RV Exchange Travel Destination - Australia - Adelaide To Eyre
Adventuring around South Australia
Even the best journey can have a shaky start. I clipped a surly customs officer with my luggage cart at Adelaide Airport. Big mistake! And then the taxi driver – a real Aussie bloke – nearly threw us out of his cab when he heard we were going to the Maui/Britz Depot to pick up our motorhome. It’s just outside the airport, you see, and the poor fellow had waited an hour in the taxi queue to earn our six dollars. I’d made two enemies. And I’d only been in South Australia 20 minutes.
Things improved when Bill and I sighted the vehicle which was to be home for the next two weeks. It was a roomy two-berth on a Mercedes cab and chassis, a three-hob cooktop, shower and toilet (no handbasin), fridge/freezer, microwave, a good size lounge area and a comfortable bed. And it came with cutlery, pot, pans, crockery, bedding and towels.
After some comprehensive operational instructions, we undertook a house warming excursion by heading for the hills which form the city’s hinterland. The Maui proved comfortable, quiet and easy to handle.
From the brow of Mt Lofty, which at only 710 metres above sea level is still the highest point in the Adelaide Hills, we also took in the lie of the land. Even through a thick blanket of haze, we could make out the sensible, straight-line layout of Adelaide’s core and beyond it, the margins of the terra firma as it merged into a tinfoil sea.
Next morning we would be heading out into that dusky terrain, driving north and then west across the York Peninsula. But that night we parked close to the city, by a long icing sugar beach in a caravan park called the Adelaide Shores – a resort set in 125 hectares of coastal reserve with heated pools, a tennis court, two ‘jumping pillows’, barbecues, gazebos, picnic areas, kitchens, TV lounges and two adjacent golf courses.
Our pitch had its own ensuite bathroom, an opportune addition because almost immediately the motorhome’s water pump gave one long groan and pumped no more. So it wasn’t the next morning when we headed out of town but later in the afternoon. The morning was spent back at the Maui Depot where a lot of head scratching and tinkering went on before it was decided that we would have to do a house swap.
Day was leaching into evening when we reached the one-horse town of Moonta and nothing much was happening under the verandah roofs hanging out over the warm pavements. I was the only customer in the supermarket, the only one in the chemist and in the curiously named Henry on George Café, we were the only patrons.
The camping ground among the pine trees by the beach was, however, full. It was a delightful spot frequented by families. Fishermen and fisher children dotted the long wooden jetty that pointed out to sea. Two men appeared with rakes. “We’re off crabbing,” they told me. “Blue swimmers mostly. Hundreds of them come out at night.”
You’d need hundreds to make a meal. On the jetty I saw one blue swimmer clinging to a fishing net with its slim gangly legs. It was a lovely shade of blue and, in its crabby way, rather elegant.
After dark, Bill and I drove the 20 minutes or so to Wallaroo for dinner at the Alehouse. Apparently, after years in the doldrums, things are literally looking up in Wallaroo; the first five-storey high-rise on the York Peninsula has already been built and there are plans for more. I wondered how the locals felt about such changes but they were too busy tucking into the crispy skinned snapper and dishes of mussels and blue skimmer crabs to offer opinion.
Wallaroo is a wheat port where the great harvests of cereal from the York and Eyre peninsulas are disbursed to other parts of the world. During the loading, grain spills into the sea and the snapper come in for the feast. So do the locals, who fish from the wharf and catch more whopper snappers than they can eat.
It wasn’t until the morning that we discovered the purpose of Moonta’s existence. It once served the largest mine of the South Australian copper belt, when it was dubbed Little Cornwall because many of the miners came from the south of England, bringing with them the habits of home.
One of them was their famous pasties, devised for workers in the tin mines so that the miners could hold the “pie” by the crimp (the crusty ridge at the top) and then throw the crimp away to avoid poisoning from the arsenic on their hands. We bought two of these delicious morsels for lunch and ate them, crimps and all.
The elegant Moonta station that once saw trains come and go from Adelaide is now the information centre. A tourist train from the old town hall still makes a 16 kilometre run through the mining area, past the School of Mines, the great powerhouses, ore-sorting floors, miners’ cottages reflecting the style of those at ‘home’ and through a tunnel that burrows under a tailings heap. The lives, preoccupations and hardships of those early Cornish miners are preserved in the good Moonta Mines Museum.
From Motorhomes, Caravans and Destinations (www.motorhomesandcaravans.co.nz)
A few kilometres away from Moonta is the huge Wheal Hughes Copper mine which ceased operation in 1993, and where visitors can tour the tunnels, the cavernous cathedrals and colourful stopes of the workings. Another underground story is at the local cemetery where headstones record Cornish origins, and the grave of Thomas Woodcock announces that he was poisoned by his wife Elizabeth, the only woman to be hanged in South Australia.
