Mt Isa

Lazy day today.  Woke up late.  Caught up with washing and pottered around working out laptops and internet and downloading photos off the new camera.

I thought I’d finally managed to download them onto Grant’s laptop and so I deleted them off the camera (thinking as I did so that I probably shouldn’t be doing this) and then, yes, I discovered that the photos weren’t actually on Grant’s computer at all.  Grant very patiently worked away and retrieved them all back from the SD card. Go Grant! 

About 10am we headed off for a tour of Mt Isa, a la Gordon and Thelma.  We saw the house they built here over fifty years ago.  It sits above the river, which in those days only ran with water once a year for about an hour.  Thelma said you could hear the water coming along the river bed, rattling the rocks as it went along.  She used to work at the hospital just the other side of the river, and would cross over to save the long walk around by the road. There was water in the river today, though, because of the dams built since then around Mt Isa.

There was a steep hill/cliff just behind the house, running down to the river.  Conrad, who lived here until he was 2 and a half, fell down a few times, apparently!  Thelma said it was onl;y a bit of the way down the hill though!

Various owners over the years have modified the house, and Thelma had a hard time recognizing it.

There was a house across the road with a very well cared for garden.  Roses had been recently pruned, petunias bloomed in the window boxes, and I noticed a yellow butterfly flitting around a bush.

“Oh, isn’t that nice” I thought, “they’ve planted butterfly attracting bushes, even out here.” 

Then I noticed the butterfly just kept flitting, and flitting.  It was solar powered and attached to a stick by a wire!

We drove to Moondarra dam, which was a beautiful dark blue amidst the red landscape.  Rolling red hills spotted all over with green bushes.  Like sleeping green warty giants everywhere.

After that the boys had had enough of the car so home for lunch and movie making by Joseph and his team (Dom and Oskar).  I re-stocked our fresh food (we’ve got an awful lot of food!) and we made a yummy dinner of Beef Stroganoff and Cheese Cake (thanks Katie and Nadine).

As the sun was going down, we headed off to look at the open cut mine (“I can’t see the bottom” said Oskar), the pipes and smoke stacks of Mt Isa Mine all lit up with lights, and the lookout over Mt Isa.

The gang in front of Mt Isa Mines

It was a lovely day

Vicki