visited the Qantas museum and toured a Boeing 747. To get this plane to Longreach, it had to land on a runway that was half the required size for a normal jumbo. The pilot could use only 2 of the 4 engines to land the plane safely. The jumbo is huge (it carrys 400 people) and we found where the black box recorder is kept (can you guess where..?). The black box is actually orange and is used to record the events onboard the plane if there is a crash.