We free camped at the Long Waterhole a few kilometres outside Winton. A lovely spot on a waterhole with lots of birds and cows wandering about. There are sometimes emus but we didn’t see any.

Winton is a very pretty town with nice architecture. There is an open air cinema which you have to enter as you would to any other cinema building but it has no roof. We didn’t go as it was Mission Impossible which we had seen. Very funky idea though.

You can see clearly that the whole town relies on tourists to keep it going, unfortunately a lot of the buildings were for sale.

Waltzing Matilda Museum

I visited whilst Simon was hard at work. The old building burnt down in 2015 so they have a very new state of the art building. The whole museum is dedicated to the song “Waltzing Matilda’ written by Banjo Patterson. The first public performance was in Winton in the North Gregory Hotel in 1895.

It included a movie of the swagman telling the story in his own words of how he would rather die than lose his freedom.

Outside there is a train and lots of old farm machinery, a shearing house and a cottage very much like you see in any Welsh museum like St Fagans or even in Cardigan on Barley Saturday. I had heard very good reviews of the place but I left feeling a bit disappointed probably because I was expecting more.

There was also a digital art exhibition within the museum which was very modern and completely at odds with the rest of the place.

Age of the Dinosaur Museum

Positioned approximately 12km outside the town on a rocky outcrop called ‘the Jump Up’. We booked to go on the ‘March of the Titanosaurs Exhibition’ and the Canyon Walk. Now this was a seriously impressive place the views alone were stunning. You could see for miles. 

We got picked up by a little golf cart type bus and driven along the Jump Up to the building that housed the exhibition. The building itself was impressive, it blended into the scenery with a low roof and lots of rust coloured iron which matched the colour of the rocks.

The march of the Titanosaurs are footprints of dinosaurs and a few turtles and crocodiles that were found in Snake Creek on Karoola Station. You can very clearly see the right and left footprints as the Titanosaur walked along. As Snake Creek often floods there was no option to build on the site so they transported the whole thing to this new building. The whole thing is 54 metres long and weighed 300 tonnes. Each piece was numbered and relocated and then put back together again this took from Sep 2018 to November 2020. An amazing achievement.

The canyon walk is a walkway of approximately 500m with various metal models of dinosaurs along it with information on each one. Great views from here. 

Really enjoyed this tour very well done.

Mary Kathleen is an abandoned uranium mine and ghost town. I had seen so many photos of the mine and abandoned township we really had to stop on our way through to McKinlay. We decided to unhook the van and leave it in the abandoned town. You can still see the streets and the foundations for the long demolished houses and this area is now well used by grey nomads to park up for a few days.

We set off to the mine and we were so happy that we had left the van behind it was very rough lots of massive potholes everywhere. The actual mine is spectacular the blue colours are amazing they change from one side of the mine to the other. It just looks so inviting to go for a swim but there are signs everywhere to tell you not to swim. You would probably glow in the dark if you swam there. 

It always amazes us what some people drive to these places. There was one guy there with a very low sporty Huyundai and he got it up to the mine across all the boulders. How to wreck a car very quickly.