A day of cold winds, even for us with our still-thick
Tasmanian blood. Today Joke had recovered sufficiently to venture out, so out
we ventured. Today we would go north, and uphill, to the coldest regions of the
Atherton Tablelands.
Our first stop was at Tolga, where they noticed that the
local station had not been used for 40 years, so they turned it around and
turned it into a museum (that is, to be precise, a physical turn and a metaphorical
turn). The museum depicts the railway, mining and military history of the area,
and contained family and social history resources as well. I couldn’t help
comparing the amazing resources packed into a little country railway station
with the meagre information supply of the Melbourne Museum we visited a couple
of years ago. These little community and volunteer-run museums might be chaotic
and might not be organised according to the latest museum science, but they
certainly have a lot more interesting material than the dumbed-down displays of
the big-city museums. Here endeth my mini-rant.
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| Turned-around Tolga Station |
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| Great little museum that great big museums can learn from |
We trundled on to Atherton, climbing all the while, and
walked up and down its main road which was funnelling a wind straight from
Antarctica. (Hey, we say that about the southerly winds in Tasmania, but we are
in the Tropics at 17ยบ
South of the Equator. What is happening??)
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| The main street in Atherton |
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| The Atherton CBD |
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| One end of the Atherton main drag |
We had lunch there, and then moved
on to Herberton with no more reason than that there were adverts for a nerdy
spy camera museum there!
Just before the town, we spied the Herberton Historical
Village and pulled in there on a whim. What a good move that was! Another museum
packed with interesting stuff. Not too much science involved, just old-time
stuff sorted according to an occupational theme: the butcher, the baker, the
radio shop, the blacksmith, the logger, the miner, the tinsmith, the school,
the farmer etc. etc. Buildings had been moved in from their original locations
in the district and decked out and filled with artefacts of the appropriate era.
We meant to stay an hour, but were still there at closing
time, hours later. Photos are supplied, but my best advice is: if you are in
the area, go see for yourself!
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| Herberton Historical Village promises to be interesting right from the beginning |
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| The Radio shop with lots of old valves on the shelf |
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| A hand drill like one Pa van der Graaf used to own |
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| The tool shop |
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| A functioning printing press |
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| Joke next to a press much like the one she saw at the Meppeler Courant where Opa van der Linden worked |
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| All the latest cameras. These are almost pre-digital: they only require 10 digits to operate. |
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| A working pump mechanism in a large windmill |
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| Joke checking out the ute. It's not a twin cab, so we didn't buy it! |
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| Tea and tobacco at the grocery store |
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| A 1923 Harley-Davidson |
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| A hearse with class |
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| The toy-shop: by the comments around us very popular with the grey nomads. |
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| A village street |
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| An original drover's dwelling |
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| Shopfronts... |
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| ...and the street they are on |
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| Repairs while you wait |
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| Man in uniform |
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| Joke in her natural environment |
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| Joke admired the wall-charts, all done without the aid of computers, by hand, in the teacher's spare time! |
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| 500 lbs of TNT in a navy mine, casually thrown in among the other exhibits! Naturally we did not poke it... |
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| My Mum would have been at home in this shop! |
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| Flowers at the gate. |
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| The pub is modelled on the Ettamogah Pub, right to the old bomb on the roof. |
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| Tickets to a great afternoon's outing. |
Sated and satisfied we drove home to our little caravan. Oh,
and we never got to see the spy camera museum.
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