Winton

Of all the places to be on Record Store Day.

It is 582 km to the nearest record store.

It is 2,151 km to my favourite vinyl repository.

As it was the birthplace of Qantas, so shall Winton be the birthplace of this blog.

If you are tired of life and happen to be heading southeast from Mt Isa, perhaps you should consider the town of Winton? It is a place that evokes different sentiments in me, depending on the time of day and how long I have been in town.  I find I enjoy it more at dawn before the road trains start rumbling and clanging through the main street.  At dusk I become bitter and the place seems to exude a sinister current, and becomes the setting of a noir fiction: "as though  some awful memory was lurking, manifesting in the melanomas festering on sun damaged faces of men, grim visages with thick skin as crisp as pork crackling. The pungent sense of collective guilt, born of a nameless horror, glistened in the sweat beading within the bristles of old ladies' moustaches as they trudged on down the street toward the Tattersall's Hotel and the promise of cold beer, endless rum and tacit denial.  This is a town where thugs came to die and heroes never bothered with. What dark secret lurks in the hearts of Winton's women and men?  The red rocky desert surrounds surely know. . ."

That, however, is a grossly unfair and bleak picture to paint of this historic town.  In the happy mornings when the motel car park is warming up, full of 4WD's and the promise of outback adventure for sprightly octogenarians, the isolation is an energising force.  Jolly swagman and women prepare their caravans and pop their meds as doors shut and voices whisper with quiet consideration. The dawn sky is split into shades of colour like Neapolitan ice cream and birds flock and sing in the ever glowing light. The busy hum of insects and idling trucks eager to crash their way along the Landsborough Highway sing Winton awake in the soft light.

Winton is the birthplace of Waltzing Matilda and boasts a proud collection of roadside wheelie bins and old men in tiny shorts.  The wheelie bins have a kitschy catch - they are in the shape of dinosaur feet -  Cute! The town has many exciting sights for the intrepid and the elderly, and honours above all others the folk hero Banjo Patterson. A great poet, Banjo shacked up at Dagworth Station and legend has it in 1895 he waltzed in to town and first sung the great song in the North Gregory Hotel in Winton.

Winton is a prehistoric place.  You can sense it in the scorched ironstone that lies squat and glistening on the sweeping plains, and in the plateaus that rise abruptly on the horizon and brood over the panorama. Head south 110 km to Lark Quarry and you will find the fossilised footprints of actual dinosaurs who strode this once verdant landscape.  The Australian Age of Dinosaurs is just down the road and up the jump-up, where for a small(ish) fee you can meet living fossils who have happily volunteered for forced labour. If you are willing, able and incapable of boredom, you too can immerse yourself in the excruciating task of chiseling stone from petrified dinosaurs bones with an array of dentistry tools.  Don't rush! The museum has decades of work stockpiled for the willing retiree, and the black soil plains of the surrounding district continues to puke bits and pieces of its Jurassic legacy onto the surface and into the clutches of your Palaeontological overlords.

What is there to eat in Winton? Known more for a livestock based subsistence than culinary diversity, it is not the place to visit for vegetarian food or Asian delicacies.  While proudly offering every cut of meat from 400 grams and upward, Winton displays a wanton lack of wontons. The tongue-in-cheek/genuine dislike of foreigners and their 'weird food' belies an adventurous palate.  Many of Winton's finest restaurants show scant regard for the prodigious distance between the kitchen and the coast and offer lengthy seafood menus to astonished tourists.  Ignoring my screaming instincts I ordered the bug and seafood platter and was pleasantly surprised at the robustness of my constitution.  Down the way at the Australia Hotel there is a menu that some have described as deep fried and others as stomach churning. Nonetheless, the dust covered opal miners from way out Jundah way seem more than happy with the texture and size of the servings.

  

When the joys of the Waltzing Matilda Centre begin to wane, as they will quite quickly, duck across the road for a swim in the council swimming pool, where for $2 all your well placed paranoia can be temporarily allayed. Take a photo at the statue commemorating our unofficial anthem about a cheerful homeless man who committed suicide in a swamp, underneath which a poignant plaque offers a tribute to "the many swagmen who lie in unmarked graves throughout the country".