Days 47 to 51 - Sapphire

On the way to Sapphire we had a quick tour of the Australian Workers Heritage Museum at Barcaldine. It was well assembled but we did not have time to do the displays justice.  We continued our journey to Sapphire and booked in to the Sapphire Caravan Park. It was amazing. Such high quality facilities: really clean. The camp kitchens had crockery, coffee, tea and other consumables.

After all the museums we welcomed the opportunity to relax in a quiet bush setting.

There were some bothersome birds that had been fed by other campers and clearly expected the same from us.

In addition to the birds we had visits from a brush tailed possum. The first night we heard a noise between the chairs and looked down the see the possum between the chairs. The following night we heard a rustle which was the possum on its hind legs inspecting one of our food trays. We had quite a job to chase it away.

Most of the time we just enjoyed evenings round the camp fire.

We needed some vegies so we opted to walk to Sally’s and Arthur’s roadside stall which we were assured was only just up the road. We came upon it after 3.2 Km. The produce was good but as the walk was hot we dropped in to the local RSL for a cold midday beer. It did not open until 2 pm but the barman was quite relaxed. Richard joined as a social member because we had consumed so many of the bar snacks.

We had a brief tour of Sapphire, Ruby Vale and Anakie. They all seemed to be places of hope. People were busy working claims in the hope of finding the big stone that was worth $$$M. We suspected the only gold mines were those that catered for the tourists. We came upon plenty of encampments alongside the tracks that ran through the bush. Asking around it was possible that many of the people did not have a Tax File Number.