We have the first of our long drives today so after breakfast we packed up the car and set off with our first stop being the supermarket to pick up something for our picnic lunch then we set off on the drive. To be honest there wasn’t a lot to look at along the way although we did see a few very long trains and some fields where they were doing controlled burns but other than that it was just a case of swapping over driving every hour or so. The good news is that we managed to get to Rockhampton about 4pm so although we didn’t make it to the settlement village we did have time to do the Heritage Building Walk. We actually crossed the Tropic of Capricorn as we entered Rockhampton so we are at 40 degrees south. We are staying in a Heritage building and our room has a magnificent four poster bed and a slightly strange spa bath in the corner! It was built in 1885 as the administration building for the rail yards which are just around the corner. It was turned into a hotel in 2010 and they have decorated the rooms to match the Victorian style. After we had deposited the luggage in the room we set off on a walk round the town. In 1853 the Archer brothers arrived looking for somewhere to run sheep, in September 1858 gold was discovered approximately 50km north and 15,000 people arrived in search of gold. Rockhampton was officially declared a settlement on 25th October 1858. The town grew both in size and prosperity mainly because of the pastoral, cattle and gold mining industries and in the mid-1860s exports from Rockhampton exceeded those from Brisbane. We took the walk along Quay road which was the original street and is full of hotels and banks. Although most are now either offices or private buildings the majority have been given a Heritage listing so the frontages can’t be changed. The original investors of the Mount Morgan Mining company were responsible extracting 2500 tons of gold during its 100 years of operation, they were also responsible for the creation of BP as one of the original investors was William Knox Darcy who used his share of the company as financing for creating the Anglo-Persian Oil company which later became British Petroleum (BP). At one time Rockhampton had eight banks but unfortunately during the financial crash of 1893 this was reduced to just three. We finished the walk at the flood statue as the town has been hit by a number of floods during its history even as recently as 2012 where water would have been up to our waists if we were standing where the statue is during the flood. We walked back to the hotel for a bit of a relax before heading out for something to eat later to the hotel over the road that are holding a rodeo tonight!
