This was another huge day of travel to get to the little caravan park at Lark Maraboon about 20kms out of Emerald. I didn’t realise what a massive dam there would be here. It’s hard to appreciate the scale in the pictures, but Fairbairn Dam is a sight to behold. We felt like Japanese tourists taking photos from all angles, because you just felt so dwarfed on this thing.

Emerald is a pretty big regional centre so it was a good introduction to the outback. A large shopping centre can be found just down the road from the original 1900s buildings that began the town.

Perhaps the town’s biggest claim to fame (literally the biggest) is the ginormous replica of Van Gogh’s sunflower painting on a huge ‘easel’ in the town centre. It is the largest ‘painting on an easel’ in the world! The giant replica marks the beginning of a path of mosaic artworks entitled “100 years in 100 metres”. These were amazing too.

Temperatures here weren’t too bad either: quite hot on the first day, but mild on the next. This must have suited the local wildlife, because we saw a lot of them! At the caravan park we were absolutely swamped by big groups of Lorikeets, Cockatoos and Parrots.

You can’t visit outback Queensland and not go fossicking. So on our way to Longreach we stopped in at Sapphire and went panning for, funnily enough, sapphires. We thought we’d see if we couldn’t “stub our toes on a fortune” as the sign promised when we drove in. We found quite a few little ones and even a reasonable sized one that could be polished up. We were all pumped to purchase 8 buckets of dirt (this was a special they were having) and try our luck, but the lady said to us, how about you start with one bucket and see how you go. Thank goodness we did. I don’t know what I expected, but after shovelling from a huge dirt pile, washing, shaking, more washing, more shaking, then standing over a table with tweezers for ages, I’ve readjusted my opinion of our fossicking ancestors.