19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
A bush drum kit marks the rust-red roots of Australia's flying kangaroo
It's the morning after a dramatic night before (with a thunderstorm bearing down on Winton, the Festival of Outback Opera's open-air, opening-night event was hastily relocated to a school hall). A golden sunrise comes as sweet relief. I stroll to the Musical Fence (an interactive sculpture sampled by Gotye for one of his songs) and a nearby bush drum kit on the town's outskirts. The playful instruments, fashioned from oil drums, hub caps and the like, beg to be played. Winton's soundtrack is the screech of galahs but I add high and low notes, banging the cymbals with "drumsticks" (literally sticks from a tree) and stomping the pedal of the bass drum. My "audience" is a larger sculpture - of an Avro 504K, Qantas's first aircraft - proclaiming Winton as the airline's birthplace. Doesn't that honour belong to Longreach, 180 kilometres down the road? Turns out Qantas's first board meeting took place in Winton, where they decided to move operations to Longreach ... and that was enough for Winton to stake a claim.
