September 2014 - Alice to The Murray River

Travelling south from Alice Springs is really easy, as the roadhouse’s are about every 200 to 250 kilometres apart, and most have good little caravan parks attached.

We stopped for “elevenses" in the parking bay at Stuarts Well, and this triple road train with 2 decks of cattle pulled in beside us and I just couldn’t resist a photo.  With live cattle export back on the agenda again in the top end, these road trains transporting cattle to and fro is once again a common site, which is giving the station owners and the cattle industry a much needed boost.

Two hundred kilometres south of Alice is the Erldunda Roadhouse which sits on the corner of the Stuart Highway that runs north/south between Adelaide and Darwin, and the Lasseter Highway that runs west out to Uluru, The Olgas and Kings Canyon. Erldunda is known as the “Centre of the Centre of Australia” as the “geographical centre” of Australia is only about 50 kilometres to the east.

Animals left over from the Y2K celebrations

     

We often read on travel forums where people complain bitterly about the cost of fuel, food and accommodation in places like this, and I am sure they don’t take the time to understand just what these people go through to provide travelers with a service.  Erldunda has 50 or so powered caravan sites, possibly as many air conditioned motel style units, a restaurant, tavern, gift shop and service station.

Animals left over from the Y2K celebrations

  They generate all their own power which burns 750 litres of diesel per day, they pump 86,500 litres of water per day from a bore 20 kilometres away, which burns another 1,000 litres of diesel per month, and all their supplies have to travel 1,500 kilometres by rail to Alice Springs from Adelaide and then another 200 kilometres by road to them.  Their closest service personnel come from Alice and they charge $800 to $,1000 call out fee, before they do any work.  It makes you appreciate how good we have it when power and water just run past your door.

Kulgera is the southernmost roadhouse along the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory and Marla is the northernmost town in South Australia on the Stuart Highway.  With so little rain, it is a wonder that anything grows out here, but we found wild flowers in full blossom all the way along here.

The RFDS provide a fantastic medical service to people living in and visiting these outback areas.  Of course to be able to provide these services, they need to be able to land their planes, and to make this possible they have created landing strips on straight stretches of roadway.

One of these is the Traeger Roadstrip on the Stuart Highway between Glendambo and Coober Pedy, which although it has only been activated for aircraft landing on two occasions since 1997, it is a vital part of the service they provide.

Coober Pedy is the Opal Capital of the World and I don’t think you would find a landscape quite like it anywhere else in the world.  The opal leases now extend for 50 kilometres all around the town, and the little mounds of overburden from drilling shafts looks more like a lunar landscape than anything else.  Even after 50 years of opal mining in this area, geologists are yet to come up with a method for detecting opal without digging.  The only way to do it is to peg out a 50 metre x 50 metre claim (which costs $80.00 for 3 months) and start drilling holes about 1 metre diameter by 30 metres deep and watch for the opal seam.  A Cadweld-type drill is used to excavate these holes using an auger bucket.

If nothing is found, the hole is abandoned and consequently, there are literally thousands of these abandoned holes all over the opal field today.  If the seam is found then tunneling machines are used to follow it along horizontally and the opal is then dug out of the seam by hand.

One of the great inventions of the Coober Pedy opal fields is the machine called “the blower”.  This is best described as a giant vacuum cleaner mounted on a truck. The suction hose goes down the shaft and sucks up all the unwanted material and dumps it in the hopper above ground.

When there is enough weight in the hopper to overcome the suction, the bottom door drops open and the material falls out onto the mullock heap.  I had a go at feeding some overburden into one of these machines and was surprised that it could easily pick up at least a 3 inch diameter rock without any effort.

Opal seam which keeps miners underground

 

All around town there are shops selling opal in any shape or form that you might want, we resisted the urge to purchase as it is much more exciting if you find it yourself.  

Heading out of town, we had a fearful side wind of about 55 to 60 kph which buffeted us around a bit, but thankfully about 30 kilometres down, the road turns to the south and the tail wind improved our fuel consumption considerably.

A lot of the centre of South Australia makes up a part of the 1.2 million square kilometres of the Lake Eyre basin.  Of course with such little rainfall and the extreme heat, most of this area is dry all the time.

