Day Eighteen - Tuesday 7th April – Arkaroola to Farina/Leigh Creek Highlights and Lowlights

Today it was one of those days when there are highlights and low lights…… We packed up and said farewell to our fellow travellers, some of whom we had got to know reasonably well. The Arkaroola Campground powered sites are popular so there had been a lot of comings and goings over the four nights we were there. Liz had been eyeing off some very cute compact pod-shaped vans, one of them very retro, called Cool Beans. The owners were very happy to show them off although she didn’t get a look in one of them as the guy’s wife was still asleep inside! After some confusion about our actual departure, we left not long after 9.00am which was very good for us. There was no point trying to clean the red dust out of every nook and cranny as we were in for more than a hundred kilometres of rough roads. Although classified as Major Unsealed Road we had 140 kms to get to Copley, our next stop. The landscape and roads were aligned as they both changed constantly: for the roads it meant sections of corrugations, small rocks, gravel, big rocks, dips for dry creek beds and ENDLESS dust. The landscape alternated between flat desolate plains with no animals and no trees, to dry creek beds lined with lofty ancient river gums to rocky escarpments of every colour. I jumped out of the car to take photos of a family of emus with babies, but they weren’t interested in being stars, so they headed for the bush. We did see some goats and quite a few sheep in and out of their fences near one isolated Station. We finally arrived in Copley intact…..or so we thought! Our destination was the Copley Bush Bakery and Quandong Café, which had great pies and pasties, but no bread. As Ewan approached the front door a guy, who was sitting enjoying his lunch outside, said that the two shock absorbers on one side of our van were hanging down. Not good news…..but the roads were so rough we hadn’t noticed! Then Graeme had a closer look at his car and discovered he had a puncture. His lovely Touareg was not equipped with a full size tyre but a half tyre ( limp-home tyre) and a compressor to blow it up. TIP: Before we came, I read the notes for Arkaroola and they said: We are on 130kms of unsealed road in every direction. You will absolutely need a full-sized tyre…..or words to that effect. Graeme did attempt to get a full-size wheel but VW had none in Australia! Very weird. A lot of our fellow travellers had experienced the joys of punctures at some point, and some even carried two spare tyres! The mechanic’s comment on Graeme’s Pirelli tyres was that they were 'rubbish on a good day’. Copley consists of a pub, a bakery, public toilets (phew!) and a mechanic and garage.

It also surprisingly has it's own Botanic Garden filled with local indigenous plants struggling to surviuve in the rocky soil and right next to the Highway. But the highlight for us was the mechanic. He does a roaring business thanks to the rough roads. He managed to find bolts to fit our shock absorbers. When Ewan asked what he owed him he calculated that the bolts costs $1.50 each and his time was $30 but $30 would be fine, so Ewan paid him $40. He had an amazing ability to do three jobs at once with that very dry country humour. Graeme’s tyre was stuffed - a technical term used by the mechanic. It had a spilt in the tread of the tyres caused by a sharp stone. The mechanic organised a replacement tyre to be delivered the next day and fitted the temporary half-tyre so they could drive down the highway to Leigh Creek on the Highway.The moral of the story is to come with a full-sized pumped-up tyre as chances are you will need it! Ewan has a long history with Leigh Creek. It was his first civil engineering job after Uni and he spent about 6 months living in very basic conditions with the miners who were extracting coal from the mine. He was there for a project on attempting to stop the water leaking from the Aroona Dam which wasn’t completely successful. It’s now a local tourist spot with swimming, fishing etc. The town of Leigh Creek where he stayed was relocated 13 kms south as it had been built on a coal seam. We could see the piles of overburden and coal which created their own low mountain range. He kept telling us that there is nothing to see in Copley: only a pub where his parents stayed when they visited him in 1975. Similarly, he was not too optimistic about Leigh Creek. We were just looking forward to the supermarket to stock up on some essentials. It’s a nice town but dying as so many country towns are. The mine closed in 2015 so the population is decreasing. However, it had a primary school, sports facilities, an Outback Resort, shops, service station, a Bar and Grill and a Post Office (which sold stamps and thongs which was fortunate as an animal had chewed mine!).

We were keen to see Farina, a ghost town, a few kilometres north so Liz , Ewan and I left them booking onto the Leigh Creek Campground. All the maps showed more gravel road so that seemed a wise decision on a half-tyre. Liz and Ewan and I headed north expecting the sealed road to run out but it didn’t, so the maps were out-of-date. On the way we saw a group of birds eating a kangaroo carcass, but as we got closer they rose into the air and two of them were beautiful wedge-tailed eagles. So stunning. Since then we have seen more eagles eating roadkill but they usually soar into the air as we approach. The last two kms were sand gravel road to get into Farina. The Campground is lots of separated sites protected by bush: so different to windy Arkaroola. It seemed strange that they claimed to have showers in the middle of nowhere so we went to check them out and discovered that there was water so that was a good start. But if you wanted a hot shower you had to light a fire under a cauldron filled with rocks and pipes, wait 30 minutes and voila! Hot water! Mind you the sign said not to boil the water which was a bit mystifying as it’s hard to know when to stop a fire quickly once it gets started, or when the water was boiling. (We used the shower in the caravan the next morning! It seemed a little less complicated!). The birds are amazing and woke us up this morning.

Farina is fascinating as it is basically a ghost town. For years in the 1800s and early 1900s it was a thriving country town but once the railroad was extended to Maree it started to lose its purpose. But in its heyday it had a school, community hall, bakeries, post office, bush nursing hospital ( the doctor was the only doctor between Farina and Darwin!), and of course two pubs Livestock and minerals were transported to go south. There were camel trains too, but their soft pads had to be covered in leather shoes as the ground was so rocky. Once the train line was extended to Maree the Oodnadatta and Strzelecki tracks, which the drovers used, could go to Maree and the livestock loaded there. The town gradually declined and finally the Postmistress closed the PO and left in 1950. The landscape is completely desolate: flat plains, minimal vegetation and distant mountains.

A Restoration Group was formed in the early 2000s to stabilize and restore the many stone buildings. Volunteers arrive from May to July to operate a new bakery and rebuild.

Jude has friends who are regular volunteers here and it would be a great community effort to be involved in. Unfortunately the bakery doesn’t operate until the end of May!! But while Liz peered in the windows of the bakery suddenly her phone sprung into action. If she moved from the corner of the bakery she lost connectivity so it was very specific. Very funny! As you can see in the photos the buildings were made from local stone blocks and have weathered well over many years. The bleakness of the landscape, the isolation and heat in summer and the endless red dust must have made life intolerable at times. Although it sounded as if it was a close community. We enjoyed a beautiful sunset and settled in front of a raging campfire before taking ourselves off to bed after an eventful day

Your relieved and relaxed correspondent Dianne .