Bowen to Collinsville

I had never heard of Collinsville until we arrived in Bowen. Peter tells me that this is because I am a Mexican who didn’t have the good fortune to go to school in sunny Queensland. So it was off to Collinsville yesterday, in the company of Gwenda and Neville (Chagall), in search of history. We passed an emu and endless tomato farms being stripped of their crop by young backpackers before arriving in Collinsville, only to have our request for a tour of the coal mine denied. The alternative was to visit the Miners’ Club for the “Coalface Experience”, an audio / visual museum. In the strife torn days of the coal miner strikes in Collinsville the townsfolk would tolerate any aberration in its people except conservative politics! Collinsville was worth the visit.

Back in Bowen we lunched at the old Grand View Pub which at one time had been the Officer’s Mess for the Catalina Squadron that was based in Bowen during WWII. The good folk of Bowen are proud of their history and highlight it at every opportunity. There are at least 24 murals in town (see photograph), any number of informative plaques explaining the historical significance of otherwise ordinary places, which is how we knew that we were eating in the Officers’ Mess, something termed “interpretative centres”, which as yet we haven’t figured out, and of course museums and memorials such as the Catalina and Coral Sea Memorial that we also visited yesterday.
Meanwhile Peter has developed “cabin fever” as we wait out the strong winds.