First is the 'Hands of Fame' park - where the hands of many of Australia's best known county and western singers are cast in concrete,
and second is the 'Roll of Renown' which is a permanent memorial to acknowledge and honour those people who have made a lasting and significant contribution to Australian, and international, country music.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't recognize very many of the names but I think this is one that will be familiar to some of you.
Today was a travel day for me, and I crossed into my fifth state here in Australia... Queensland.
Basically it was a day spent on the bus, but we had a bit of a break at lunch time when we stopped in a place called Warwick - and the stop was long enough for me to do a bit of walking around the town.
Warwick is essentially a service centre for the surrounding area known as Darling Downs. Darling Downs is a farming region with the landscape dominated by rolling hills covered by pastures of many different vegetables, legumes and other crops including cotton, wheat, barley and sorghum. Between the farmlands there are long stretches of crisscrossing roads, bushy ridges, winding creeks and herds of cattle. There are farms with beef and dairy cattle, pigs, sheep and lamb stock. Other typical sights include irrigation systems, windmills serving as water well pumps, light planes crop-dusting, rusty old woolsheds and other scattered remnants from a bygone era of early exploration and settlement. It was beautiful countryside to drive through, and in the town of Warwick you can see that church, civic and commercial buildings in were usually built from sandstone, and built to last. St Mary's Catholic Church was built in 1864 and is on the Australian heritage register.
Other sandstone heritage buildings include the Post Office, built in 1898,
the Town Hall, built in 1888,
and St Mark's Church of England built in 1868. All in all it was quite a lovely little spot to have a lunch break.
For the final leg of my journey today I was able to get a seat next to the window so I took a couple of photos for you to see. Warwick is located just west of the Great Dividing Range and these photos were taken just as we were coming down out of the mountains on the eastern side.
My final destination today was Brisbane. Brisbane is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Queensland and the third most populous city in Australia, having a population of approx. 2.5 million people. Brisbane is named after the river on which it sits, the Brisbane River, which in turn was named after Scotsman Sir Thomas Brisbane, the Governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825. The first European settlement in Queensland was a penal colony in 1824 (located about 30 kms north of what is now Brisbane's city centre), and free settlers were permitted from 1842. Brisbane was chosen as the capital when Queensland was proclaimed a separate colony from New South Wales in 1859.
When I got here this afternoon my friends and I went for coffee at a little coffee shop along the bank of the Brisbane River, which looked directly over, across the river at the Central Business District (CBD) - Brisbane's city centre.
The Queensland coast is currently being affected by what I think is the fourth cyclone since January. Those of you reading my blog internationally may have seen on the news some of the terrible flooding that occurred in January and February as a result of these weather systems, and although the current cyclone - Cyclone Tim - is expected to weaken within the next couple of days, I have a feeling that grey, cloudy skies are going to be the norm for most of my photos while I'm here. I just hope I don't have totally rainy days --- which are fine as there's lots for me to do, but not so great for photo taking.
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