Scones, stories and stars.

Charleville is the home of stars – that is, they have a great observatory! The Cosmos Centre, just outside the town, has hands on displays and theatre presentations that explain astronomy during the day, and telescopes that allowed us to look at the stars and planets by night.

We handled a meteorite that had landed some 50 kms away from Charleville, it was the size of an axe head, but quite a bit heavier. Comprised mainly of iron, but with many other minerals also, it was found by a station hand some twenty years previously, and had only recently been identified as a visitor from space.

There was a great film on the formation of the solar system, and talks from a guide on meteors and comets.

In the evening we again went to the Cosmos Centre, this time to use the telescopes. To preserve our night sight the large telescope building was dimly lit by red light, and as the roof of the building slid back we could see clearly the millions of stars overhead.

There were four telescopes for about forty people, and we took turns observing the various parts of the sky that the guides described for us

We started with a great view of the Planet Jupiter, we could clearly see the equatorial rings and four of it’s 65 moons despite the fact that it is 780million kms away. We were then taken to the Orion Nebula, where we could see the hydrogen cloud that surrounds it, followed by the Jewel Box, an open cluster of over 150 stars in many colours.

The guide described the Milky Way, Omega Centauri and Alpha Centauri, which is our closest neighbour, some 4.3 light years away. As you can imagine, with no light there are no photos!

In the afternoon we had been to the Hotel Corones, where we heard the story of Harry (Poppa) Corones, a Greek immigrant who arrived in Oz penniless in 1920, and after learning English while working in Sydney and Brisbane, opened a café in Charleville. Within ten years he opened his first hotel, in it’s day very high class, and by the time he died in 1972 owned many others throughout the region. He was also one of the first investors in QUANTAS, and met many famous early aviators.

One of those was Amy Johnston, and the story has it that when she stayed in his hotel she asked for a champagne bath. Harry obliged, and when she had finished he re-bottled the champagne and sold it throughout the state at a premium!

This is the bath, I hope it was a bit cleaner when she was in it!

Later we had tea and scones, very nice but very fattening.

Charleville also boasts two of the last remaining Vortex rainmaking guns. In 1902 Queensland was in the grip of a terrible drought, they were so desperate to produce rain that they purchased six vertical Vortex Guns and placed them strategically about the town. They were filled with gunpowder in the hope that the explosion would change the atmospheric pressure and produce rain. They didn’t work, but in any case within a couple of months the weather broke and most of the guns were sent for scrap.

As a small outback town, Charleville is quite amazing!