DAYS 41 - 44 (27/5 - 30/5): Marree to Witchelina to Arkaroola (Kuyani/Arrernte/Arabana to Adnyamathanha countries)
DAY 41: While the others left from our tour were heading homewards with destination Peterborough, SA, today, we were headed all of less than 100 km south to a 1 million acre Nature Conservation Foundation reserve called Witchelina. Getting on the road without anyone known on the end of the radio was a teeny bit weird but it is also good to be going our own pace again – somewhat slower than tour pace.
First though, we decided to do a bit of sightseeing around Marree. I had heard stories of Afghan cameleers being buried with a camel from our guide who had heard it from someone up in Wyndham, WA, so we decided to find the cemetery and see if that was the case here. The cemetery was a bit hard to find - Google Maps wasn't very helpful, leading us to the MCG instead.
Sad to say that in the Aboriginal section, except for one 90+ year old, the oldest person had lived to 66 years of age.
The Afghan section showed no sign of the camel burial except for perhaps one grave that was substantially larger than the others. Interestingly, in this area the Afghans were often buried just with two pieces of timber to mark their burial place. Just one of the historic graves has an inscribed headstone, the only one in SA.
From there we looked at the old railway paraphenalia and the Afghan mosque which is sadly falling into disrepair. There is a camel sculpture at least that commemorates the important part played by Afghans here.
After resupplying ourselves with a few more groceries, we made our way to Farina, an old settlement that is in ruins but which is being preserved by the Farina Restoration Project. They have built a new structure (an imitation of an old one) to house a new café/bakery. The bakery bakes bread for three months of the year in an old underground oven. We bought a loaf – of course. We also had lunch there – the best pastie I have tasted in a long time. Absolutely delicious.
We then headed into Witchelina as the road begins within Farina. Witchelina covers an area of 4,200 square kilometres and includes a gorge, gullies, a wetland, and all sorts of interesting geological features. There are ‘nature drives’ you can do within it and we did part of one of these this afternoon on our way to where we are camped. We had a walk up Spring Gully to a place where an old spring, no longer permanent, used to be. Now, when the spring does produce water (there was a bit lying around), it is saline. We saw a wallaroo near one of the waterholes.
An old well and bore
An old slate-line trough
I have put up a moth trap for the first time since the one in the Simpson. I thought at first that I would come up with very little, but as the night wore on, more and more critters came in for a visit.
This put me outside for quite a while during which time Pete was devising a game plan for the Central Coast Mariners that Nick Montgomery had been hassling him about.
DAY 42: After a relatively warm night (there was quite a bit
of cloud around) and a yummy breakfast of toast made from the fresh Farina
bread, we decided that a bit of exercise was in order. Instead of driving to
one of the main features of this part of Witchelina, Old Mt Nor'west Gorge, we decided to
walk there. Around about a 8 km round
trip so not too far.
At the entry to the gorge is a wall of shale that looks as though it was built by people - but it is natural.
The Gorge has only a few pools of water in it at the moment, but it is an incredible place geologically. All along the gorge are 700-750 million year old rocks from strata that were tipped up on their side during one of the turbulent periods of geological history. These rocks are apparently pre-life-on-earth. Hard to imagine really.
There are some ripple rocks – rocks that many millennia ago were on a seabed. Despite all the explanations I read, I still find it hard to imagine how these ripples are preserved. I can imagine the water receding and leaving the ripple patterns in the sand, but then how do they then get covered in a way that preserves them so perfectly and then hardens them. If silt was blown over them, why didn’t the winds move the grains of sand?
Although winter is obviously not the peak season for blossoms, there were enough different plants flowering to keep me interested.
Pete returned a little earlier than I did so, unfortunately, he could perfect his Little Corella squawk.
Later in the afternoon, we walked via the vehicle track to some old farm ruins that are nearby – an old house, shearers’ quarters and an old woolshed, unusually made of stone (or maybe not that unusual in this stony country). A few relics from the past, such as broken horse-shoes, shearers’ blades and so on, are scattered around or piled up in little collections on stone walls.
Shearers' quarters
The old woolshed
Lots of broken toolsThis is harsh country. You have to wonder how people thought that farming here would last. I guess the good years were good. The bad years must have been awful. We walked back to camp via the creek bed where we were serenaded by real Little Corellas. They must have been listening to Pete earlier on.
