Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
The immediately-preceding post’s aptly-named Prairie Hotel sits on an almost horizontal plain.
Look out the pub’s back door, however, and you will see – running all along the horizon – the “spine” of the northern Flinders Ranges.
They were “built” circa 800 million years before the pub was.
Hop into a vehicle, drive east for ten minutes, and you will enter one of the loveliest of the Flinders Ranges’ many dramatic gorges.
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The pictured art object sits outside the front door of The Prairie Hotel, which is surely Australia’s most wonderfully-unlikely – and downright wonderful – outback pub
Be sure to read the “artist’s statement”.
The hotel pretty much is the hamlet of Parachilna, which a colourful signboard proclaims THE EDIACARA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, where fossils rock!
That declaration is no idle boast.
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The Arckaringa Hills – widely known as “the painted desert” – are conveniently near to the roadhouse in this series’ previous episode….and likewise far distant from any city.
They are very good badlands.
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The Cadney Homestead Roadhouse is a bona fide “remote” location.
It sits on the Stuart Highway in South Australia’s far north, nearly 1,000 kilometres north of Adelaide, a little more than 150 ks north of Coober Pedy, and 534 ks south of Alice Springs.
The Painted Desert is conveniently nearby.
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The Curdimurka rail siding – near Lake Eyre South in the SA outback – saw its first train in 1888.
The last one went through in 1980, nearly three decades after the pictured water tank and gigantic water softener lost their raison d’être, when diesel electrics replaced steam locomotives in 1951.
This “big softie” was erected in 1943-44, so its working life was very brief.
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Today’s photo shows a repeatedly-pleasing aspect of our June 2023 “outback” trip: it included a surprisingly large number of sightings of Australia’s largest raptor.
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Some of Australia’s mines are many thousands of years older than most Australians realise…and enormously more colourful.
A spectacular and easily-accessed example sits in desert, circa 600 kilometres north of Adelaide, just outside a quasi-“ghost” town.
A formerly-important “railway town”, Lyndhurst saw its last train in 1980, but is still the crossroads for the Oodnadatta and Strzelecki Tracks
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Northern South Australia and the south of the Northern Territory are deservedly celebrated for their vast, “cinematic” landscapes.
Any visitor can hardly fail to be in awe of the big skies, the far-distant horizons, and the extravagantly colourful, harsh/glorious, obviously-ancient terrain.
Too many visitors, however, fail to pay attention to what’s literally right in front of them, or just behind, or immediately above them.
The “small” view – of whatever is within “touching distance” – is almost always at least as rewarding as is any “sweeping plains and rugged mountain ranges” perspective.
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Is there a Great “Martesian” Basin, from which water “escapes” in certain places, forming petite “oases” on the planet’s otherwise “desolate” surface?
This gushing – or seeping – water originally arrived from the sky as rain… many thousands of human generations ago, when the proverbially dry Mars was a very wet place.
As you can see, the new photographic evidence is compelling.
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Superb Fairy-wrens and Splendid Fairy-wrens both deserve their names.
The former – Malurus cyaneus, pictured above – is the “Blue-wren” most familiar to humans who reside in Australia’s southeast.
The latter – Malurus splendens – is the Blue-wren most commonly seen in Australia’s southwest.
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