Down by the sea...

It's getting hotter.
This week has been getting hotter by the day, today will be 38C, tomorrow will be few degrees hotter still and the town has seemingly gone to sleep.

 The only activity is very early in the morning when we rush about getting fuel, groceries etc.
 The rest of the day the town will be deserted, no cars on the streets, no one walking or jogging, no one to be seen.

During the week some of the shops remain busy, especially those in the Mall where old people and those without air conditioning go to spend their days in the relative cool. But today is Sunday....

I was out at 6am to take a few shots of the marina and the sun rising, it's calm and clear and when that sun comes up there will be no cooling breeze, no wafting clouds, just relentless heat...
I'll be at home
trying to stay cool...


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Ok, Lets take the tour….

This is the reason why the town is here, the pelletizing plant in the foreground, harbor behind that and the Steel making plant behind that. Also there is a Rolling Mill off to the side and the mine that feeds the whole catastrophe 60km away. The rusty red is the iron ore dust. (Iron ore is basically rust) One entire end of the town is the same colour and you can guess the colour of our house dust?

This is where the town started about 80 years ago and that’s why this is where the largest trees are found. Below the protection of the hill is the town Gardens (big trees) and the town spread on the flats beyond that. (ancient floodplain)

That’s the sea there, several degrees warmer up here in Spencer Gulf where the water is shallow and the sun hot. It's also several percent more salty because of the evaporation rate. (and also why we have a thriving salt pan industry) 

Outside the town looking back. This is typical of the area, low hills with ancient floodplains between, a few low bushes and hardy trees. At least we hardly ever got lost and it's an awesome area for motorbike and 4WDing.

If I turn around to the North we see… more of the same across to the next hill 12km away. Australia originally had huge mountain ranges, over eons they wore away to dust. The dust washed toward the coasts making these huge sand and silt flats. We also have alluvial Gold and Diamonds…the hard part is finding them in all that sand.

..and from the top of that hill….

Typical of the better bits, the red sands of central Australia visible between the struggling Saltbush (light grey) and the darker and useless Bluebush. (dark green/blue) Lucky for Australia *Saltbush is good Sheep food so we managed to build a Wool and Meat trade from this. The trees both alive and dead are Myall trees, long lived and so gnarled and hard you cant do anything with them. (pretty much the only reason theyre still here)

* Saltbush tackles the hard salty soils and horrible temperatures by excreting salt through their leaves to act as sunscreen. You can (and we do) eat the leaves to increase your salt intake. (only take leaves from the top of the bush where theres likely to be less pee)

You can tell the approximate age of the Myall by their shape, this one is over 150 years but not yet 400 years old. Even small fires will kill them and they need a good flood to create seeds, they sometimes go 50 or more years between flowerings and seed setting. For these reasons they are totally protected. The last big flowering was 1974 and I can see the young trees from that year all around. (between 6 to 10 feet tall)

This older Myall is somewhere over 400 years but not yet 600 years old. To put that into perspective, Australia was settled in the 1770's, that’s less than 250 years ago when this tree was middle aged..

..and now I must tell you that these photos were taken in August 2012 at the end of our Winter (our rainy season) when the trees were at their best and every bush had put on it's next years growth.
I keep promising myself to go out in the 48-54Celcius Summer to get pics of what it's really like out here but I keep chickening out..besides, people really do die out there....




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My Birthday Treasure Hunt

At exactly 9am I received GPS coordinates by SMS.

Quickly punching them into my Garmin I saw straight away that it was going to be one of the local fast food outlets. (They're all very close together) It turned out to be the golden arches and my clue was a womans first name.

First things first, seeing as it was early I ordered breakfast and coffee and sat to consider my clue. There was no one in the *restaurant that looked familiar and no one was looking at me so I went to the counter and asked for the womans name. * just who decided these fast food shops somehow deserve the title of restaurant?

I was pointed to the manager who knew who I was and gave me a small present containing another set of coordinates and lots of numbers on bits of paper. 

As she sits now, 3 Km from the water, you cant see it but you can walk right under the Corvette HMAS Whyalla

The new co-ords took me to our new city library.. I sat in my car looking at the numbers, two sets on two bits of paper. They looked somehow familiar.. then the penny dropped. I was outside the library and the numbers were Dewey numbers. The two sets of numbers took me to two books. Australia's Sea War and Greece and Cyprus during WW2. There were no bits of paper or marked pages in the books so I guessed the books themselves were the clue.

We have two WW2 sites here in town, a large Gun Battery which protected our harbor and ship building facilities and the first war ship built here now dragged from the sea and set up as a museum several kilometers from the sea…not a small ship.

I did a drive by of the ship, had a look about and not finding any clues moved on to the gun battery. 

The old gun battery is set on a hill overlooking the sea, as such it was perfect to set up as a picnic area with one restored ships gun and all the original emplacements still intact. With a few huge picnic tables with benches and a lookout viewing 360deg all around.

I wandered about the emplacements first and eventually made my way over to the big gun.

I like this place, during WW2 my father worked in the steel making facility and manned the big guns here on the hill.

Eventually I found a bright yellow rubber duck hidden in the recoil chamber of the big gun, on it were more co-ords.

Punching them into the Garmin it immediately came up with a map showing the point, I knew it immediately, my daughters house on the same street as mine…

The whole family was there, I was carried inside by a wave of grandkids, through the house and outside to the patio where they were all gathered with food, presents and cake. It was a great day and in fact the best birthday since my 21st.

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The Great Storm of 2011

Whyalla was pounded by a huge hailstorm at 8pm last night, cars wrecked all over the town, trees smashed and brought down, heavy flooding and the power went out. Just now the power was restored..22hrs later. I was lucky because my car was under cover but two of my daughters cars were extensively damaged.
My garden was smashed with the trees stripped of leaves and that nest which had a baby bird in it yesterday...empty today. (feelings of sadness sweep over me)
I took 8 min of video which I will process soon enough...


This car was at the end of my street, windows smashed, all the panels dented. Probably a write off.




Men never really grow up do they?





Our local mall, the Westlands was completely surrounded by a lake.... including inside


Some hailstones were as large as this, but most were golf ball sized.



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