Saturday 21th June

Today dawned with a very cold southerly wind blowing and the outside temperature was only around 7 degrees. It was too unpleasant to go for a bike ride with not only the quite strong wind but also the low temperature. The day warmed up to about 19 degrees. Hopefully, we do not get too much of these low temperatures.

We spent most of the day at the QANTAS Founders Museum, which was not more than a 5 minute walk from our caravan park. A very imposing sight as we walked towards it with the huge Boeing 747 aircraft parked on a hard stand with red dust blowing around it from the wind.

The entry to the museum is through a modern entrance with either figures or paintings and photos of the founders of QANTAS in the foyer. As you move in there are the inevitable memorabilia and other similar items including models of a lot of the QANTAS fleet both present and past. The time comes to clean out of pockets to pay for entry to the museum and/or walk tours to both the Boeing 747 or Boeing 707.

To start the museum visit, you are guided into a small theatre to be given the detail on the start-up of QANTAS. It is a very interesting session. One part that is amazing is that the original financier, Sir Fergus McMaster, stated more than 80 years ago that QANTAS would become a world class airline. How right he was. The two founder pilots, Fysh and McGinness, had great vision and a very supportive financier as well as many others.

In the museum there are many beautiful displays of the growth of QANTAS along with some extremely well made quilts depicting various stages. There are several video documentaries, one going through the making airworthy of the 707 and the other shows the preparation of the final flight to Longreach of the 747. I say final because the airstrip here is half that is required to land on as required by CASA. The airstrip is not long enough for the 747 to ever depart so it is here forever and with the dry climate that will be a very long time.

After we had been through the museum, we then went on two wonderful guided tours. The first was on the massive Boeing 747 200 series “City of Bunbury” and the second was of the first QANTAS Boeing 707 “City of Canberra”. We were able to view parts of both aircraft that are normally not visible to the average passenger such as the cargo hold, location of black box flight recorder and the cockpit. The tours were presented by a very competent and passionate guide who is capable of explaining any part of the aircraft.

In the evening we went on a beautiful sunset dinner cruise in the Thompson River. We were collected by coach and taken to the MV “Longreach Explorer” for the cruise and on board dinner. Great descriptions, by the skipper, as we cruised and sipped champagne before dinner. There were 48 guests for a lovely dinner. People from all over were guests. There were several couples we have met at other sites, too.