Travelling along the Stuart Highway we came across Lake Hart which is one of the smaller lakes of this system.

All the way along the highway we saw signs saying that we were passing through a restricted area, and this was explained when we got to Woomera to camp for the night. Woomera was built in 1947 as the domestic support base for the Woomera Test Range (formerly the Woomera Rocket Range) in support of the Anglo-Australian Joint Project.  This project focused on the development of long-range weapons systems, principally to counter the growing intercontinental ballistic missile threat from the former Soviet Union.

Woomera test range file photo

The Range today is much smaller than it was in 1947, but still covers one-seventh of the State of South Australia.   Although there are now several major mines established within the range, the Woomera support base is the only permanently established 'township' facility in the range, which covers an area of just under 127,000 square kilometres, or an area roughly the size of England.  It is the world's largest land-based instrumented defence systems test and evaluation range facility.  

Now days the range is used by the Defence to trial and test Defence systems including bombs, missiles, rockets, aircraft and electronic warfare systems.  The range conducts about 50 – 60 trials each year using many items of special equipment such as high speed cameras and optical trackers to ensure that such testing is always carried out as safe as possible.

The village housed 7,000 people back in the 60’s and has been in decline ever since and today there are only 200 permanent residents rattling around in all this infrastructure. The population can increase rapidly in spikes when special tests are being carried out.

This aircraft is a Meteor Mk7 which entered service with the Air Force in 1944 and saw service in Japan and Malta and this one is believed to be the last one remaining.  After the war these aircraft were converted to pilotless drones and used for target practice at Woomera.  There were 477 sorties over a 17 year period during which time 59 Meteors were destroyed in flight and a further 20 crashed through malfunctions.

The Black Arrow is a 3 stage British rocket that stands 13 metres tall and was designed to carry a satellite into orbit.  This rocket weighed 18 tonnes at take off and used 3 engines to propel it into space, where 10 minutes after take off it would be 1,700 kilometres from Woomera and 560 kilometres above the earths surface.  At this point, with it’s speed approaching 8 kilometres per second, The nose cone would open and the satellite would be deployed into permanent orbit.  The last satellite it deployed is named Prospero and it remains in space circling the earth every 100 minutes and will continue to do so for the next century to come.

Seventeen Canberra Bombers were once again used here for target practice after being converted to remote control by a company in Northern Ireland and then flown to Australia. The first target flight was flown in 1959 and the bomber was destroyed from the ground while flying at 50,000 feet.  A further 11 were shot down over the next 6 years and 5 more malfunctioned and crashed before the project ended.  No wonder they need such a large area around Woomera for the range.

This one is called the Jabiru and is a seriously fast rocket which can reach speeds of 2,500 metres per second or 9 times the speed of sound. This rocket carried a payload of 90 kilograms of specific instruments designed to measure the effects of aerodynamic heating.

The Thunderbird is a large ground to air missile which went into trials at Woomera in 1954, and the program was completed in 1960 when it went into service with the British Army after many failures and mishaps.

Two days travel and with an overnight stop in Port Pirie, saw us back on the Murray River at Renmark.

The Big 4 caravan park at Renmark is undoubtedly one of the best caravan parks in Australia.  Right on the banks of the Murray it offers a very tranquil place to sit and ponder the river going by.

Just by chance we saw the strangest house boat pass by so we followed it to the wharf at Renmark to find out what it is all about.

The boat was built by Frank Thornton who is one of the most eccentric characters that we have met on our trip.  Frank is a 70 year old busker who writes and sings country songs as well as songs from his idle, Johnny Cash.  Frank is known as the Chookman as he travels everywhere with his bantam chickens and rooster who also live on the boat with him.

They also used to travel up north with him to Daly Waters in the Northern Territory where he was the main attraction at the pub, performing nightly during the tourist season with the chooks sitting on his head.

So here we are now, back in our favourite part of the country, along the Murray River learning to wear jumpers and long trousers again.  The trip over the past 18 months has been absolutely awesome and we have seen heaps of this great country, but the call of the land beckons and we are thinking that a nice place on the river might be a good place to interrupt our trip for a short time, while we contemplate “where to next" .............

