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| Wilpena Aerial Sunris |
Say, fr’instance, you’re in Adelaide, South Australia. Why not head over to the Yorke Peninsula, or even out to the Adelaide Hills – I hear the markets are mighty fine up there – but all in all it’ll really just be more of the same: cold nights, y’know… a touch of dampness.
So why not make for the wide open spaces? It’s sounding high time to press the big red shiny button marked “Eject” – and the next nearest inland oasis that beckons from the City of Churches is the Flinders Ranges… that is unless a weekend in Port Augusta seems promising. You can find out if PA is to your liking on the way north, as its just 300 kilometres up the highway and then it’s only a hop, skip and a leisurely jump from there to Quorn and Hawker - the towns at the gateway to the Flinders.
Should you make the drive up round September or October you can thrall at some of the incandescent daytime displays of canola flowers throttling the landscape in the foothills in bright shades of yellow and purple - like an undeclared national flag of agriculture. After following the road by the Ports (Gawler, Wakefield, Pirrie and Germain) and you feel the need to cut inland early, follow the sign off to Wilmington and head round the top of Mount Remarkable National Park. Get with the spirit of the early explorers and the grand hyperbole of the outback, make up your own reason for why it could be Mount Remarkable and then lend this rumour the credibility of fact at night-time campfire gatherings, soon you too will be the stuff that stories are made of.
Edible fungus!
Bring on the weatherboard houses and small local halls as the road winds away from the masses up towards Quorn and Hawker. This Quorn is 100% natural, not the highly processed protein manufactured stuff made from edible fungus – no this is the real thing, free from preservatives and colourings. This Quorn is rich in natural fibre, wood mainly, and uses only the finest sun-bleached materials to give it its rich lustrous colours. It is also the home of the figure hugging light blue 1970s style t-shirt I used to own in my younger and more handsome day: emblazoned with the train from the Pichi Richi Railway, the steam engine railway that bore the rich mineral deposits from the region south to Adelaide. Without skipping details, Hawker offers more of the same and has some more bumpy bits that you can walk around to look at for that regional feel.
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| Fog at Wilpena |
For many the main event in a trip up to the Flinders is the Pound. Wilpena Pound is a curious bowl covering 80 square kilometres nestled between two mountainous ridges– like giant cupped hands it practically beckons you to come in and makes for a pretty spectacular site for sunrise from the southern end. Like most natural features that stick up out of the ground, you can climb, go around it or the one exception here is to go into it. There’s only one entrance to Wilpena and apart from climbing it, a walk through will give you an insight into the 1500 species of plants that live in there and survive the arid conditions – that’s about half the total complement for South Australia.
The charms of old rocks
After you’ve left The Pound (which come to think of it sounds more like a late ’90s hip-hop collective than a rock formation of national significance) you can do that thing where you shimmer like a story on afternoon television: y’know, when someone talks about the story that went before, bending the whole linearity of the plot and the shimmeryness acts as a device to show that we going back in time…
The area round the Pound does in fact shimmer frequently when you squint your eyes the right way against the light, offering a range of views on the geological fore-goings of the area, much like stepping backward and forward in time, easier to see - hard to do. For example there are the 640 million year old deep marine depositions of the Erorama Shales, then there is Trezona rock formation further round on the north side of the Park, is some 630 million years old, around the time of the emergence of the earliest life forms on Earth, long before pubs or even internet dating. Further around but still in the same area is the Cambrian zone with its fossil stromatolites, an era characterised by the first multi-cellular life. This shimmering through time thing goes on in 10 million year sets to 530 million years ago. If you want to get your rocks off with the full details on the geological history of the Flinders check it out here.
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| Brachina Gorge |
A bit further round, Brachina Gorge is a great chance to take it slow and check out the landscape, the road is a bit rough but the scenery sure isn’t. It gives you another spot to travel back and forth through 130 million years of the Earth’s history and see where the sea has risen and fallen throughout that turbulent time with some nice spots to stop along the way.
Blinman is a small town in the north of the Flinders, being historically the land of the Adnyamathanha people. In past years the town has seen sheep farming and mining (which wasn’t so healthy for the people cos of all the dust it made) but that’s been over for 90 years. Now it’s a quiet little place and host to the annual Land Rover Jamboree – make sure you say Hi from me if you drive a LandCruiser.
If you should find yourself back in the Pound after all that and if you’ve survived the arid conditions I mentioned earlier, the website at the Resort (yep there’s a resort out here) exhorts you to “Climb a mountain, then climb a bar-stool”. The logic is over-powering and just short of impeccable. In fact, I’d get it as a full-sized back tattoo if I’d thought of it myself first – practically an untouchable statement, leaving all endeavours at hyperbole cleanly in the dust. Like screaming at the world “Beer = the height of human endeavour”? Now you can’t beat that.
Planning at trip? Check out Viator.com for a complete list of things to do in South Australia, including sightseeing in Adelaide.
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