Travelling with real Australians

Sitting around the campfire in Quilpie we are with other travellers. One from Albury and a couple from Darwin who haven’t been home in 5 years. The owners of the caravan park were here serving soup for dinner but have gone. The Darwin couple do the mail run – 10 local properties in 10 hours twice a week. In tourist season (April to October) you can buy a ticket to go with him and be served tea in the homesteads on the way around.

Quilpie is very quiet tonight. We were here 3 years ago and it was packed – standing room only around the fire, entertainment laid on and lots of noise. Not school holidays tonight, and a bit of a lull – it was full last night and bookings for tomorrow, but only 3 people in all day today.

  Big travel day today. Early start from Birdsville after a visit to the pump and the ‘i’. Fortunately the reports we had that the road was much improved from 14 years ago turned out to be correct. Then Windorah to Birdsville was a big day. Today Cooper Creek was a late lunch.

 

Not too much time to stop today. A new lookout just East of Betoota in memory of a Birdsville boy killed in the helicopter accident, gave us an elevated view of a mostly flat landscape. Apart from that it was birds, roadkill, and for the last hour, potential roadkill.

 

Big day today, bigger day tomorrow but home is not far now.

The Pub with no Food

I sit here tonight in the beer garden of the Birdsville Hotel, after having been greeted with a sign above the bar saying no food until the truck comes in “tomorrow”. I wouldn’t be surprised if that is like “free beer tomorrow”, but then we are 1600km west of Brisbane so I guess these things happen. Instead, they had a pizza and pasta night which, well, it filled my belly but that is probably enough said.

The day started well enough. Sunrise is late at the moment so I was up in the wetlands an hour before dawn to watch the birds and the sunrise. I had visions of a morning dip in the hot tub too. Brolgas, ducks, corellas, galahs and many other types were greeting the dawn. Unfortunately I had chosen to park underneath a galah roosting tree and the prospect of some additional sprinkles in my cereal didn’t appeal. I was about to move the car forward, only to discover a flat. There was no obvious hole or damage, but the tyre got my dip in the hot tub and blew bubbles nicely. My plugging kit had its first failure, fixing that hole but showing another nearby. Not wanting to turn my tyre into swiss cheese I decided to give the roadhouse some work.

Plenty of people were ahead of me in the queue, and all with problems rather worse than mine, so that much was good. There was a very sad camper trailer on a flatbed trailer with wheels at a very peculiar angle, and tyres beyond redemption. My tyre responded well to an internal patch and we were on our way.

I’d have to say the Birdsville Track we travelled today rang few bells with me. The only part that was familiar was the last few km south of the Qld border where the road is smooth and hard and runs between sand dunes. The rest was disappointingly rough and rocky but ok. We covered the 300km in under 5 hours.

That had us in Birdsville in plenty of time to run foul of the parking police at the caravan park reception before we escaped to a spot beside the wetlands. That left us plenty of time for a run out to Big Red, to watch the big boys with their boy toys. Unexpectedly we met up with a huge crowd doing the “Big Red Run”, a charity fun run for Type 1 Diabetes. They were camped out in about 40 tents beside Big Red, with lots of other gear and a helicopter. I’d suspect it was this influx of campers that ran the pub out of food.

And so we reach the end of the main destinations for this journey. In true holiday tradition Lynne has her nose well and truly pointed homewards and so is trying to work out how we can get home in 3 days. I’m just ready to collapse into bed.

 

Turning North to Mungerannie

This journey continues to serve up surprises. Perhaps because of my lack of prep for this trip, I had assumed that Lake Eyre was the only attraction on this leg. Far from it. Sure, there is the lookout which actually showed us Lake Eyre with salt nearer to us, but plenty of water on the horizon, but there was plenty more besides.

First up we needed to extract our value from Coward Springs, being one of the more expensive campsites of the trip. The owner here has made a real effort to preserve the railway history, having restored the engine driver’s hut. Other station buildings are part of the working cattle station and so are in good condition, but not for the public. There was also the spa and the wetlands to explore in daylight. They also run camel safaris out of the homestead, and we were treated to a departing camel train, fully loaded for an expedition.

