It's not all beer and skittles...

(Warning: Long!)

We finally made it to South Australia – out of the clutches of WA at last! So far… well … it has been a little challenging in parts. Not South Australia’s fault – just the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in.

We stayed a night at Fowlers Bay Caravan Park, which apart from the masses of stinking sea grass so close to us that Nic had to light a sandalwood mozzie repellant stick to cope with the smell, was OK. Its main attraction at this point was a shower!

It got a whole lot better when we drove off in search of a fishing spot, and came upon a now familiar landscape of hard and rocky dunes leading to limestone cliffs and reefs. We found a fishing spot on the edge of a reef at low tide, with a thunderstorm developing out to sea. Tim cast and caught a salmon immediately. That’s better - the fishing had been pretty woeful until this point! So we left with a few fish in hand and in the fridge.

The next morning we woke to a HOWLING wind. It has been windy right along the South Coast, but this wind rattled our brains and felt likely to cause insanity if experienced for too long. We had also both woken with disgusting headaches – not hangovers, maybe something hayfever related from this foul wind. And it was HOT. So in this frame of mind we packed up camp, miraculously without breaking up or killing each other, and called into Cactus Beach. A pilgrimage of sorts for Tim, even though his shoulder is still not OK enough for him to be surfing. Perhaps not the best scenario in which to make a pilgrimage, but at least he was spared the sight of perfect waves as the swell appeared very low!

To complete this day best forgotten, 5km before Ceduna we felt Elsie shudder & shake and discovered that a wheel on the trailer had completely come off, snapping the bolts and mangling the wheel arch/mudguard in the process. Tim went back looking for the wheel and Nic was gazing about the scratchy dry paddock next to us, still slightly stunned, trying to escape the marauding flies, and noticed a wheel that had to be ours. It must have flown alongside us, for a couple of hundred metres, bouncing right over 2 barbed wire fences! The wheel nuts had obviously loosened since they were last checked (on the limestone outcrops and corrugations of the Balladonia track perhaps?) and then the wobble had sheared the bolts and the wheel off.


After calling the RAC we had a guy come out, check it out, go back into town for the bolts & a spot of welding, and then fix it for us on the side of the road. We were lucky that it happened so close to town, and not in the middle of nowhere, where Tim insists that we’d be spending a day doing our own bush mechanic job to get us to the next town.

So we kind of limped into Ceduna on Saturday afternoon, with an extra day in town while we waited for Monday. Which has been fine – good fishing to be had here, fresh oysters to buy, lots of beautiful beaches and cliffs and rocky sand dunes to explore outside of town.

Monday came and we got a few things sorted out (hammering the trailer mud guard back into place, swapping tyres around etc) and meanwhile the temperature got hotter and hotter, with a searing wind from the north-west. Some reports say it was 44 degrees - it had to be well over 40. And this was the day we spent in workshops and factories and Tim spent lying on bitumen and getting hot and greasy. Nic managing to escape into air-conditioning most of the time - the benefits of being mechanically illiterate!

At about 2 or 3 pm we finally headed out of town and by this stage it was scorching hot and the wind, if anything was stronger and hotter. 5km out of Ceduna Elsie’s temperature gauge shot right up so we pulled over immediately to find that the radiator was fine – but the gauge continued to fluctuate. So back into Ceduna for an unsuccessful afternoon with a mechanic trying to figure out whether it was the gauge, the thermostat or the sender. At 6pm, with a new thermostat in place, it was agreed it was the sender, which no-one in Ceduna had in stock, and we’d have to stay until Wednesday to get the part from Adelaide and get it fixed.

Wondering if there is some forcefield of a 5km radius that is preventing us from leaving Ceduna – perhaps there is some significant lesson that we have to learn from Ceduna?

By 6.30pm Tim had just about passed out with heat exhaustion, and it was still astonishingly hot, and the only thing we could do was buy some beers that weren’t cold enough, and take them down to the tidal flat of a beach (at low tide), where we had to lie flat in about 40cms of water to stay remotely cool. Any bit of body outside the water was instantly blown dry and hot by the still searing wind. With daylight saving it doesn’t get dark here until about 8.15/8.30pm, and it was hot until about 10pm and that wind just kept blowing. What a day! We’re amazed that the Eyre Peninsula didn’t burn to the ground.

