Try Not to Step in the Nuclear Waste

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Today we head into the real outback, a five hundred and twenty kilometre slog north along the Stuart Highway to the famous opal mining town of Coober Pedy.

But first up is a visit to the impressive Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden on Port Augusta’s northern outskirts. We read that the concept of a garden here was first proposed in 1981 and it opened in 1996. It covers an area of some 250 hectares and includes species collected predominantly from arid areas of South and Western Australia.

Next up’s a short drive east to the Matthew Flinders Red Cliff Lookout which, as the name suggests, sits on top of a cliff on the west side of the narrow headwaters of Spencer Gulf. We read that the great navigator came here during one of his many expeditions.

We set off bravely into the outback. First impressions are that it’s probably not as flat and barren as we might have expected. It’s not the Swiss Alps, and even “rolling hills” would be stretching it, but there is at least some relief in the landscape, and even the odd mesa off in the distance … and there’s even some sparse coverage of scrubby vegetation.

I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised about anything we see out here out in the middle of nowhere … but an elderly gent on a mobility scooter walking his dog along the edge of the highway? And then there are the animals. We were warned not to drive at dawn or dusk because that’s when the kangaroos come out to feed. Smashing into one of them at a hundred kms an hour probably wouldn’t end all that well for either us or the unfortunate creature. We do indeed see lots of roos … or more so pieces of what used to be roos lying in bloody heaps on the bitumen. All the talk was about roos and I don’t remember anyone mentioning emus. It seems their dining schedule’s not quite as rigid. We swerve to dodge one as it goes charging across the road in front of us. That was a bit too close for comfort.

The landscape standouts are the salt lakes, Island Lagoon and Lake Hart - massive flat expanses of blinding white. We wander down the hill and through a small culvert under the Ghan rail track to the edge of Lake Hart. It’s blindingly bright - I reckon the your eyesight would disappear very quickly if you were silly enough to take your sunglasses off down here.

We both ignore a sign telling us we shouldn’t cross under the rail track because it’s part of the “Woomera Prohibited Area”. Huh? What? It seems this whole Woomera Prohibited Area thing started back in the late 1940s when the Brits started to get a bit excited about weapons testing. It kicked off with conventional armaments, but then quickly graduated to nuclear. I beg your pardon? What? Apparently the Brit’s densely populated homeland was deemed too dangerous for the local populace, so, of course, why not instead irradiate thousands of square kilometres of the sparsely populated Aussie outback. And we agreed to this? Who thought that was a good idea? Our feet don’t seem to be glowing when we get back to the car, but how do we know it won’t be different when the sun goes down. Apparently the Stuart Highway goes right through the middle of the prohibited zone, so if we set foot off the bitumen we’ll be in it. There are sheep and cattle stations all through here, so where does that leave them? I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much of a demand for glow in the dark meat, but what would I know. … and to think I was feeling quite relaxed before all this lot came to light. The zone covers a massive area of more than 120,000 square kilometre which makes it bigger than the whole of England, and there have apparently been more rockets launched from here than anywhere else on the planet other than NASA facilities. Hmmm.

As we approach Coober Pedy it’s a bit hard not to notice that the vegetation’s all but disappeared, and small characteristic opal mine mullock heaps have started to appear on the landscape. We’ve booked a traditional Coober Pedy experience - an underground hotel room. The town’s apparently renowned for its subterranean dwellings, or “dugouts”, which are built this way to give the locals some respite from the scorching daytime heat. We expected maybe a couple of rooms dug under the rest of the establishment, but no, the whole place has been carved into the hillside, reception and all. It’s absolutely mind blowing. I hope Issy’s sharing my enthusiasm. She’s not usually into caves - something about a constant fear of thousands of tonnes of rock suddenly collapsing in on top of her. I did ask her if an underground room was OK before I booked it, and she seemed happy enough. I don’t think she’d been drinking, but I am now starting to wonder whether I should have checked a bit more carefully….

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