Isabel's Adventures: Monday 15th June

Monday 15^th June

On Monday we went to the Underground Hospital. At the Underground Hospital there was a museum above ground. In the museum there was bed pans and a real skeleton in.

This is the real skeleton.

After we looked in the museum we looked at a collection of rocks and crystals. After we looked at the collection of rocks we went on a tour of the real Under Ground Hospital. In the Underground Hospital there was beds and even bottles with medicine still in them.

These are the bottles with the medicine in.

These are bed pans.

Mum's notes:
The Underground Hospital was very interesting. The medicine vials were discovered in a sealed cupboard that had somehow survived decades of kids entering the hospital though the emergency escape shaft to play in the tunnels.

The men's ward.

In the museum we saw a collection of Japanese pre-printed currency notes for the countries that they planned to occupy after WWII, including Australia. I found this degree of planning and certainty of victory to be fascinating, but very, very chilling.

Japanese money intended to replace ours and others....

On the hospital site we also saw this tent house, a common structure once in Mt. Isa in the 1930's.

A close-up of the roof of the tent house - the original structure is covered with cheap and readily available canvas.

We spent the afternoon in the Visitor Information Centre in Mt. Isa. There are number of attractions within the centre, including the bush garden, the Outback at Isa museum and the Riversleigh Fossil Centre. In Outback at Isa we learned about local Aboriginal artefacts, we saw a boat made of a fuel tank from the wing of a WWII plane and saw lots of mining information.

Food gathering and preparation tools.

Ochres for bark painting.

The little boat made from a WWII plane wing fuel tank.

The kids spent a long time doing this, several times. They are looking at a display of native copper built into the floor.

In the bush garden we learned about many Australian plants and their uses. Our favourite is the soap bush, which is an acacia that has seeds pods that produce a lather if rubbed with water.

A Bloodwood tree - the heated sap was used by the local Aboriginal people as a very hard glue.

Ruby Salt Bush with edible red fruits that can also be used as a dye.

A native edible fig (Cluster Fig - unripe, fruit goes red).

Grevillea nectar for sweetener.

In the Riversleigh Fossil Centre we saw a film on the amazing array of creatures fossilised in one spot. We were also struck by the difference in fossil digging techniques and fossil quality. The fossils at Riversleigh are encased in hard limestone, and explosives are used to break the rock apart, so the fossils are rarely dug out whole like in Winton and Richmond.