There's another track...

We were given another mud map from Gina & Norm at the Eyre Bird Observatory, which took us from the observatory on the coast, along the bottom of the escarpment to the Madura Roadhouse – skipping a little bit more of the Eyre Highway. We left late in the afternoon so the light was golden on the beautiful mallee country through which we were driving. The track followed the old Telegraph line (with most of the cast iron poles still in place) for a while then skirted the ruins of Burnabbie homestead. We camped the night near the Burnabbie ruins, and explored them in the morning. The house was built with frames of the mallee that is all around them, and then clad with flattened kerosene tins – this wood is so hard that the frames of the hut, and the fences, and the old shearing shed are still largely intact (70 years later!).





The track to Madura then travelled into much drier flatter country, and into the Madura station. A few ruined water tanks and wells about, and some signs that it does rain there sometimes – but it was hard to imagine on the dry dusty day we passed! There was also a fine collection of ruined cars starting from the days when people began making horseless buggies up until the present. We were later to realise that this wasn’t a reflection of profligate vehicle use by the station but a graveyard for those vehicles which had expired on the nearby Eyre highway.

Escaping Eyre Highway

We were always determined to take it slowly across the Nullabor – and we have. We spent a night at the Eyre Bird Observatory – partly so we didn’t have to stay at a dodgy roadhouse or a skanky roadside camping spot, partly to indulge Tim’s emerging avian interests and partly to satisfy my growing fascination with the cross-country Telegraph line (my obsession with the early settlers at Israelite Bay has broadened out into an interest in the whole Telegraph Line!)




It was a great drive over a scarp and towards the sand dunes to the old Eyre Telegraph Station. It’s a fabulous old building that is now accommodation for twitchers and the volunteer caretakers, who as well as cooking for blow-in guests like us, have to do regular bird counts, record weather observations for the Bureau of Metereology 3 times a day and keep the solar cells and water systems functioning.

It is a fabulous spot and we had a great time – it was just us and Gina and Norm the caretakers, who sent us off exploring with lots of tips and mud maps. We drove along the beach and through the dunes to the beautiful Twilight Cove - which is where the long, long limestone escarpment that becomes the cliffs at the Great Australian Bight heads inland for a few hundred kms. We did a bird count for the EBO on the beach on the way and found some interesting stuff washed up on the beach including a dead loggerhead turtle.

There's a track...

We left Cape Arid on the Mt Ragged Track which meets up with the Balladonia Track that joins the Eyre Highway at Balladonia. Ever since we’ve been talking about this trip and looking at a big map of Australia I (Nic) had been keen to take this track – I think I just loved the idea of being able to skip some of the Eyre Highway and take the road less travelled or something!!

The track alternated between soft sand, dried out mud potholes, limestone outcrops and corrugations. It was fine, although we later discovered that we probably had given the camper trailer a bit of a hammering – more about that later.

From all over Cape Arid NP you can see Mt Ragged in the distance. The track takes a direct line towards Mt Ragged, no deviations, and we passed through some beautiful country with Mt Ragged just getting closer & closer.



It is an impressive sight – in such a flat landscape it looks quite majestic. And more heavily vegetated than similar clumps of rock we know & love. We set up camp for the night at the foot of Mt Ragged sharing our home among the gum trees with a trio of tawny frog-mouths. They are very funny birds – doing their best to be bits of dead tree – but perched on a pine log and unavoidably blinking and shuffling occasionally.


We thought we’d snared another solo campsite until a late arrival of Andrew in a big Oka truck. But we kept to ourselves, and sitting by our campfire we felt like the only people for miles.

We climbed Mt Ragged in the morning, a fairly steep scramble up a track strewn with glistening quartz shards. But the real hazard was the relentless MARCH FLIES!! Combined with the steamy heat of the day their stinging attacks were hard to bear and left Nic, in particular, physically and mentally scarred! But the torments were not in vain - the cool breeze at the summit was only surpassed by the all encompassing views to the coast at Israelite Bay.


