On the road again....and loving it!

No sooner was I back from Hamilton Island when I was driving out to the regional New England areas of the state up to Glen Innes and Inverell. See below. The route I took, took almost 8 hours to get to Inverell from my home. But it was lovely. I love long drives, with my music, my thoughts and my camera!

Leaving the rat race of city traffic like the first two pictures is always wonderful. I got back last night and am sooo happy just to be home. I absolutely love traveling, meeting people and seeing things differently. It challenges me and provides a passing landscape that infuses the soul with an appreciation for the land, for my creator and for life. I love looking at the variety of things my eye sees.

In one instance the drive between Armidale to Inverell passes through several different terrain and vegetation landscapes it is almost incongruous. I believe it gets damn cold out here, and so in the next visit I make here I will be here to see the snow, and maybe THIS time I can do a snow angel!

There was even a town called Tingha obviously from the early gold mining areas the concentration of the chinese was high, there is even a big, perhaps the biggest business in town that is chinese. It was in Tingha that I saw the shop advertising in premium space, a CLEAN toilet, Then advertising the fact that they sold food. It must be a real important feature of the establishment. It was almost a ghost town, and the rocks, were everywhere. A brief history of the chinese store in Tingha is here

Wing Hing Long was established in the late nineteenth century as one of a number of stores servicing the tin mining communities of the Tingha district. Tin was first found in the area in the early 1870s. The discovery created a boom in productivity and population which peaked in the late nineteenth century and which declined as the tin was mined out.

Here was a typical general store in rural New South Wales where you could buy anything and everything. It was a busy place and, at this time, the building with its new timber walls and iron gabled roof demonstrated that the town itself had moved from the slab walls and bark rooves of a temporary mining community to more permanent structures. This was a store with a sound business and good prospects for the future.

In 1918, Jack Joe Lowe became the owner of the store.' Born in China in 1882, he had landed at Cooktown around 1900, and spent time in Sydney and Gunnedah before arriving, with his wife and eldest son, in Tingha in about 1915. J.J. Lowe was the fifth Chinese owner the property. The first was Ah Lin, identified as a storekeeper from Inverell. He purchased the land from George Fearby in 1881. Subsequent Chinese owners were Jock Sing of Glen Innes (1883-1887); Ah Bow, a miner from Tingha (1887-1899); and Charles Hing, a storekeeper from Tingha (1899-1918). It is unclear which of these early owners built the store, but building materials and styles suggest that it was constructed some time during the 1880s.

I thought I would share some images I captured - there is little or no reason I took them, other than what you see caught my interest.