Back to Port Augusta

I spent some time last night thinking how good it was to have knocked over the Nullabor and be back in civilisation in Ceduna. After three days in the wilderness of the Nullabor, it was nice to be in a town again. Then it dawned on me that Ceduna is only half way back to Melbourne. There’s no cause for celebration yet – we still have another 2000 kilometres to go to get home. We were only half way! Today was the start of that with another 470 kilometer drive to Port Augusta.

For most of our time, we were driving alternatively throuh enormous wheatfields and scrub along with a long stretch of military area just to the west of Port Augusta.

There were a few little towns along the way that we hadn’t visited on our forward journey so we checked them out today.

Wirrulla has some enormous silos and looked interesting, so we turned off the highway into the town.

The first thing that we noticed was an enormmous communiuty hall that looked out of place in such a small town. Like many places in the bush, buildings like this were constructed just after WW1 to commemorate the service of local people.

The town has all the essentials. – a general store and a pub. 

Many little towns like this have collected historical items such as ploughs, water tanks and old wagons to put in thier public parks. This town has a man who grows old vehicles in his garden.

Further up the road at Poochera, we stopped for coffee in the little historical park. Again it had a collection of historical things (junk) in the little park. This included a gate that had originally been somewhere on the dog fence.

Western Australia’s State Barrier Fence (historically known as the Rabbit-Proof Fence) is a major pest-exclusion and wild dog barrier structure managed by the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development. It was built between 1902 and 1907 as a rabbit-proof barrier but was later upgraded and converted to wild dog standards. It stretched for 1,350 km from an area north of Kalbarri down through the wheatbelt and agricultural regions toward the south-east near Condingup / Esperance. I(I think that made it the longest fence in the woirld). ts primary purpose was to prevent wild dogs, emus, and other agricultural pests from crossing from the eastern rangelands and pastoral areas into protected farming and livestock zones.

I found the most interesting object in the opark to be a little shanty made out of kerosene tins that was the home to a local recluse.

Also in Poochera is Dusty’s Gallery. He paints scenes, figures and animals on curugated iron. All you have to do is send him a photograph and he will send you a painting of it by return mail.

We passed the locations of Minnipa and Yaninee but they had nothing of value to make a stop worthwhile. We thought that we would call into the little town of Wudinna and visit the nice bakery there once more but to our disappointment it was closed on a Saturday. The only real choice was to push on for another 45 minutes to Kimba.

We reached Kimba with its painted grain silo around 1.15 pm and bought some bread rolls at the Big Pink Galah roadhouse. They cured our starvation but I would only rate them as having two stars.

I thought that because it was Saturday, I might be able to take a photo of the main street without cars but this was not possible. I have no idea of the event at the pub other than that there was a lot of happy noise being generated and the entire street was parked out with vehicles.

Apart from the grain silo, there is another mural on the side of the town hall.

The countrysde looked much the same as the other areas through which we had travelled.

After Kimba, we only had about 130 km to drive before reaching our overnight stop at Port Augusta On the way we passed the old mining town of Iron Knob. We didn’t stop there today but we could see the ‘knob’ from where iron ore has been mined along with sections of an old ore train.

We are now in Port Augusta for the night, staying in our usual motel and eating at the pub across the inlet. It might sound boring to always stay and eat at the same place but these are the nicestt in town.