Just that short time at Cape Arid and on the Balladonia track were enough for Eyre Highway to come as a bit of shock. After having bumped our way over the final 80km, we paused at the end of the track a bit stunned by the traffic flying past… and then joined in to head east.

Cape Le Grande & Cape Arid by ground

The weather has been ‘interesting’ for a while now – windy, overcast and cool, with a little rain. Which made our first few days at Cape Le Grande a bit bland.

But our last day there was bright and cheerful, sunny and warm. We drove to Hellfire Bay then walked over to Little Hellfire Bay with our snorkelling gear. It was a beautiful snorkel – anyone who has been here would know how clear the water is and how white the sand. A paradise. Tim hunted for some greenlip abalone which we had lightly fried for lunch. We climbed Frenchman’s Peak in the afternoon and slept well that night…



Onto Cape Arid NP next. It is not that much further from Esperance – the entrance to the park is only about 100 km away – but far fewer people and it feels more remote. We only saw a couple of cars/other people in the four days we were there.

We camped down at Thomas Fishery, just near Cape Arid and Mt Arid. It was a fairly rugged track getting down there – the first time we’d really tested the camper trailer. And despite losing the handle from the jockey wheel, it was all good!

We had the campsite completely to ourselves and spent our time exploring the beaches and the coast, as well as the nearby ruins of Hill Springs - a short-lived farm/station at the turn of the century. The stories of the handful of people who tried to settle this area from the 1860s onwards has really fascinated me. Tim found a book for me in Esperance which is a locally written history of all of the early settlers of the Cape Arid/Israelite Bay area. It is woefully written, but I’ve still been captivated by the stories.

The country here is expansive. You need to stand somewhere and take a wide sweeping view to soak it all in. It is hard to capture in photos.

We climbed Peak Charles

It’s been an ambition of mine (Tim) to climb Peak Charles ever since a friend and his father visited over 20 years ago. I say to Nic “it’s only an hour or so up the Norseman Rd and we’ll just go there and run up and back down – piece of cake!” Mmmm …. more like 200km, the last 50 corrugated dirt and as we approach the monolith looming from the mulga it becomes apparent that it’s no stroll in the (National) Park.

But what an impressive sight, an immense peak of eroding granite, striped with water marks and lichens and furrowed with deep cracks. We walk from the carpark in humid heat and scramble and climb the last couple of hundred metres to the top in a freshening, and refreshing, wind. The view from the top is one of a vast, ancient and salt-scalded plain, a few other landlocked islands rise on the far eastern horizon. The 650m descent tries out all the leg muscles the ascent missed!




We had been away from Elsie 3.5 hours and driving into Esperance on dusk with the full moon rising over the bay we make plans to depart for Cape Le Grande and Cape Arid the next day – more big rocky hills to climb!

Cape Le Grand & Cape Arid by air

We’ve been in Esperance for about a week, staying in a cottage on Marcus & Michelle’s property – friends of Tim’s through all of his work trips to Esperance over the years. Marcus has been so generous with his time, helping us make all sorts minor modifications and running repairs on Elsie (a big mudflap on the back, plastic tubing on the roofracks, relocate the trailer plug …)

And even more fabulously, Marcus has his own light plane and he took Tim and I flying the other day – along the coast to Cape Le Grand, then to Cape Arid National Park and on as far as Israelite Bay.

This coastline is undoubtedly beautiful but even more so from the air – it is amazing.





We landed at Israelite Bay (finally - after hearing so many weather forecasts over my life I finally get to Israelite Bay!), close to the old Telegraph Station. We wandered around and had lunch there – marvelling at this big old derelict building that must have been so grand and was obviously designed for a large community (not sure if that ever materialised). And now there is so little evidence of what this place was once like – the old jetty is about the only other reminder.



On the return flight we skim low over the beaches, skirt hills and reconnoitre bays for camp sites. I can totally understand the passion for flying – in small planes especially it feels so magical!

Fitzgerald River National Park

We only drove through briefly, at sunset, on our way to Hopetoun and Quagi Beach – unfortunately. It’s a very favourite place for both of us and we would have rather stayed a week, but we figure we can always come back here easily from home.