Through South Australia

One of the things all Victorians surely look forward to is warmth as you travel north.  -1deg Celsius last night in Alice, with our breath steaming in the camper trailer as the 5:00am 2 km long train rolled past nearby. Things warmed up nicely by about 8:00am when I hopped under the trailer to start some repair work. As with each journey we’ve done we expect there will be things that need to be sorted after the first week or so and this trip is certainly no different. Fortunately Alice is a great town to get things done. We have landed here a week before the Finke desert race that begins next weekend. Nearly every workshop, and there are many, is involved one way or another in this great race that draws entrants from around the world. So finding a metal working shop able to make new brackets for a new water tank has been time consuming but eventually fruitful. Before I go any further a message for Greg who did a marvellous job fitting a new tank under the floor of the trailer….not your fault!

First day out, on our way to Penola over the SA border, I drew water for a drink and scalded my lips with water that had turned toxic. Fortunately I didn’t swallow any, but dumped the water and refilled, only to find the problem wouldn’t go away even after six rinses that jiggered the hand pump (no drain plug provided). As chance had it we bumped into old Williamstown friends in Maree in the hotel there, and Henry is an industrial chemist. Apparently whilst I had purchased the tank on the web on a site called “water tanks”, I had been sent a tank that had been treated with Fluorine or Ozone to prepare the plastic for diesel. No matter how many rinses we might do we wouldn’t get rid of the stuff, which is carcinogenic anyway. Oh joy! So, a new tank that sort of fits, new brackets being welded up in the morning whilst the trailer has its seized-on 20 year old shockers changed, new hoses already prepared, and after hopefully no more than an hour underneath we’ll be back in business. Alice people are so helpful. Already we have had two repairs on things done without charge. 

Early in May we went over to McLaren Vale for a wedding and enjoyed the journey through the Grampians so much we opted to go that way again, this time on a damp day following the Glenelg River much of the way through fading regional towns. Not so Hamilton with its excellent regional art gallery. We were offered a free night at the old pub just over the SA border in Penola “next time you are passing this way” because they forget to turn on the hot water system for our morning showers. Little did they realise we would take them up on their word!

Strawberry Lane cottages, red gum kerbs

Penola is a pleasant small town with a fine modern memorial building to Saint Mary McKillop, and a delightful historic cottage and garden streetscape called Strawberry Lane. We wasted a day by going so far due west rather than heading for the top left hand corner, but we weren’t about caring. We headed north on day 2 and landed on the Murray at Morgan, one of the old trading towns from the riverboat days, with two competing pubs and a ferry that goes all night. Like the Nile, a mile wide and 1000 miles long, the Murray here cuts a green swathe through near a barren landscape on its way south.

Our northward advance, now on dirt roads, took us into a far flung and somewhat sombre landscape. We crossed the Barrier Highway and stopped overnight at an old gold mine we had visited a few years ago when we did the Simpson Desert crossing. Waukaringa mine was supported from 1873 to the 1950’s by a magnificent hotel and a township in 1890 of about 750 people.

Only the lethal shafts, the treatment tanks and a tall chimney rising high above the ridge, the unroofed hotel and the a few graves in the Catholic cemetery remain, with stone remains of a mortuary a few km away. It is hard to imagine how the town worked socially in such a remote place, yet it is typical of how miners lived, then as today.

This blog could die an early death as I am being defeated by technology - the pics won't be dragged into order on the left, hotspot from mobile to laptop is tricky despite much help yesterday from a young Israeli in the campground and internet connections a mystery! However we are stuck in Alice for a few days fixing things and mending Ian's sore back so who knows?

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