We weren’t moving on from our motel today.  It was so nice not to have to repack the car. Today we did the Lake Dunn Sculpture Trail.  The 200 km circuit follows a large triangle from Aramac to Lake Dunn and then along some unpaved back roads, returning to Aramac.  As we started out in Barcaldine, we had a few extra kilometres to travel. We covered about 340 kilometres today.  

A local lady, Milynda Rogers, living on one of the isolated properties on the circuit, created the trail.  She taught herself to weld and create the most amazing sculptures after seeing one in Blackall a few years ago.  She uses all sorts of found metal objects and shapes them into whatever it is she is sculpting. Old cutlery, car parts, spanners, wire coil, Barbed wire, saucepans, forty gallon drums and anything else she can get her hands on.  She finishes them and then displays them by the side of the road, somewhere along the triangle. Originally she was giving the kids that travel those roads daily something to look at along the way but it has become a major tourist highlight around these parts. As adults, we found it good fun to watch and try to spot where the next sculpture was going to be. They weren’t always easy to spot but we found all 40 of them, much to our delight. There were a wide range of topics but all relating to the area in someway. If I had to pick one favourite I’d say it was the bottle tree but there were so many others that I loved as well.

Well worth a visit or a detour if you’re heading out this way. Even the unpaved road wasn’t too bad.  We didn’t have a four-wheel-drive and we found it quite manageable.  The car was covered in red dust by the time we got back to Barcaldine but that was a small price to pay for a very entertaining day out.