Nov 5 - 8 (Day 279-282) - Marree to Pt Augusta

Thursday 6 November

We packed up the site and were going to head off when we remembered we hadn't checked out the Tom Kruse Museum in the Marree Hotel. So we stopped out the front and popped in, allegedly for a few minutes, but ended up staying a couple of hours! The museum was interesting enough, and catalogued a pretty amazing life. This guy operated the mail truck up and down the Birdsville track from about the 1950's when the track was hardly even a track - dusty sandhills, scrub, often having to take circuitous bypasses and detours and still get back to the stations. He had breakdowns and simply had to use his ingenuity to get things going again, even going as far as having repaired a broken fuel line with bullet casings! He is a real example of the Aussie spirit of just getting on with the job without making a fuss.

 The Marree Hotel itself is quite a nice old building and we had a chance to look around for a bit.

The entrance to the Marree Hotel

Looking south west from the upper floor of the Marree Hotel,
overlooking the area we stayed the past two nights.

An old newspaper in the Marree Hotel

It was pretty interesting reading what jobs people needed done in 1897!

 The managers of the Marree Hotel said they'd had about a 70% downturn in trade this year, on top of the town slowly getting smaller, so we stopped and had a toasted sandwich for lunch while we were there.

Towns along the Outback Way - Marree to Leigh Creek

Yesterday and today we went through a number of towns and saw various bits of old infrastructure from the old Ghan railway line. So I thought I'd write a separate section on this going back over some of what we saw yesterday and then carrying on down to Quorn later today. 

The Outback Highway runs from Marree in the north down to Hawker in the south.  Many of the towns along this road appear to have been built for the main purpose of servicing the Ghan railway.  The railway itself was built from Pt Augusta to Alice Springs in various stages, beginning in the late 1800’s up to Oodnadatta, and extended up to Alice Springs by 1928.  This route, along the Oodnadatta Track, was popular in colonial times on account of the mound springs which provided reliable water sources for livestock as they travelled.  It would have been a natural fit for the railway to follow the main track, especially as back in those times they were steam locomotives which needed water.

This undated photo in Marree Hotel shows the
derailed Ghan train near Lake Eyre

However this route was not without its challenges.  The manager at the Marree Hotel told us the land in this area doesn’t deal well with water – it gets boggy very quickly and takes a long time to dissipate, and indeed the evidence we saw yesterday along the Birdsville Track of deep tyre ruts through what would have been soft mud bears this out.  And it seems this constant risk of water was one of the key undoings of this Ghan route, as the line was closed in 1980 after a new line was built closer to the Stuart Highway. As we travelled up the Oodnadatta track towards Lake Eyre, the old railway alignment was clearly visible, most of the time along an embankment or here and there through a cutting in a low hillside.  As a result of the flat country the line had to be elevated, and every few hundred metres or so there was a cut in the embankment for water to get through with a short bridge spanning the cut.  Consequently there would have been hundreds of these bridges along the course of the line, all of which had to be maintained and checked, and all of which were potential failure points during times of flooding.  The line ran right alongside Lake Eyre, and not too much higher, meaning in times of flood there was always risk of the line getting flooded out, which periodically it did.

My grandfather (my mum’s dad) worked on parts of this railway line in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s so I had particular interest in this area.  Earlier this year while in Melbourne I got digital copies of some photos of him at work, and found some photos which tied up with history I’ve looked up.  Wikipedia   describes some of the damage, in particular:

The service was suspended beyond Finke from 17 January 1930, until 6 March 1930 after some of the Finke River bridge piers were carried away and others damaged. A deviation was put in place to run the line over the river bed instead.

In looking through the photos, I found photos dated 1930 which tied up with this of my grandfather at work on repairing this bridge and photos of the laying of the new deviation.

My grandfather (left) on the job repairing the Finke River washout

Note the top right photo - laying down the new deviation

 

Another photo referred to some repair work at Farina, which we didn't visit but went past. I never met my grandfather as he died in 1962, but it was a nice experience to be in the same area and see the line he maintained.

