What a surprise! Despite being a large cotton, wheat and wool area the town had a distinct Mediterranean feel and look. The grape draped arbours lining both sides of the main street, the olive trees growing in the median strips and the distinctly neo-classical Memorial Hall all showed strong southern European influences.
Moree is obviously a wealthy little town and has been for a very long time if the old buildings are anything to go by. We will look into Moree's history on the way back as we are due to spend a night here.
The grape draped arbours....
The distinctly neo-classical Memorial Hall...
The former bank building now the town's art gallery....
After lunch we headed for Narrabri. After checking into our cabin we were back on the road sightseeing.
Our late afternoon visit to Sawn Rocks, part of the Mount Kaputar National Park, was the highlight of the day.
The tourist guide says....
"The forty (40) metre high cliff face is the sheered off remains of a basalt lava flow from the Nandewar Volcano which dominated the area 21 million years ago. When the molten rock within the basalt lava flow cooled slowly and, importantly, evenly, this enabled the individual crystals within the molten rock to align perfectly with each other. While this type of five-sided (pentagonal) ‘organ piping’ is not rare to lava flows it is exceptionally rare to find them so perfectly formed and preserved and is recognised as being one of the best examples of columnar jointing in Australia. The perfect polygonal jointing of Sawn Rocks is attributed to the slow and even cooling of molten rock which erupted from the bowels of the earth some 21 million years ago." After a 25km drive and a 1km walk we said WOW!!!  Wow!!!  That is amazing...  Overnight we almost froze again. We are definitely going to buy flannelette PJs and a fan heater today. In same tourist guide as we found out about Sawn Rocks we discovered that only 25km from Narrabri was the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere. The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), at the Narrabri Observatory, is an array of six 22-m antennas used for radio astronomy. In the crisp early morning light the dishes were very impressive and photogenic.... |
The six dishes are mounted on a set of rails 6km long and are moved back and forth to focus the incoming signal. This arrangement makes the telescope effectively 6km wide.
Today, two dishes are quite away down along the rails....
Bouyed by the success of our early morning adventure we decided to venture even further into the wildness and find Yarrie Lake. Yarrie Lake is almost circurlar and located in the midst of an errie cyprus pine forrest at the end of red dirt road.
Yarrie Lake in the early morning....
Red dirt road to Yarrie Lake...
