The Midnight Oil House

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I’m up before dawn and head a few kilometres out of town to get an early morning view of the ruins of a Cobb and Co Coach House Hotel. It’s apparently famous for appearing on the front cover of the “Diesel and Oil” LP, which was released by the iconic Australian rock group Midnight Oil back in 1987. It just looks like a ruined farmhouse …. well apart from a sign pointing to stony a car park right in front of it, and another sign saying that you’re not allowed to camp. There’s absolutely no one here, and I think you’d probably have to be a slightly over-obsessed “Oils” fan to even think about setting up your tent here on the gravel, but each to their own I suppose. I was hoping to recreate the photo, and I read last night that to do this I‘d need to be here at either “sunrise or sunset”, hence the early rise from my much needed beauty sleep. Unfortunately it seems “sunrise or sunset” needs rewording to …. well “sunset”. Anyway, they say there are health benefits to getting up early … I wonder when I’m going to feel those kick in?

I learn a bit more about Burra from plaques in the main street. It seems it was quite a place in its time. It started life around the Burra Burra Copper Mine, which was established in 1851, and was for the next 15 years responsible for producing 5% of the world’s copper, which seems staggering. One plaque claims that the mine played a lead role in saving South Australia from bankruptcy. The town’s current population is around 1,000, but at the peak of mining activity it was as much as 5,000, which made it the country’s largest inland settlement, and seventh largest overall. It was declared a State Heritage Town in 1994, was placed on the National Heritage List in 2017, and is now a major tourist destination.

Today’s the last full day of the trip, and we plan to spend it meandering slowly south-east to the town of Naracoorte near the South Australia Victoria border. We’re not quite sure exactly where we’re meandering, and are perhaps a bit surprised to find ourselves in the town of Nurriootpa in the famous Barossa Valley of wine fame. Issy says we should stop at a winery for lunch, which sounds like a great idea … well it would except I can’t drink because we’ve still got four hours of driving in front of us …. and even if I could, neither of us are really wine drinkers … and I suspect that if you ordered beer at a winery they‘d probably lock you up in the nearest village stocks and throw buckets of mashed up grapes at you. Anyway, the grape vines all look very attractive.

We plough on across the Murray at Murray Bridge (where else), and stop for a quick bite of lunch at the mighty township of Coonalpyn, population 193. There’s some impressive silo art here to look at, and what do you do if your town’s small and you still want to have all the services of a larger metropolis …. well it seems you put the cafe in the post office … we’re going to need to move our table out of the way if someone wants to buy a stamp while we’re munching away on our rolls. Then it’s on through the award-winning Padthaway wine district to our destination for the night.

After last night’s Booking.com fiasco we’re keen to avoid its apparent stranglehold on the global accommodation industry. And it seems there is a way around its impenetrable wall … and our reward for our efforts, well that would be profuse thanks from a lovely lady at reception for booking direct …. and a complimentary room upgrade. So stick that up your jumper Booking.com. I’d better be a bit careful what I say here. We’re heading overseas next month and I have had to book through them a couple of times when there’s been no other alternative. On the off chance that any of their three staff (have you ever tried calling them?) ever take time off from their taxing jobs to read obscure travel blogs, they could potentially inflict untold misery on us. We wouldn’t want to find ourselves late at night in some village in outback Uzbekistan (just to be clear we’re not actually going to Uzbekistan - just trying to cover our tracks here) to find they’ve cancelled our booking at the only inn for thousands of kilometres in every direction.

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