This morning I gave the locals a break and took all their flies for a walk. Yep, every fly in Augathella came with me as I walked around the town at sunrise and discovered more things about this lovely town. I saw all their quirky meat ant sculptures, including the two having a beer, stretched back at a table near the pub. The granddaddy of them all is a huge one on top of a pole in the Main Street park. Cast beautifully in bronze, it looked stunning as it captured the rising sun and glowed against the sky.

I also took a closer look at their many murals, my favourite being the soft toned olden day scenes on the public toilets. Other scenes such as the one depicting the 1950s movies about Smiley (a character based on a local boy) on the walls of the old picture theatre and the drays and bullock teams on the garage were more colourful.

The park was a wealth of information, with signs and pictures about the town's history. It is fascinating to think that the Cobb and Co coaches still ran through here when Reg's mother was a girl attending the local primary school. The wall at the entrance of the park is covered in tiles, each one painted by an adult or child of the town, each depicting some aspect of life in Augathella. It is a colourful mosaic that captures the community spirit of this place beautifully.

As well as walking the streets, the flies and I also walked the outskirts of town following a path along the Warrego River. Gums and coolibahs graced the riverside and a riot of yellow wild flowers danced at their roots. Yesterday evening there were kangaroos everywhere around town, but this morning they were mysteriously missing. My guess is they were all out on the highway throwing themselves at cars. (This was later confirmed when we saw the many carcasses all the way to Longreach.)

I eventually returned to our cabin, my legs not at all weary, but my hands exhausted from constant fly chasing, and we hit the road northwards to our next stop, Longreach. It was a long way to Longreach, with fewer places to break up the journey. They must have had more rain up this way as we drove through much greener countryside dotted with healthy looking cattle. These vast, flat plains stretch for ever and their immensity helps give us a greater understanding and appreciation of the Australian outback. It does one good to be reminded of our place in the world, that we are but a speck on the surface of the earth.

There was quite a bit of roadwork between Augathella and Tambo, but not much after that. We have been really impressed by the excellent condition of the roads and the amount of work being done on them since leaving Toowoomba. The road was mostly ours alone all the way today.

We stopped at Tambo for a cup of tea, Blackall for fuel and an ice-cream, and Barcaldine to tap into the Tree of Knowledge. Ilfracombe was the only other town we passed through before reaching Longreach. All these western towns are amazing. They are neat and clean, show-casing their heritage and shining with civic pride.

We particularly enjoyed spending some time in Barcaldine, the town that forged its place in Australian history with the Great Shearers' Strike of 1891. Shearers protesting poor pay and working conditions, held their strike meetings in the shade of a ghost gum that became known as the Tree of Knowledge. Their efforts laid the foundation of the Australian Labor Party. The tree has died, poisoned by an unknown culprit in 2006, but been preserved as a monument. It stands outside the Railway Station beneath an impressive timber sculpture, a gigantic cube made from recycled timber, recreating the size of the canopy of the tree when it was in its prime.

Once checked into our Longreach motel, we headed across the the road to spend a couple of hours in the QANTAS Founders Museum where the artifacts and multimedia displays gave us an insight into the formation and history of this airline. We also saw inside the heritage-listed, original QANTAS hanger and some of the early model planes on display.

Being a true outback town, there are no fast food places in Longreach, nor big supermarket chains. Being Sunday, nearly everything was closed, so we acquired a loaf of bread from a service station, made a meal of sandwiches for dinner, then hit the sack early.