An Elephant in the Wheat Field?

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Today we’ve got a long day of driving to Renmark in the South Australian Riverland, near the Victorian border.

As we check out we get chatting to Rob, my pilot from yesterday. He says that today he’ll be flying a group of intrepid expeditioners up to the not so thriving metropolis of Leigh Creek and then on to a picnic on the shores of Lake Eyre. One of the other guests in reception seems to think that Leigh Creek’s major claim to fame is as a landing ground for space junk. I hope Rob gets all his passengers back here safely. I’m not sure you’d feel all that well if a random piece of some Russian rocket smashed into you while you weren’t looking.

There seem to be lots of dead kangaroos on the side of the road that weren’t there when we came up here a few days ago. I’m now fairly sure we’ve seen more dead ones than live ones since we left home, which doesn’t bode too well for their future. Issy says you’re supposed to stop and check them for surviving joeys, but it’s going to be a long and gruesome day if we do that every time we see one. My excuse is that surely that was the job of whoever ran into them in the first place.

We stop for a stretch at the quaintly named town of Orrorroo. It seems that the town’s public facilities are in the middle of the golf course. Well we think it’s a golf course; the only real giveaway is a sign next to the toilets warning against parking on the fairway. It’s not quite Augusta – the “greens” are black sand. Fortunately there don’t seem to be a lot of golfers out today, well none actually.

We read that there’s an art silo in the settlement of Farrell Flat. We program the car’s GPS to take us there, but it appears to have forgotten its purpose in life. It cheerfully tells us that we’ve arrived at our destination as we stare out at empty paddocks. We revert to the Google machine, and after twenty kilometres of bumping along a track better suited to goats than cars we find ourselves in front of the art work. It looks relatively new and depicts a steam train chugging through a wheat field. We join a group of fellow art admirers, and one of them asks Issy very politely whether or not she can spot the elephant. Huh? I’m starting to suspect that hallucinogenic substances might be at play here, but she assures us that a shopkeeper told her that there was in fact a picture of an elephant hidden in among the artwork somewhere. We’re all struggling to spot it, and are now wondering whether it’s instead the shop keeper who‘s been raiding the drug cupboard. One of the party pulls out a pair of binoculars, and eventually manages to point the rest of us to the tiny and barely recognisable image of an elephant hidden in amongst some ears of wheat. Well it could be an elephant.

We wander into the pub across the road in search of some lunch. We’re the only people here. The bearded publican appears and asks us if we’ve signed in. He says that there are undercover police everywhere checking that everyone’s obeying the COVID rules, and that we’ll be fined if we haven’t complied. I would have thought undercover police had better things to do than to patrol empty pubs in one horse towns in the middle of nowhere looking for COVID miscreants, but he looks very serious. We enquire very politely whether it might be possible to get something to eat. He looks at his watch, and tells us that it’s two o’clock. I think we could have worked that out. He then asks whether we want to eat now or at four o’clock. Huh? I’m finding it a bit hard to tell whether or not he’s being serious about anything, and this whole place is starting to feel spookier by the minute. The small bar is decked out in an odd assortment of miscellaneous paraphernalia, including a large motor bike which occupies a fair proportion of the floor area. I can’t also help but notice the large statue of an elephant in the corner. There’s clearly a theme at play here. Our offbeat publican tells us that the circus came through here in the 1920s. It apparently had three elephants, but only needed two, so they abandoned one to the care of the locals. At least that solves one mystery. I ask him whether the silo art, which has apparently only been in place for a few months, has improved his patronage. He says it hasn’t. He says most people only stop briefly to take photos and then move on. I’m sensing he’s not having a good day. He’s lucky we’re hungry or I think a few minutes in his slightly eccentric company might have tempted us to move on too.

Next stop is Waikerie where we cross the Murray River on a small ferry. The silo art work features a parrot and a giant yabby. It sits high above the river where we get excellent views of the massive yellow riverside cliffs.

We’ve taken our non-planning of accommodation to the next level. We pull over in Renmark in the now pitch darkness and consult the Google machine for somewhere to rest our heads for the night. Hmmm. The whole town appears to be booked out. This is not good. The back of the car’s packed with luggage, and the prospect of sitting upright in the freezing cold on the side of the road all night is suddenly not feeling all that attractive.

We ring the Renmark Pub. They tell us that they have one room left, but warn us that it’s an old style pub room that’s in need of a bit of modernisation. They weren’t kidding. I assure Issy that we will eventually get used to the smell, but I doubt there’s any escaping some of the other “features” – wires hanging out of the ceiling; carpet that looks like it’s been here since the 1920s; a fluorescent light encased in a wooden box attached to the wall just above the full width of the bed - I doubt it’s possible to avoid bumping your head on it every time you sit up; a hole in the floor in the corridor outside the door big enough to swallow your foot…. A sign on the mirror in the bathroom warns that if we have a shower we must (1) close the bathroom door tightly, (2) turn on the exhaust fan, and (3) turn the cold water on first. It seems that if we don’t follow these instructions to the letter we’ll trigger the fire sprinklers in the whole building and drown all the other guests. ....and there’s an old style phone in the room. We haven’t seen one of those in a hotel for years. Issy says we should ring someone on it, just for the novelty.

We’re on the second floor. The first floor has much newer carpet, and houses a museum showing what the place used to look like when it was first opened back in 1897. These rooms look a whole lot better than the one we’re about to spend the night in. I suppose we can’t say we weren’t warned……, and it was very cheap.

I tell Issy that I saw a sign in the museum claiming that the hotel is haunted. I sneak out onto the large wraparound balcony and knock on our window from the outside. Well I hope it’s our window, for one horrible minute I think I might have inadvertently knocked on the window of the room next door. I haven’t, and when I try to get back in I find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that my beloved’s seen fit to lock me out…..

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