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Discussion starter · #21 ·
Fun fact for the day: Boomerangs curve because they are shaped like an aerofoil, with one curved surface and one flat one. They will curve their trajectory in the direction of the curved surface. The boomerang itself does not need to be bent and real aboriginal made ones are not:


Today I spent the morning (and an obscene amount of money!) chasing up an auto electrician to repair my trailer plug.

Then we checked out some museums in town before driving out to check out the gorges of the West MacDonnell Ranges about 100 miles west. These ranges are a raised rocky ridge running east-west. Alice Springs sits at a natural gap in the barrier, only a few hundred yards wide, called Heavitree Gap. The highway, the Central Australian Railway, and the Todd River (or the river bed: it is almost always dry) all squeeze through the gap.

Out to the west there are a number of gorges at waterholes cut through the barrier by water action. A bit like the Olgas, this water is rain-fed and rainfall is infrequent, but the permanent shade keeps some of these places permanently in water.

We went to Ormiston Gorge. It still had enough water to swim, but the water was drying up and no longer flowing. The corpses of many surprisingly large fish (where did they even come from?!) were adding a certain ambience to the place as the water oxygen levels were too low to support them. Didn't stop a few locals having a swim.




Tomorrow we are off to see some 10,000 year old petroglyphs. I wanted to go out to n'Dhala Gorge which is a reasonably challenging 11km trip along a dry river bed to find, but vehicle access is restricted now and there's a 1.5km walk to see the glyphs over rocky ground. Easy enough but not with my toddler, baby, and aged mother. So we will go to a less well-preserved site a little closer to town.

The day after we are back on the road. Three days down to Adelaide which should involve a bush stop, a collection of space debris, and a lot of GAFA (Google it).
 
Thank you Sir.
Rivetting stuff us Western Euro folk's can but dream of. Looking forward to the next chapter.
Indeed. Many UK folk look out on a few square metres of muddy turf (covering builder's rubble in their paltry back yards), surrounded by larch-lap fences that fall over every three years in the wind (but at least keep the neighbours' feral kids away, and the smell of their cheapo burned-sausage BBQs, when the sun comes out), then they do a week-day commute that is mostly queuing in traffic, or 70 miles down an overcrowded motorway, filled with kamikaze drivers, all under leaden grey skies for most of the year.... But they do get to moan it's all caused by foreigners and the welfare state....

It does make your very big country seem attractive!

Keep up the great fact-filled stories, to abate our depression! Then again, I'm mostly in the Algarve, so pretty happy! :)
 
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Discussion starter · #26 ·
Yesterday we went to Ewaninga Station to view some petroglyphs.

The site is a small red sandstone outcrop - one of many in the area - next to a clay pan about the size of a football pitch. The clay pan remains wet for weeks after rain, which is obviously what led the Arrernte people to camp here.

The site is a sacred "secret men's business" site and women and uninitiated boys would have been required to camp away from the rocks. They ask for no photographs, so I didn't take any, but the rocks are covered in carvings and patterns which were used partly for education (such as pictures of the tracks left by edible animals in the area) and partly to help teach the oral laws and rites of the tribe. Nobody outside the Arrernte men are 100% sure what they all mean, but the oldest of these carvings was put there 7,000 years before the pyramids were built and modern day Arrernte men can still read them and still add new ones. It's the world's oldest surviving culture. If

The site is part of the Raintime Dreaming, a series of sites common to the Arrernte and other neighbouring tribal groups that start at the present Glen Helen homestead and continue east for hundreds of miles close to the city of Mount Isa in Queensland.

The mythology behind these sites eluded me a bit based on the signs present at Ewaninga, but from what I can tell they are all places at which water would collect temporarily after rain. The west-east alignment follows the direction of most rain systems passing through here, so they would go to the first site after rain and then move east following the water. Although they have several places such as the Olgas and Ormiston Gorge which are almost always in water, they tended to avoid these sites except in extreme drought so that there would always be animals they could hunt there when they really, truly needed it.

That was it for us yesterday. I had to spend the afternoon on the computer for work, so we retired to town and my wife took the kids to the pool.

Today we backtracked 700km down the Stuart Highway to Coober Pedy (place with the underground houses), where I investigated further maintenance issues caused by the rough roads on the way in to Alice. I got the electrics back up in the camper by finding and replacing the main 50A fusible link (mental note: replace with a circuit breaker, I took all the skin off my knuckles trying to get a spanner on it); replacing some snapped cable ties under the car where various wiring harnesses were hanging down; greasing the hitch pin; tightening several bolts in the canopy and roof rack which had worked loose; and winding the spare up a notch as it has slipped down and was loose.

