The Bodies in the Barrels

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Issy asks me how I slept. “OK I think“, I reply, “other than getting up in the pitch black in the middle of the night and spending ten minutes trying to find the door handle on what turned out to be a door size wall panel”. My beloved does eventually stop giggling. Such a sympathetic response …. not. And on the subject of the motel’s bathroom, the mirror above the sink‘s so far from the basin that I need a telescope to be able to see myself shaving. Fortunately I seem to survive the ordeal without too many deep wounds. On the upside, the mirror’s only so far back because the proprietors have seen fit to fill the space between the sink and the wall with a wide bench. They’ve thus managed to avoid one of my pet hotel hates, lack of bench space to store toiletries. I‘ve lost track of the number of establishments we’ve stayed at where there’s no bench space at all; there might be room on the edge of the sink for a toothbrush, or a tube of deodorant, but not both, and certainly nowhere to put anything else. Surely just about every traveller in history has turned up at one of these places armed with at least a small supply of toiletries, so why can’t the world’s hoteliers see fit to provide enough space to put them on. That’s probably enough ranting for now. I think I need coffee.

Today we’ll be meandering a couple of hundred kilometres north to Port Augusta at the head of Spencer Gulf.

First stop is Snowtown, which is around 30 kms west of Clare. It’s infamous in Oz, and possibly elsewhere, as the place where a gang of murderers hid the bodies of eight of their victims in barrels in the vault of a disused bank in the 1990s, in what became known as “The Bodies in the Barrels Case”. The motives for the killings has never been clear, but it’s believed the gang leader thought that all of their victims were either “pedophiles, homosexuals or “weak””. They were tortured before they were killed in attempts to steal their identities and associated social security and bank account details. Four perpetrators were given jail sentences ranging from 25 years, up to life without the possibility of parole. The crimes have been detailed in several books, as well as one critically acclaimed movie.

I often wonder why we all feel such a strong fascination with gruesome crimes, although on reflection maybe it’s not “we” at all, just me. Anyway, Issy finds a picture of the bank and reads that it's open to tourists on weekends. We cruise up and down the main street looking for it. It’s a fairly non-descript looking 1950s style cream brick structure, and it seems whatever my beloved’s been reading is a bit dated. The front door’s firmly bolted, the windows are boarded up, and it looks like it might have been several years since it received its last visitor. We learn the crimes initially resulted in a welcome tourism boom for this tiny settlement, but the novelty soon wore off. The locals then decided they really didn’t like the notoriety, and even went as far as considering changing the town’s name. There’s some nice silo art across the road from the bank, which we suspect might have been put there as a distraction from the murders, but other than that there doesn’t seem to be too much going on here. The main street’s virtually deserted. The one exception is a couple of elderly gents racing their mobility scooters up and down the footpath, and then up and down the main street itself. If they’re trying to deter crime tourists they’re doing a good job; it all feels distinctly creepy.

Next stop is the small village of Wirrabara which is about a hundred kilometres further north. There’s more impressive silo art here, this time a farm worker, and a brightly coloured bird. The detail in the farm worker’s face is particularly striking.

We head west through the very impressive Germein Gorge, which is a reminder that we’re now very firmly in the southern Flinders Ranges. We get excellent views from the top of the range out over the headwaters of Spencer Gulf.

We follow the coast for a while and then head inland through the Pichi Richi Pass to the small town of Quorn. It’s ridiculously cute, with a good array of heritage buildings. It’s apparently particularly notable as the terminus of the Pichi Richi Railway, which runs as a not for profit tourist operation along 39 kilometres of a heritage narrow gauge line through the southern Flinders Ranges between here and Port Augusta. The track forms part of the original route of the famous Ghan. Works on the line started in 1878, reached Oodnadatta in 1891, and eventually Alice Springs in 1929. The last service to operate the route was in 1980. The current standard gauge route is some 160 kms further to the west and commenced operations the same year the services on the narrow gauge line ceased.

As we head into Port Augusta it’s a bit hard not to notice the large number of wind turbines and solar farms on the coastal flats on the east side of the Gulf. And they’re clearly needed. We read that this used to be the home of South Australia’s only two coal fired power stations, but the last of these was closed down in 2016. Port Augusta’s apparently often referred to as the “crossroads of Australia”, and understandably so. If you want to drive from Adelaide to Darwin, or from Sydney to Perth, it looks like you’ve got little choice but to come through here. And we can confirm that the main highway through the town is indeed heavily trafficked. And how do we know this? Well our cheap motel’s right on it, and if we were hoping for a peaceful night’s sleep….

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Australia
Miles and miles.... we took the train from Sydney to Perth and enjoyed the miles and miles of wilderness.

[DaveandIssy]

Oz
We realise now, if we didn’t before, that we live in a ridiculously big country.