Tucson Station

Dear family and friends,

We are close to finishing our 6 week placement at Tucson Sheep Station, helping the family. The children, aged 10 and 8, are enrolled at Longreach School of Distance Education and do their schoolwork at home under their mother's supervision. Our job is to give mum a break, so she can catch up on other things.

Lee is working with her student, you can see the telephone and computer in the background. The children have an average of one lesson each day "on air" with their teachers, using the phone and computer together.

The older student's lesson is about Australian Ballads, and she is learning the steps of a dance, following instructions from a tape. She needed a partner, so Peter was "it". Completed lessons are sent in to the teacher each fortnight and another set posted out with books and tapes.

Tucson is a 35,000 acre Merino sheep station south-east of Winton and west of Longreach, just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. The land is open grasslands with a few scattered trees. You can see the house on the right, sheds in the middle and a transportable "donga" to the left, where we slept. The grass is reasonably long this year after good rain. 

This is the road into Tucson, 29 km from the bitumen highway. It is mainly black soul plains and can get boggy after rain. We went in and out each weekend, mainly to go to church in Winton.

The sheep are spread out in large paddocks at this time of year, so there are no pictures of large mobs. However there were some pets around the house. This ewe, named 6:30 had her first lamb about 1/2 hour before this photo. She is in the process of licking it clean, the taste and smell helps her identify her lamb.

Jasper, the ram is helping Lee hang out some washing on the line. The hard dry ground came right up to the house.

Water for Tucson comes from sub-artesian bores, ie they need pumps to bring the water to the surface. Water is stored in above ground turkey nest dams. From there it is reticulated via poly pipe to tanks and troughs in several strategic points. Michael went to check this bore, so Madi and Bear turned the water spray on and made a fountain of it. The water was very warm, but they were soaked and the ride home in the back of the ute was quite chilling.

This is the view from our bedroom window. The landscape is very flat grassland, but there are also several large flat-topped Mesas (Jump-ups) over the whole area.

  

This is a closer view of the edge of the jump-up near Tucson. We went here for a picnic and we climbed to the top of  "two rocks".

On another weekend we went further towards Winton into Bladensburg National Park. One of the jump-ups in the park is called Scrammy. Here we all are at Scrammy Gorge. You can see the dark rock layer in the background, this is extremely hard.

And this is the gorge face, once the hard surface rock is undermined the rock crumbles. The whole area is very dry but when it rains there is hardly any soakage, all the water flows across the surface and into the gorge, then out across the plain.

The surface of the jump-up is several kilometres in size each way, this section contained several very hardy trees like this one.

We have enjoyed our time with the Mims family at Tucson. We are heading south this Friday south of Longreach towards Jundah and Windorah, on the edge of the red sand desert, then east to Quilpie and back to Bourke, NSW. Thence to Broken Hill and Wagga to visit friends and family. We plan to be home mid to late September.

Drop us a line at pcaspo@telstra.com with your news. We would love to hear from you.

Bye for now and God bless,

Peter and Lee.