The local spring at the homestead was artificial, extracted from a bore dug in preparation for the coming of the railway. The real spring is a km or so down the road. These springs are natural, as water has found a path through the rock that overlays the Artesian Basin. Over time, the sediments and minerals brought with the water builds up into mounds above the surrounding flat plain. If the mound gets too high, the pressure required to lift the water that extra height causes another fracture to open up, so one spring dries up, and another starts to build. This creates a series of mounds, mostly dry, but one will have a depression in the top filled to overflowing with water, and a stream running away from it.

Further down the road is more evidence of the railway and Overland Telegraph Line. These pictures are of the second longest bridge on the old Ghan and the nearby siding at Curdimurka.

A little further down the road we had advance warning of the next surprise. We caught sight of what looked like a huge statue of a scottie dog, made out of one of the railway water tank strands. Just beyond this station is a place called Planehenge. It was particularly appropriate for us because there has a been a statue made of C3PO from Star Wars, and we were listening to the radio play of Return of the Jedi at the time.

At Maree we had a last look at old railway history, and took a look at one of Tom Kruse’s Birdsville Track mail trucks parked near the station. We just found out tonight that he died in 2011, aged about 97, so the job did him no harm.

From then it was a small matter of completing the 200km north on the Birdsville Track to Mungerannie. We arrived about an hour before sundown, so there was plenty of time to get the camp setup, go down to the tub for a hot wash, and be back in time for dinner at the pub. It has been extended since we were last here 14 years ago with Isabel nearly 1 and so has lost some character in its newness.

Tomorrow it’s off to Birdsville, but not before we look at the birds in the wetlands over breakfast I am sure.

In search of an inland sea

For many years it was presumed that Australia must contain a great inland sea. I suppose there may have been a number of reasons for this presumption, but the most plausible was the vast number of rivers which seemed to flow in that direction. And indeed they do, at least when they flow. However the reality of the great inland sea was to be rather underwhelming.

For us the search was rather easier to achieve. It is marked on all of our maps as Lake Eyre, and routes into it conveniently marked as roads. We can see all of the rivers joining and making their way there, but as we cross them one by one, each is as dry as the last. The line of trees and the depression for the sandy bed being the only indication as to their presence.

Australia does have a great inland sea, but it is in fact dry most of the time. The rate of evaporation exceeding the rate of precipitation, even accounting for the huge catchment that flows here, means that all we see is the sea bed, apparently as low as 15m below sea level. Even after its discovery in the 1860s, there was no confirmed observation of its filling until the 1940s. Since then it has been full in the 1974/75 period and again in the 2000s. So once again, this great continent had broken dreams as it had broken hearts and bodies in a search.

We took a diversion travelling from Coober Pedy to William Creek to go to Lake Cadibarrawirracanna. The attraction here was quite simple. You might assume it has the longest place name in Australia, and perhaps that is correct although I have no idea. However, for me it was because Rolf Harris wrote a song about it that was part of my childhood. Not a great deal to see here, and because the ground is so flat and soft, the road finishes a couple of kilometres from the lake and so the walk takes longer, and provides less than we wanted to afford.

Lunch was at William Creek. It was another place to be ticked off, but turned up a few unexpected surprises. A pub that has chosen as its characteristic to pin identity cards to the roof is not so surprising, nor was the homely atmosphere of the dining room, and the price of diesel providing more turnover than the bar. William Creek services Anna Creek Station which is the largest in the World, and also is sited in the Woomera Prohibited Area, through which we travelled. Woomera was a rocket range and while Australia achieved Federation in 1901, it would be wrong to say we achieved any kind of independence. Britain chose Woomera, and the associated area at Maralinga for its rocket and nuclear bomb test ranges after World War 2, and Australia was a willing participant.

The level of the technology, and the priority, was to launch rockets, not to retrieve them. They fell, untracked, into the vast tract of land from South Australia up into the Pilbara of northern Western Australia. While some were found, the majority were not, and even if they were, horseback could not carry the large pieces. It was not until stations began using aircraft more commonly that the pieces were found in any quantity, and vehicles could be used for their recovery. William Creek became a collection point and a museum, and one such interested visitor today was Dick Smith, amateur aviator and interested in all things historical and cultural.He had flown in for a visit with a small group of friends.