September 2014 - Alice Springs

Alice springs is nestled in amongst the East and West MacDonald Ranges and the Todd River “runs” around the south end.

The West MacDonald Ranges are very distinctive in that there is a rocky ridge that runs all the way along the top of the range, unlike any other mountain range that we have seen on our travels.

We visited Alice some years ago and went to Palm Valley and Hermannsburg, so this time we decided to visit Glen Helen.

Glen Helen sits on the banks of the Fink River in the West MacDonald National Park, about 130 kilometres west of Alice Springs.  The Fink River, which is often described as the worlds oldest river, rises in these ranges and meanders for nearly 700 kilometres across the plains and through these rugged mountain ranges, before soaking into the sands of the desert about 50 kilometres south of the South Australian border towards Lake Eyre.

The river seldom flows, but in 1988 the river flooded at Glen Helen and water spread over an area of 10,000 square kilometres.  The water hole at Glen Helen gorge is special as it is one of only 6 “more -or- less” permanent water holes along the full length of the river system, so fish, animals and people rely on these water holes for their survival.

The Glen Helen gorge as been carved out over many years by water running down the Fink River.

Only 20 or so kilometres further upstream from Glen Helen is Ormiston Gorge.  Once again there is a “more -or- less” permanent water hole and a short walk along the dry river bank exposes the upper reaches of the gorge.

Who could come to Alice Springs and not visit the Road Transport Hall of Fame, which is a volunteer based project dedicated to the preservation and presentation of Australia's unique road transport heritage.   It does this through its magnificent Hall of Fame, and display of old transport equipment, right here in the traditional birthplace of the roadtrain.  This place was built to not only to remember the great trucks, buses and vehicles of the past, but recognise the contribution of the men and women who drove and lived with these great machines of the past.

Current engineers in the transport industry today are working feverishly to build steering suspensions in modern trailers to improve turning circle and reduce road wear, yet this road train towed by a restored Diamond T 980, has full steering rear suspensions operated by a mechanical linkage from the front trailer suspension.

The army’s 1934 AEC road train, commonly known as the government roadtrain, was used extensively in the top end during WW2.  Not much in the way of a cabin but at least the driver got a nice breeze while driving. Not sure about the safety aspects of the big cooling fan right behind the drivers seat.

Kenworth also have their museum here which displays the first truck built at their factory in Melbourne in 1970.

There are also many other Kenworth's of various models that have been donated by various companies to show the advances in technology over the years.  We visited on the Sunday of the Hall of Fame annual reunion, so there were extra trucks on display, and even better, entry was free.

The Commonwealth Railways also have a museum here showing the Old Ghan diesel electric locomotive with one of the dining carriages coupled to a kitchen carriage on display. You can just about feel the gentle rocking of the carriage and hear the “klickety clack” of the train moving along the track.

There are so many iconic attractions around the centre of Australia it is impossible to see them all in one trip, so we picked on another of the lesser known attractions for a day out.

107 kilometres south west of Alice Springs down a gravel road is Mary Vale station, and another 50 kilometres of 4 wheel drive track leads to Chambers Pillar.

Now this place takes a bit of getting to, with the last 50 kilometres taking about one and a half hours, but the scenery at the end of it is well worth every corrugation and pot hole in the road.

Chambers Pillar is a column of red and yellow sandstone which towers 50 metres above the surrounding plain. Sandstone deposits were laid down in the area 350 million years ago.  Since then, wind and rain have eroded away the softer material, leaving this solitary column of pebbly sandstone.

John McDonald Stuart, heading north on his earliest attempt to cross Australia, first recorded the pillar in April 1860 and named it after James Chambers, one of his South Australian expedition sponsors.  Since then, it has been used by our famous early explorers as a navigational point.

I took this photo from the top of a hill about 15 kilometres north of Chambers Pillar and it is easy to see why it was used as a navigation point, as it is really distinctive and stands out from surrounding landscape.

There are also another 2 sandstone formations in the same area, one is called “Castle Rock” and I couldn’t find a name for the other one, but they are just as formidable.