This tourism attraction is superbly well done. Jerry Collins, a major station owner and beef producer in the eighties, learned about the virtues of diversification having found himself over-geared as Aussie went into the nineties recession. Having sold off some stations and negotiated a unique deal with the Queensland Government, he was left with a much-reduced beef operation and a lease of a small portion (“Lava-Tube-Land”) of his old and first cattle station, the rest of that station having become a National Park. The two hour tour of the Lava Tubes (example right)involved a solid delivery of information pitched just right. Lava tubes were created when the last volcano in the region erupted approximately190,000 years ago. The shallow gradient caused the lava to flow slowly, solidifying on the top to form a crust with the flowing lava underneath naturally finding and flowing down watercourses, in some cases for around 60 kms. The super-hot flowing lava cuts into the igneous massive granite below and essentially, a tubular-shaped hole opens up between flowing and solidified lava. In the places where the roof of the tubes collapse, the rain forest vegetation that was on the surface at the times, thousands of years later, continues to exist in the resultant depression, creating deep green islands on an arid sparsely vegetated landscape. These islands we explored by the Aboriginal people with the Lava Tube caves probably being regarded with suspicion and therefore not used as living places.