With the stock route and the railway came the numerous towns along the route which sprang up to provide services and provisions for stock, for the railway and its people.  Naturally then when the railway closed, these towns suffered inevitable decline.  Along the route there was lots of ruined buildings which were either homesteads, perhaps signal boxes, railway sidings etc.  We’ve seen similar things travelling between Gawler and Waikerie. I remember as a kid travelling up to Glenlock in the early 1990’s seeing trains along this line.  Sadly like the old Ghan route, that line too has closed, and the towns along that route like Sutherlands, Bower and Mt Mary have suffered a similar fate.

 

Remnants of a railway long gone

 
Marree was an important town in the old days for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, as today, it sits at the junction of the Oodnadatta track (which travels north west to Oodnadatta and Coober Pedy), and the Birdsville Track (which travels north to Birdsville).  However it had an even more important purpose on account of the different rail gauges which evolved.  The line from Adelaide to Marree was a standard gauge line, while the line north of Marree was narrow gauge.  This meant the Adelaide train terminated at Marree, and all the passengers and cargo had to offload and board a different train to travel north to Alice Springs. On account of all these reasons, and the maintenance work done in Marree, it used to be a town of over a thousand people.  Today there are about 80 people living there.  The town itself is fairly quiet, but it still has some spark.

As we travelled south we saw the first signs of familiar territory, with the northern reaches of the Flinders Ranges!  Of course we’ve not been this far before, but it was still nice to think these are the same ranges which lead down to the territory we call home.

We went through several towns which, to one degree or another, told the same story at Marree.  We stopped in Lyndhurst at the roadhouse for some fuel, which by the way is the starting point of the Strzelecki Track out to Innamincka.  What used to be a staffed roadhouse with a shop, coffee and even some accommodation out the back, was now all closed and all that remained was a prepaid self-service diesel pump.

Leigh Creek – The Birth of a Ghost Town, or a Phoenix Rising from the Ashes?

However the town I really wanted to see was Leigh Creek.  My Dad worked out here when he was younger. As we approached Leigh Creek we could see plenty of evidence of the mining operations out to the east.

 

 

In the centre of the Leigh Creek Shopping Centre.
Remember those yellow on brown wooden signs?

The town has a staffed petrol station at the start of the town, a reasonable size shopping centre with a supermarket, a school and a number of houses around it which all seemed in reasonable condition.  It seemed rather quiet though for the size of the town, when we were there at 3pm on a Thursday afternoon.  It also felt quite 80’s, in terms of the style of signage and the fonts used. The signs were wooden signs painted mission brown with lettering routered into the wood and painted yellow. It felt just like my primary school to be honest!  The shopping centre was a number of individual buildings all clustered together in a complex with a small quadrangle in between. The shops were signposted ‘Hairdresser’, ‘CWA’, ‘Crafts’ and so on.  However most of them seemed empty.

I was looking for some stamps to send a postcard to Mum and Dad, and after much hunting around discovered they had a post office which was open at close to 4pm, despite both Google and the supermarket people saying they thought it closed at 2!  The post office was actually quite modern looking inside and up to date.

Stamps bought, I got chatting to the lady behind the counter about the town, and it was a very interesting conversation which explained a lot about what I'd just seen!

Leigh Creek is the only town owned by the State Government, which I didn't know! She said she’d been in Leigh Creek for about 10 years. The original town of Leigh Creek was 13km further north than the current town, which is the town my Dad would have visited, but this was demolished in 1982 to allow for expansion of the mine as, according to my Dad, it sat on valuable coal, so this new town built around the same time.  This explained why the buildings and general environment felt so much like my 1980’s childhood schools. In those days it was a town of 2500 people, sending coal by rail down to Pt Augusta to power the Playford A and B power stations in Pt Augusta, and therefore it was built to support such a sized population.  