Lake Eyre for us was indeed dry, but the warning signs were also spot on. Driving on the lake is prohibited for several reasons, but the principal of which are that the marks left may last for decades, spoiling the view for others, and also because the crust is very thin over a bottomless mass of sticky black mud from which vehicle recovery is impossible. And indeed it is.   Walking would have you break the surface and you sink above your ankles into mud which I can only describe as being like vegemite with a sprinkling of talcum powder mixed in. It is some of the stickiest stuff I have ever had to deal with, and I include old baby poo in this comparison.

The salt is further out, but patches are close enough to walk on, and it is salty, and hard. There is also evidence of a salt foam being whipped up as it was drying, with a crusty wave preserved in time.

Cleaning up the muck made us late into Coward Springs, our camp for the night. That gave us a beautiful sunset on the road, which we couldn’t spend the time to appreciate and a semi-dark setup. It also meant the obligatory walk to the hot spa was freezing cold, but necessary to remove the last of the mud before collapsing into bed.

End of the line?

Oodnadatta grew up because of two major pieces of 19th century infrastructure – the Central Australian Railway (or Ghan) and the Overland Telegraph Line. For a good long time Oodnadatta was the end of the line for the railway, and this privileged status of geography meant it was a thriving town with as many as 500 residents. The train serviced as often as twice a week and was met by cameleers and traders who would alternately disperse and collect the goods for transport on the train.

Unbelievable as it may seem, an enterprising Chinese gentleman maintained a market garden out here which serviced the needs of the community for fresh vegetables and a small amount of fruit. Being at the edge of the Great Artesian Basin, water was available, although it needed desalination to be useful. Even this was not beyond the technologists of the optimistic 19th century residents.

The Overland Telegraph Line took a bend just west of here. That was considered remarkable enough in the straight march of this wire stretched across the continent for the “Angle Pole”, where it turned the corner, to be preserved, and for the “Oodnadatta to Angle Pole Railway” remembered as an aid to construction.

And how do we know all of this? Over the last 20 years or so, the enterprising proprietor of the Oodnadatta Pink Roadhouse has been making entertaining and informative signs at all points of interest radiating out from Oodnadatta, and along the Oodnadatta track. Painted in a characteristic style they are immediately recognisable, and add character to the landscape, as well as knowledge to the reader.

Alas this has all come to an end. Late last year that same man was killed in a driving accident in a rally, as rallying was another of his passions. Whether because the level of his input was too great to be replaced, or because of the vast numbers of reminders of him about the place, his surviving wife has decided to put the place on the market. This has implications not just for the roadhouse, but many of the other businesses in the town such as the caravan park, and perhaps also the shop and hotel. If a similarly driven buyer is not found, it is easy to see that the town of Oodnadatta, already well down into double figures from the high of 500 during the golden days, may lose entirely its reason for being. The whole town may then be a museum, and not just the railway station.

Oodnadatta was an essential detour for us on the way to Coober Pedy. The Oodnadatta Track and the Coober Pedy road provided us with stark landscapes, with evocative names like the painted desert, and lollipop lane. It was no surprise to find out that movies like Mad Max and others were filmed out here.

And who hasn’t heard of Coober Pedy? Centre of production for the vast majority of the world’s commercial opal, the stuff is just lying around in the streets. Tourists are encouraged to go to an area where they can pick up and chip away at the rock and take away whatever they find. And find it they do.

Famous also for underground housing, I was surprised to find out that the underground housing also comes with a view. The opal-rich layer is hard rock and so is often found un-eroded at the tops of hills where the surrounding landscape has worn away. Apparently the majority of the town’s residents now live, hobbit-like, tucked into the sides of the hills about the place. We were lucky, in a sense, to be able to score one of the last remaining available motel units so we could share this underground experience. Isabel, however, was a little disappointed to learn that the local drive-in, of which we have a great view, shows only once a fortnight on a Saturday, so we were out of luck.

Dinner tonight was a goat curry, having eschewed a “Coat of Arms” pizza of emu and kangaroo available at the local pizzeria. We are warm and dry in our rock hole, but the temperature is dropping outside, and apparently the rain is falling again further north.