A new video is highlighting Winton's success as the tourism and events capital of Outback Queensland.
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The video posted by the Drought and Flood Agency (which has issued its response to the 2019 floods this week) interviews Winton Mayor Gavin Baskett who says Winton had predominantly been an agricultural shire with sheep and cattle but tourism and events had grown steadily in importance growing over the last 20 or 30 years.
"Our forefathers had a vision 50 years ago to create the Winton Tourism Association and it has slowly grown with the Waltzing Matilda Centre and now we have the Australian Age of Dinosaurs which is doing fantastic," Cr Baskett said.
"The opal industry is great for Winton with mining and it is getting bigger in tourism and we are also known as the birthplace of Qantas."
Cr Baskett also listed the many events Winton hosts such as Way Out Way, the Writers Festival, the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival, the Opal Festival, and the Outback Festival every second year with its signature dunny derby.
"We consider ourselves the festival capital of Outback Queensland, these are great events that attract 1000 to 3000 people for a few days up to a week," he said.
Cr Baskett highlighted Winton's open air cinema, the Royal, which hosts the Vision Splendid Film Festival.
"It's great sitting back on the old canvas chairs, watching a movie and looking up at the stars," he said.
"We've got directors interested in shooting western movies out here, we've got great landscape for that."
The Australian Age of Dinosaurs has been a huge attraction and AAOD chair David Elliot said from the time they found found fossilised bones nearby there was a potential to do something for regional Queensland and they started to design a museum in 2002.
"It was based on our property until 2009 and then it came up to the Jump Up which is all of the land on top of the mesa," Mr Elliot said.
"We've been working away since then to get all of the infrastructure in place for a major museum for regional Queensland."
One of the upcoming attractions is a building housing a trackway containing 60m of recently discovered sauropod tracks and there are installing large new bronze dinosaur sculptures on site.
"We've got to invest and look at getting better not just sit stagnant and hope that things will get better," Mr Elliot said.
Cr Baskett said the museum and the Waltzing Matilda Centre attracted many visitors to Winton.
"David's ultimate goal is to build a natural history museum on top of the hill which will be one of the largest in Australia for natural history and Australian fossils and that will be fantastic when completed with the jobs it will create for Winton and the people it will attract to come to it," he said.
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