Tuesday 24-Dec
Destination for today; Melrose, which is the oldest town in the Flinders Ranges. The town was once named “Mount Remarkable” and is known for its proximity to Mount Remarkable and the surrounding National Park, its caravan park and historical sites including Jacka’s brewery and Melrose Courthouse.
We stopped on the way to look at another silo art, this one is in Wirrabara. The silos now proudly display the likeness of Dion Lebrun, a resident of Tumby Bay chosen by Smug (the artist) as the embodiment of a quintessential South Australian farmer. The inspiration for this portrayal stemmed from a chance encounter between Smug and Dion at the Tumby Bay Street Art Festival in April 2018.
We decided to stay at the show grounds in Melrose, it is very windy with wind speeds up to 50 Km/h but the awning is holding well. The show ground was completely deserted when we arrived and by the time of writing (18:00) one more caravan arrived. The wind was picking up so we decided, at 6 AM, to take the whole thing down. At least the caravan stopped shaking about and we could have a bit more sleep.
Wednesday 25-Dec
Melrose is a cute town, and well known for the mountain bike crowds. There are many mountain bike tracks on Mount Remarkable and rest of the Flinders ranges. We stopped for lunch at the Jacka’s brewery, they had a lovely pizza that went well with one of their local brews. We visited the Melrose war memorial and had our first walk (trying to see how this goes with Jen’s foot) to see the Alligator (long for Ali) gorge.
Thursday 26-Dec
We visited a few more wineries today and brought home a couple of nice bottles for on the way.
Friday 27-Dec
We took the car for a drive around and visited the Hancock lookout with awesome views to the Gulf and beyond.
We also seen many wind turbines in this area, interesting fact is that SA is able to produce 2.7 Gwatt of electricity by windfarms alone. Quite impressive considering that the Eraring Power Station, located in New South Wales on the shores of Lake Macquarie produces 2.9 Gwatt, and is the largest one in Australia.
Saturday 28-Dec
We left Melrose behind and are going to spent the next few days exploring the Yorke peninsula. We had a stop over in Ardrossan notable for its deep water shipping port and its towering coastal cliffs of red clay. Also the place where they invented the stump-jump plough, also known as stump-jumping plough. This is a kind of plough invented in South Australia by Richard Bowyer Smith and Clarence Herbert Smith to solve the particular problem of preparing mallee lands for cultivation.
Sunday 29-Dec
Today we did a 240 KM drive around the Yorke peninsular. This is farm land for sure, the grain fields (mostly barley) are at the moment harvested but they are huge. As far as the eye can see there are those fields. We decided to follow the art trail, there are quite a few art works on water tanks and towers that we wanted to see. We also saw another lot of wind turbines and we understand with all the winds we had, how effective they must be in this place.
This area is also famous for its salt lakes. Yorketown and the surrounding areas were once a hive of activity. There were many more townships in the area than there are today, and several had populations in the hundreds. Salt and gypsum were major industries, employing thousands of workers, and individual farms also employed hundreds of labourers.
As industries became mechanised or closed down and work became scarce, many townships also faded, leaving only stone buildings and ruins behind.
We also visited the Captain Harry Butler memorial. The museum contains his aircraft “The Red Devil”, the sole remaining Bristol MC1 fighter plane of a total of 130 made in England during WW1. A scale model of the aircraft is also located in the memorial. Two white metal plaques are affixed to the front of the building.