Leigh Creek Post Office

However the population shrank over the years, and in 2016 the mine was closed by the State Government in their efforts to move to low emissions power. This move had catastrophic ramifications for Leigh Creek, really in the same way as the closure of the railways had for towns like Lyndhurst and Marree.  Leigh Creek’s population has now dropped to about 80, and the only businesses left running are the Post Office, supermarket and the petrol station we’d been past (plus the school which services the few kids in Leigh Creek and those in some nearby communities). So we’d actually visited all the operational businesses in the town, and this was why all those other businesses were closed. They’d all had to close after people lost their jobs and left town, so many of the houses we drove past would have all been empty.

The Government has tried to get people to move close to the centre of town to keep a sense of size and activity, but as a result the houses on the outskirts of town are all empty and mainly used for spare parts to maintain the other houses.  Since the town is owned by the State Government, no-one owns their own houses or buildings for business, they rent them from the government.  To her credit though, she’s bought the Post Office business and renting the building, and is trying to grow it as much as she can. Good on her! At least the rent would be cheap. When I left, things didn't look that bright for Leigh Creek.

However in a patch of GREAT news for Leigh Creek, a week after we visited the SA State Government allocated $30m for Leigh Creek in the 2020-2021 State Budget. This will go towards a plan to transform Leigh Creek into a government service centre, which will involve demolishing old buildings, maintaining critical infrastructure, and "titling activities" which will finally allow the sale of residential and commercial properties to private buyers. From the Budget Papers:

"This initiative provides for an expenditure provision of $30.6 million over four years towards supporting the government’s commitment to transforming the Leigh Creek Township into a sustainable and open regional government service centre for government workers, surrounding communities and tourist visitation following the transition to government ownership on 1 January 2017. Following a recent independent cost assessment by Aurecon, the state’s expenditure provision includes a significant program of demolition activities in relation to surplus housing, commercial and community facilities which have been assessed as either in a state of disrepair or no longer required by the local communities. Funding will also be made available for future maintenance and refurbishment of critical ongoing town infrastructure including local health and ambulance facilities and the town’s aerodrome, as well as to undertake titling activities to facilitate the sale of residential and commercial properties to existing community stakeholders and private investors."

 I have to say I quite liked Leigh Creek. It was small, quiet, familiar for me in terms of what I grew up with, but reasonably clean and tidy. It's the sort of place I wouldn't object to living.

So it seems the future of Leigh Creek at least is semi-secure, if the plan comes off, so the post office will be able to be bought!

However it may be a different story for many other little towns along the old Ghan line like Marree, Lyndhurst. These towns mainly now rely on tourism, rather than actually having much of a sense of purpose in themselves, and are dying a slow death. Clearly they are a very interesting window into the past, and tourism is always valuable. But at the same time, taking off the romantic glasses and taking a purely pragmatic view, it's important to remember these towns only came into existence in the first place to support a specific piece of infrastructure, and once that infrastructure is gone it's possible some of these towns have no practical purpose any longer other than for history's sake.

Our camp for the night just south of Leigh Creek

After leaving Leigh Creek we spotted a track disappearing underneath a railway bridge to the left (east) of the highway.  This led to an area just by a creek bed where we stopped for the night.  It was still pretty rocky but the railway embankment was nice and high and provided both a visual and aural barrier to the road on the other side.

Friday 6 November

Over the last week or so a few things have stopped working or broken. The exhaust fan above the stove died back in Bedourie. Nothing was obviously broken but the fan was held in with pop rivets and the whole rangehood have to be removed in order to get the rivets out. As we couldn't get into see what sort of fan it was it was a bit hard to know what we were replacing. But this morning, with a bit of help from Jude, I pulled it all apart and found it was just that some wiring had come off from the torque of the motor starting and stopping, which pulled on the wiring each time. So that was an easy fix to solder the wires back on, we just need to buy some longer pop rivets now to reinstall it. That'll be on the list for Pt Augusta.

