25TH MARCH 2013 - PORT AUGUSTA , EYRE PENINSULA , SOUTH AUSTRALIA

 

Couldn’t keep to our usual timetable of leaving camp at 8.30am due to some conversation with a couple of Aussie campers who gave us some good tips of what to do & see. However, we left Gladstone on a lovely, sunny, cloudless blue sky morning - again! 27deg by 10am so aircon on again. This part of the highway heading through the Southern Flinders Ranges wine region is not quite as good as most we have been on. We pass through the dear little town of Laura with wide tree-lined main street, & I discover it was the birthplace of the famous Aussie poet C.J. Dennis (harping back to school day recollections). The next two little places (hardly towns) have so many derelict old buildings & even those currently inhabited show signs of poverty among prosperous large properties. Morning tea was at Melrose, established in 1885 & is the oldest town in the Flinders right underneath Mt Remarkable. This is a marvellous base for walkers with numerous wonderful walking trails.

Gladstone (Ghost Town)
 

 

Incarcerated in Gladstone Jail
 

Next stop is Port Augusta which is at the top of Spencer Gulf on the Eyre Peninsula. It is a slightly warm 39deg. The wind blew us along across the plains from Port Augusta to Whyalla – a great fuelsaver. Again we had been here last time but even in this large country you have to sometimes backtrack. Campsite for the night is at Point Lowly right on the waters edge of Spencer’s Gulf on Eyre Peninsula. There are about 10 vans already here, & unbelievably you can stay for up to 14 days with lovely clean toilets, cold showers, rubbish collection, Ph & TV coverage ALL FOR FREE!   it is Easter weekend in 3 days time so it is filling up mainly because of a fishing competition I think. Close by is an oil & gas refinery with an extremely long jetty. Stuart & I take a walk out to the nearby lighthouse in the afternoon to stretch our legs. Next morning we are farewelled by a lovely sunrise though the forecast is for thunderstorms. Stuart has booked a steel mill tour in Whyalla, not my sort of thing so I will stay in the van & try & catch up with the blog while he is away. It blows a gale after he leaves me & I was a bit concerned   with the van being buffetted every which way,    but luckily it didn’t last long & turned to rain for an hour or so. Whyalla, ‘Where the outback meets the sea’ is a mining town with a steelmill (formerly BHP) which makes steel products for Australia. The hematite iron ore(the best)  is brought in by rail from the mine, & the magnetite ore(small bits)  is made into a wet slurry & piped in via a 63km pipeline. Stuart got the feeling that production was slowing down. A lot of the ore is also shipped to China & no doubt Australia then buys back some of the finished products. Crazy world. Another icon in this city is the HMAS Whyalla, an ex navy ship originally built here for the war & after a colourful life at sea giving service in a variety of ways, has it’s final resting place beside the information centre. It took about 2 years to move it to the site & it has been restored & looks in wonderful condition.

Harvested grain fields
 

 

We are now half way across Australia & turn onto the Lincoln Highway which we will follow a long, long way. The surface is really good to drive on & passes through yet more grain pastures to Cowell, one of the best fishing destinations in South Australia with an incredible variety of fish plus crabs & oysters which are being farmed in the Franklin Harbour. It can also boast one of the largest jade deposits in the world which was discovered in the nearby Minbrie Range in 1965. It is recognised as the oldest & one of the largest in the world with a variety of col. ours & patterns not found elsewhere. One of the tourist attractions is cage-diving with white pointer sharks – unfortunately we didn’t have time to do that!!!