Clermont

Sorry about the delay with this post, this working lark is no good I tell ya!

A bit of a historical read for you today!

After a few weeks of not going away, due to Ben’s foot and my new job, on Sunday 23rd we spontaneously decided to go somewhere for the afternoon. The challenge was where to go that was less than an hour away from Moranbah. I had picked up some leaflets a while ago about a place called Clermont, about 110km away from Moranbah, so we decided to go and explore there. We left Ben at home as his foot was still not healed and we weren’t sure whether there would be anything there for him.

We set off in the opposite direction to our usual route to Mackay on the coast. It was amazing how totally different the scenery was as we drove along. At first there were thick trees, and then it became totally barren land apart from huge odd-shaped rocks jutting out unexpectedly on the horizon. We were driving through the Peak Range National Park at this stage which we will have to explore further another time.
A section from ‘Geological Elements of the National Estate in Queensland’ describes the Peak Range as:

“A chain of prominent and picturesque mountains to the east of Clermont which is visible from a considerable distance across the plains of the central highlands. It consists of a number of groups of sharp peaks separated by flat plain country similar to the surrounding district. The Peak Range district is underlain by an extensive sequence of basalt flows and rhyolite/trachyte intrusive bodies, which were erupted and emplaced between 30 and 26 million years ago (middle of the Tertiary period), probably as this part of the Australian crustal plate drifted northwards across a ‘hot-spot’ deep below in the Earth’s mantle.”

It is amazing to think that these strange rock formations are a result of activity millions of years ago!

A bit further along the road I was surprised to discover farmed land, this is the first we have seen (apart from sugar cane) since we got here. On stopping at a plaque at the side of the road we discovered that the land in the area of Wolfang (named due to one of the rocks/mountains which is in the shape of a wolf fang) was first used for farming after the second world war when the Queensland British Food Corporation used crops grown here to be sent to ‘Mother’ England. The plots of land here still continue to be farmed by various landowners.