No photos of the drive today, but here's our camp setup:


Actually I did have one picture. This is Erldunda Roadhouse at the intersection of the Stuart and Lasseter Highways. It is the only fuel for 100km in any direction (and is much more substantial than the next stops). Oddly it only has two diesel pumps. We got here at about 1130 when all the caravaners who left Ayers Rock at 0900 were pulling in. Outback traffic jam (you can't really see it but the queue of caravans is about five deep, plus there is a road train waiting on both sides):
 
Discussion starter · #27 ·
Well we've been home for just over a week now. Sorry my posts stopped at Coober Pedy - from there, we backtracked to Port Augusta and then the city of Adelaide where we caught up with friends for a couple of days (I lived there a while back). Not much Nav content.

We spent two days driving to Adelaide, where we laid up for a couple of nights in the city catching up with friends. From there we drove through mallee country for a brief transit of Victoria before crossing the Murray River into NSW. We set up camp outside Balranald, on the Hay Plains, and then pushed through to my mum's farm near Bathurst. Then we crossed the Blue Mountains and took the motorway home.

I wanted to indulge myself and post a story and some pics from Balranald. Balranald and Hay are the only two towns on the Hay Plains, which is an ancient floodplain between the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers. This country was first explored in the 1820s and properly surveyed in the 1840s. While not brilliant for crops, it was good grazing country with lots of natural grass cover. Initially the settlers moved in with cattle, which didn't require fencing and could walk themselves to market, but as they were able to add fencing and improve steamer navigation on the rivers over the next decade, cattle were quickly swapped for sheep, which were reared for wool.

My great, great grandfather was a half-aboriginal shearer who lived in this area from the 1850s until 1920s. Back then, as now, shearers were itinerant workers generally employed day-by-day, moving from farm to farm with the shearing season. They were paid per sheep, and often pretty well, but would maybe only have work for a few weeks a year. The rest of the time they'd pursue casual farm hand jobs, or as my ancestor did, get drunk and up to no good. On the Hay Plains they earned very well, but only had one season a year, when the river was high enough to allow the steamers in to pick up the wool. In other places there would be less pay but maybe two or even three clips a year.

I know he worked for a time on Yanga Station, which was established in the 1840s and stayed working until 2005, when the crown lease was surrendered on the back of dismal wool prices and soaring costs for water licences. The property was managed by the National Parks service for a decade looking for a buyer, but when none came forward, it was proclaimed as a national park. We decided to go visit the old woolsheds to trace the footsteps of my past.

This shed was constructed in the 1850s from local timber and corrugated iron and used continuously until 2005. At its peak in the 1870s (and again in the 1950s) it would have processed around 120,000 sheep per clip, with 24 shearers plus about double that number of rouseabouts, classers, pressers, and stockmen, plus camp cooks, even a camp butcher. Some shearing mobs (companies of men who travelled from job to job as a unit) could have 100 people. The shed could hold 1000 head in its sweating pens and do around 4800 head per day.

Typically the farm would employ a handful of stockmen who would round the sheep into holding yards (and take the opportunity to tend to dipping, veterinary care, tagging, tail-docking and other care tasks). From there, rouseabouts (general hands) from the shearing crew would move them in groups into the shed into 'sweating' pens for them to settle (hence the phrase 'leave him to sweat'), separate large and lively rams from more docile contenders, divert any with heavily soiled or twigged fleeces off for cleaning, and feed them up to the shearers to be shorn. Once the sheep was shorn, the shearer would kick it down a race into an outside pen where it would be sweated again, inspected by the farm-employed stockman, and then sent back to the paddock. Meanwhile the rouseabout would pick up the fleece and take it to the sorting bins, sweep the floor, and bring the next sheep up.

Shearers were paid per sheep, so woe betide the rouseabout (usually a teenage boy or girl) who did not have all these jobs done and kept him waiting. Their pay was docked if they nicked the sheep or failed to get the fleece off relatively unscathed. From the sorting bins the classers and pressers would clean up the fleece, grade it, press it, and bag it. To be a classer, which was the best-paid job in the shed (usually salaried), you had to be assessed and approved by one of the big wool buying agents. Some larger places like Yanga employed their own classer; other places would get one in from their buying agent.

The shearer with the highest daily count was known as the 'ringer' and was king of the shed. The ringer usually got their choice of shearing position, the easier and more docile sheep, and their pick of rouseabout. It was backbreaking work, and still is.

The shearing equipment pictured below is 1920s vintage mechanical motors, although this shed was converted to electric drive on the main shafts in the 1960s. By the 1980s the side that still has the old mechanical motors fitted was no longer used - they were removed from the other side of the shed and the shearers used modern electric shears.

The pics below, if uploaded in the right order, should show:
-the entry race into the shed
-the sweating pens
-the holding pens just before the shearing floor
-the paymaster's boxes
-one of the tables on which the fleeces would have been laid out for trimming and classing
-one of four wool presses (entirely manual - remember, still in use in 2005!)
-the shearers' quarters, with dining hall (probably fell out of use in the 1970s when the shearers would have begun using cars and caravans to sleep in)
-a photo of the last shearing crew in November 2005
-the river where a paddle steamer would have collected the wool
 

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