We could have spent more time in Moonta but we had a boat to catch. The ferry between Wallaroo on the York Peninsula and Lucky Bay on the Eyre Peninsula has been running for over a year. It’s a two-hour journey across the Spenser Gulf and cuts many kilometres and litres of fuel off the rather tedious run to the peninsula from Adelaide. Nor is the Seascape just any old tub, but a state of the art catamaran with smart amenities and viewing lounges. To announce a new ferry to the fleet, our passage was filmed from a helicopter for local television. We were instructed to gather on the upper deck and look happy – which we were.
There are many things to bring visitors to the Eyre Peninsula. One of them is the sea food. The waters of the peninsula provide a smorgasboard of oysters, abalone, mussels, prawns, tuna, whiting, rock lobster and countless other cold water fish. The peninsula has only 2.5 percent of South Australia’s population, and yet its seafood industry produces over 60 percent of the fish for the whole country.
For the next ten days Bill and I had a personal seafood fest, eating as many of the delicacies we could lay our hands on.
First up was a visit to the Aqua Oysters Centre at Cowel, a hard-case town about thirteen bone-rattling kilometers from the landing jetty at Lucky Bay. The catch of the day had just arrived from the farms, and Michelle deftly schucked us two dozen. I thanked her profusely. “It’s nothing, love,” she said. “I do a hundred dozen a day.”
We called in to the Franklin Harbour Pub in Cowel for a cooling Cooper’s pale ale. The barman wore a cheeky grin, a label on his shirt that said, “Hi, I’m Nigel,” and a pink tie embroidered with a chicken and a pig.
“Chooky and meat monster,” he said, pointing to the tie. “If y’ buy enough beer and keep y’ receipts, y’could win a chook or a pig Thursday night.”
Two pale ales weren’t going to do it.
Thirst has always been big in this part of Australia. One man who knew it well was Edward John Eyre, the intrepid young man who came to South Australia from England and was the first white man to explore the triangular peninsula that bears his name. More notably, he and his Aboriginal friend Wylie were the first men to cross the continent from east to west, suffering unimaginable hardship and almost dying several times from lack of liquid.
From Cowell, we drove west across the peninsula roughly in the same direction that Edward and Wylie took. We were travelling on the Birdseye Highway which could hardly have been named for its hill top views – perhaps for the flatness of the land that stretches like a calm cinnamon-coloured ocean to the far horizon.
It’s wheat growing country here. There’s so little to look at that a windmill or lonely farmhouse seemed as entertaining as a fun park, and the enormous silage towers that dot the plains looked like grand architectural gestures. Every now and then we would pass through a service town such as Cleve, whose claim to fame is a small hill called Ticklebelly used during World War II for spotting aeroplanes.
The west coast of the peninsula is bordered by the Great Australian Bight. It has several white sand beaches and we headed for Venus Bay, named after a two-masted schooner that traded around the peninsula in the 1850s. The village is a cluster of utilitarian fishing baches in a corner of a bay bigger, they say, than Sydney Harbour. From a cliff edge we watched a pod of around 20 dolphins slicing through the clear water. The bay is a well-known fishing spot and in the camp, Ernie and Mel were cleaning an arm-length snapper watched by a gang of pelicans as focused as street thugs.
“We’ve got plenty,” said Mel, “here have some.” She cut two sizeable fillets and later we ate with them with the oysters and a bottle of Clare Valley Reisling.
Next day we drove north, diverting off the main road to wander among Irish Murphy’s Haystacks – which are not haystacks at all, but bizarre orange-coloured inselbergs that balloon out of the flat terrain.
Further north again, an almost hidden path leads to a small waterhole which had huge importance for Edward Eyre. The water supply was so reliable that Eyre made the spot a depot for his peninsula explorations. In his journal he wrote: “This curious little hole contained water seven inches in depth, the level of which was maintained as rapidly as a person could bale out. This was our sole supply for ourselves and our horse.”
Today there is just a sludge in the bottom of the well. The long drought here has finally put paid to the flow.
North again is Streaky Bay – a strange name but a delightful little town and a beachside camping ground which is so ‘fishy’ we counted 11 scaling/gutting stations. There were pelicans on the water and jellyfish in it, and notices on land that warned: beware of the razorfish.
There were two very memorable things about our short stay in Streaky Bay. One was a grinning effigy; a massive 1,520 kilogram, five-metre long white pointer shark, hanging from the ceiling of the small information centre behind a garage. It is the largest in the world caught on a hand line and landed by 21-year-old local lad in 1990.
The other was a restaurant called Mocean in the old general store, which has bare floorboards, a sacking ceiling and a great view of the harbour and jetty.
The proprietors, Margi and Hardy, had earned a formidable reputation for their menus at the remote Prairie Hotel in the Flinders ranges. Now they said they wanted to try innovative ideas with local herbs and fish (honestly) straight from the sea.
And so I found myself in Streaky Bay tasting abolone poached in lemon myrtle, salt and pepper stingray and snapper encrusted in peanut and wasabe – there was nothing shaky about that.
Author: Jill Malcolm
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Thursday, 9 February 2012
