Leigh Creek to Clare, South Australia

This morning we left Leigh Creek to travel around 400km to Clare in the Clare Valley of South Australia.  Before we left Leigh Creek though, we made a quick trip to Aroona Dam.  The dam was originally built for the Leigh Creek township when it was a thriving coal mining town but since the mine has closed and the town switched to underground water, the dam has been de-commissioned.  Now it is simply a beautiful place to put the boat in to go fishing or on a hot summers day, pack a picnic lunch and swim in the cool lake water.  

As we travel towards Clare the highway runs parallel to the old Ghan railway line that ran from Port Augusta to Alice Springs for 100 years beginning in 1878.  It breaks my heart to see it disused as are so many railway lines across Australia.  The railway bridge with its huge stone pillars, that we pass outside Leigh Creek, is very impressive.

Our journey also follows the Flinders Ranges that I have come to love so much.  They continually change colour as the sun moves across the sky.  We also pass many many deserted stone homes that have disintegrated.  Philip and I talk about the English graziers who came to South Australia back in the 1800's.  They moved onto the vast plains below the ranges and because there had been quite a few years of unusually good rainfall the green grass looked perfect sheep grazing country.  Of course it was an exception to have such good rainfall and inevitably a drought hit the area.  A drought that lasted many years and all the graziers had to abandon their grazing plots.

We stop at Hawker for brunch and to re-fuel the car.  It is an interesting town that sits on a cross road.  One road leads to Wilpena Pound and beyond and the road we enter on takes you to Leigh Creek and beyond, the beyond being either the Simpson or Strzlecki Deserts!  The town was established in the 1800's and has a number of lovely old buildings.

As we leave the Flinders Ranges behind we are now in cropping country and once again we see the fields of golden canola.  Just like we saw in Western Australia last year, the crop will start going to seed in the coming months and then those seeds will be harvested to extract the canola oil.

As we approach Clare Valley the scene changes to vineyards....many vineyards, but sadly we see that many of those old vines have been dug out of the ground.  Will they be replaced?  We don't know. But we do know that a recent Australian report says that we have around 2 billion litres of wine in storage, that is around 2.8 billion bottles of wine.  This is a staggering figure and can be attributed mostly to the tariffs that were imposed on us by China that cut our wine exports by around a third.  It will be interesting to see how the industry recovers.

So that brings us to Clare where we will be for at least the next seven days, perhaps more.  We have to have a little more work done on our Power Management System that will entail the services of a local auto electrician.  We won't be moving from here until we know that everything is working well.