DAY 43: We are sad to leave Witchelina but our wish to revisit the Gammon and Flinders Ranges (now thinking perhaps just the Gammon Ranges) means that we are moving on. This is a place definitely worth revisiting. Bigger than Kangaroo Island, it offers many more places to explore although it only has two places where you can camp, where we were and another homestead site. We drove through the gorge we walked through yesterday, a slow low-range drive over the rocky gorge floor.
Once through the gorge, the country was more open. We saw Red Kangaroos and Western Grey Kangaroos. These and the Wallaroo, which we had seen yesterday, are the macropods that can be found on Witchelina. We had morning tea on a knoll with a great view and as I was scouting around I found a rock with interesting markings.
By the time we left Witchelina it was around lunch time, so we had to go back to the Farina bakery for a pastie for me and a sausage roll for Pete. I think I had the better deal – and I think Pete agreed with me. We then made our way down towards Copley.
Just before Copley there is an old ochre pit that is worth visiting. Over millenia, tons of ochre must have been taken by the aboriginals from this site. With many different colours, this was a very tradeable commodity. The colours here are beautiful.
While our tag-along tour may have felt like a bit of a pub crawl, we are now on a bakery crawl. The managers at Witchelina had suggested we tried the Copley Bakery and we arrived just before closing to enjoy one of their quandong pies. Yum! Copley remains much the same as 15 years ago, but the bakery is new and efforts are being made to create a little botanic garden at the entry to the town. The plants are still very new and have no ID tags, but I’m sure it will be a project that is worth it in the long run. Mum and Dad will be pleased to know that trees have been planted around the cabins at the caravan park.
The botanic gardens in Copley
The old Railway sleepers are used everywhere along the Oodnadatta Track and beyond. In William Creek they were used to line the walls of the pub's dining room. Here they are used for garden wedding and picnic tables.
We left Copley rather later than we had intended, headed for some old mining ruins on the northern side of Arkaroola Sanctuary in the Gammon Ranges. However, the road was slower and rougher than we remembered so luckily we noticed a camping ground about halfway between Copley and our destination. This is where we have ended, underneath Arcoona Bluff, part of the Vulkathunha - Gammon Ranges National Park. This is a harsh but beautiful landscape.I’m not sure who has set up the campground but we are lucky to have it to ourselves. We climbed a little hillock behind our camp to watch sunset. The tipped up layers of the earth provide plenty of rocks and stones, but all too pointy or sharp to be comfortable for sitting on. Dusk seems to continue for a long while out here. No red sunset tonight but a slightly pinkish-orange one.
As I moth watch for the night, Pete is designing a trailer that can be used for towing passengers who can’t otherwise fit in our truck.
A lantern fly
DAY 44: We have done so little walking in the last few weeks so we decided that a pre-breakfast hill climb up the peak behind our campground (I think a smaller bluff beneath Arcoona Bluff,but possibly Arcoona Bluff) was in order. It was a quite steep kilometre walk up that took about 30 minutes and well worth the view. You could see Owleandana Station (part of Yanka Ninna - now reclaimed by the traditional owners) and the wonderful hills around. The sun had only just reached the top of the hill as we arrived and our camper was still in shadow so we stayed until the sunlight reached our camp. Then it was back down for breakfast. This took just as long since there is no track and the ground is very rocky and in parts slippery.
After packing up we headed for our original destination, Yudnamatna, an historic mining precinct that we had visited 15 years ago with Mum and Dad. I wanted to climb a hill there that I learned that my grandmother had climbed in 1925 (or maybe 1926 - I've forgotten). We had thought that the road we were travelling on was the road that we came out on last time. Unfortunately for us, changes in ownership of property and other changes have meant that the road was VERY different from that we remembered. Our average travelling speed was about 10 kph and we didn't reach our destination until lunch-time. As there was no camping allowed in the precinct this meant that there was no time to do the walk I'd intended to do. Very disappointing, but we needed to get to Arkaroola campground and because of the state of the roads, 30 kms still to go, we had lunch, looked around then left. All that effort for nothing! That is not true. We went through some pretty stunning scenery.
Yudnamatna is interesting nonetheless. The cemetery there is sad - almost everyone died sad deaths.
A few building ruins remain and a few bits and pieces of mining infrastructure.
On the way out we passed the Wheal Turner Mine site too. This one was much smaller but had more substantial ruins.
Once we reached Arkaroola property, it became clear that the drought has had a very dire effect here. Hill after hill was covered in dead cypress-pines. So sad. Many of them would have survived countless previous droughts, but for some reason this last one was a killer. Fortunately, there are a few small ones coming up and a few lucky ones surviving. It will be soooo many years, maybe hundreds, before people will be able to see hills covered in mature cypress-pine here again.
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