You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.........

Wilton - the home of Banjo Patterson, who wrote and first sang Waltzing Matilda here in 1895, and whose memory is revered throughout Australia. I learned the song at my grandmother's knee 70 years ago, and can still sing most of it. So it was interesting to me to come here, and to visit the Waltzing Matilda centre. It is the only museum devoted to a song in the world, but it is more than that. It is one of the finest (and cleanest) outback museums that we have visited, and we have seen a lot in the last 20 months.








But today is Matilda day, when Wilton celebrates once again the famous song, and local celebrities gather to sing, and hear speeches from the mayor et al. The press and TV are here, it is a big event locally.



Inside the centre is a lifesize diorama depicting the song, from the billabong, to the Jumbuck (sheep), the troopers, and of course the jolly swagman.It is very well done, and we sat through the sequence which took about 15 minutes.

In the museum are many artefacts from Banjo's time, in fact there are eight modern buildings devoted to the history of the area, including the founding of the Qantas (Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service) airline that took place in this town in 1922. We will be writing more about that when we visit the Qantas museum in the next town, Longreach.





In the main street of Wilton is a billabong, with a coolibah tree, (a eucalyptus tree). Further down there is a depiction of the song in stone, and a bullock cart. It is a very clean little town just 900 people, but it punches well above it's weight.


To be honest, we would not have stopped here except that it was a useful stopover between our major stops, and useful also for a housekeeping day. And we are glad that we did.







Just outside the town is a musical fence, with the music for Matilda, which we played. It is made up of very taut wires hooked up to a sounding board above, and works very well. It is just as well it is outside the town as there are a couple of dozen percussion instruments, (junk tins etc) that would drive locals mad if it was any closer!








Yet another eccentricity is 'Arno's Wall,' a fifty metre long edifice of concrete and rock which contains everything including the kitchen sink. Motorbikes, a cement mixer, car wheels, lawn mowers, many hundreds of articles are embedded in the wall, which is still a work in progress.




Some 110 kms (70 miles) away to the west, along a dirt road, is Lark Quarry conservation park, home to the Dinosaur Stampede National Monument. Here are some 3300 dinosaur footprints from  95 million years ago, preserved originally in in mud and covered over soon after. It is thought that a number of chicken sized and emu sized herbivores were drinking at a lake when they were attached by a large carnivore. In this picture you can see where the large carnivore approached the lake, causing the smaller animals to flee along the muddy shore.


This town is a unexpected pleasant surprise to us, we could spend another couple of days here to see more, but we must move on. We have now put Betty on the market, and must be back in Melbourne by the end of the month to ensure that she finds a buyer.