On the road Longreach to Emerald

On leaving Longreach along the Matilda Highway it was quite depressing as we had in all off our travels here never seen so much road kill.
It was like a Kangaroo cemetery along the highway as every few metres was a dead kangaroo is some state depending on how long it had been there.It seemed to go on for miles and I tried not to look at that part of the road. They are having a drought in the area so whether that meant more kangaroos were moving around looking for water or not we don't know. There was no way that I could photograph it!
We stopped in the town of Barcaldine which has an interesting tree. It is outside the railway station.
The Tree of Knowledge is a memorial to the 1891 Great Shearers Strike which lead to the birth of the Australian Labor Party, so it is regarded as the Labor Party ALP birthplace.It was at the foot of the Ghost gum tree a foundation document was read out in 1892 and so the tree was of importance and in 2006 it was poisoned with roundup.The remains of the tree was removed in 2007 and it was preserved and then returned under a an architecture design structure in 2009 which cost 5 million all up.It recreates the canopy of the tree with hanging long wooden like blades representing shear blades.

Looking up into the structure

It is a very clever design and made a lovely chiming noise in the wind when we were there.

Tree of Knowledge

We stayed the night at a small town Jericho at the show grounds and continued on to Emerald through the area know as the gem fields. In the towns of Sapphire and Rubyvale you can go gem fossicking but we weren't keen in the hot sun to dig in dirt!!!