After packing up we went for a quick walk along the nearby trainline.

The old Ghan line, just south of Leigh Creek

On our way out of our camp spot, under the bridge in the photo one above

After heading out of Leigh Creek we stopped briefly at a spot for a quick photo at Woolshed Flat. In my grandfather's photos I found one of him and his wife (my nanna) having a picnic at Woolshed Flat! Probably not the exact same trees and whatever but nice to find the place as we had thought it was much further inland..

Then we stopped off at Parachilla for lunch, and had a brief look around Hawker including stopping to fill up our water tanks. We considered stopping in Hawker for the night which was a nice town, but decided to carry on down to Quorn where we stayed at the local oval for the night. As we drove down to Quorn we started to see sheep. We haven't seen sheep much on this trip at all, at least not since probably the Atherton Tablelands. Since we've been in the hotter, drier areas it's been much more suitable for cattle, particularly Brahman. These sheep apparently around here are salt bush feeding stock which makes the meat taste delicious. We haven't tried it as yet but would be interested in trying it out one day.

Once we had set up us boys enjoyed a bit of cricket before we headed indoors for dinner. The oval had a turf pitch which was a novelty for us so we made good use of an old one. We could see there was a new one freshly mown and painted so we figured there'd be a game on tomorrow morning!

Saturday 7 November

Watching cricket from bed!

We were woken about 7am by the local kids cricket team having a game. The boys enjoyed watching from the warmth of their beds for a while.

 

While in Quorn we had a wander around.

Quorn is a lovely town! I said I didn't mind Leigh Creek, which is true, but Quorn is a very different character, and I think I like it even more than Leigh Creek! It has much more history, old Victorian perhaps, perhaps more Edwardian, buildings.

First up we went to the information centre on the north side of the main road, where the attendant said the town has about 1000 people living there, which is great! That sort of size is large enough to maintain enough of a critical mass to provide enough services to make it a useful town in its own right.

Quorn of course has suffered from the decline of the railway line, however it has two distinct advantages. 1) it's only 30km from Pt Augusta so it's not so far out of town that it's too far to go to the big shops, and 2) they've preserved the line south of Quorn for the Pichi Richi Railway, which still runs on the original Ghan line. This is a big tourism drawcard, rather than just another old historical town for the sake of it.

Outside the visitor centre were the old rail yards. Again these had been used for the Ghan in years past, but this is now where the Pichi Richi Railway stops so it's a working rail yard.

.

We then wandered south back a block or so where we found a cafe for morning tea.

Here we are enjoying a Quandong pie.

There are plenty of buildings around, some empty naturally but enough is alive and going to make Quorn a lovely place to visit, and even to live.

As we drove out of Quorn we travelled alongside the trainline that the Pichi Richi trains travels along. This train has been at full capacity this year because of Covid which is great for this business.

As we travelled into Port Augusta to do the food shop we drove past one of the remaining Holden dealerships :(.

We parked at a free camp for the night quite close to the highway.

Sunday 8 November

The meeting today is to be at 9am so we got up early enough to enjoy a cuppa and have breakfast before packing up and heading into Port Augusta town. 

Matt, Jude, (rear): John, Kathleen, Doug, Bek,
(front) Anne, Gillian, Mim, Greg

We met at Brother Doug & Sister Gillian Bailey's house where we also met Sister Kathleen Burk & Brother John & Sister Anne Hodges (from Mount Barker). We enjoyed a morning of fellowship around God's word by listening to a prerecorded exhort by Bro. Greg Gilmore from Riverwood ecclesia.

After the meeting we made our way to a caravan park so that I could get some much needed washing done and had lunch. By the afternoon it was quite hot and the kids had asked to go for a swim so we drove down to the east shore line and cooled off. 

As we were getting into the water the kids spotted a dolphin jumping around quite close to them. It swam around and did it's delicate dive for a good 10-15 mins before swimming off up stream.

Once we were done we went back to the caravan park for the night.

-- Greg and Mim