Blogs from Woomera, South Australia, Australia, Oceania

Although it was a slight detour from our journey northward, we took the time to visit the small town of Woomera, which lies within a Department of Defence owned and operated facility. In common usage, "Woomera" refers to the wider RAAF Woomera Range Complex (WRC), a large Australian Defence Force aerospace and systems testing range (the 'Woomera Test Range' (WTR)), covering an area of approximately 127,000 square kilometres It is the world’s largest test and evaluation range for ground based, air and space defence systems testing. The Woomera Restricted Airspace (WRX) includes all the airspace over Woomera Test Range from ground to outer space. Woomera Village initially operated as a "closed town" between 1947 and 1982, when the facility supported the operations of the Woomera Rocket Range during the Anglo-Australia Project. This cold-war project focused on ... read more

I got up at 6.45am to see if the sunrise over the salt in Lake Hart would be any more colourful than the sunset last night. There was some colour but it still wasn’t very strong, disappointingly. After breakfast, we packed up ready to leave and I was in the process of lifting one of the blocks we use to level the van when Barry’s hold on the brake slipped. I just managed to get my fingers out in time for them not to be squashed as the weight of the wheel came back onto it. I normally try to slide them out as I have always been worried about working between the two sets of wheels but the ground was soft and stony and one had got stuck. I was extremely reluctant to do it ... read more

We are sitting in the Woomera Caravan Park at the present time. We spent our procrastination day at Coober Pedy planning where to go as we headed south, then after we took off Thursday morning I finally admitted to GMan that what I really wanted was to stay in one place with reasonable mobile coverage whilst much loved brother-in-law Robert is having his main aortic valve replaced. He agreed so we have booked in here for 4 nights. Robert is due to go to theatre tomorrow morning at 7 am so lots of positive thoughts please everyone. Barbara has advised him that as he is getting a cow valve he is no longer allow to eat steak as it will be cannibalism. We were not unhappy to leave Coober Pedy because the flies were dreadful where ... read more

Bush Basher - the Late Len Beadell Roxby Downs - Woomera We woke up fortunately at Roxy Downs, where we expected to be and thankfully it was a fairly warm night, I raced out of bed to get in the shower whilst Andy concentrated on our morning cuppa. As soon as we were showered and breakfasted we then concentrated on getting Jack and Gypsy ready to hit the road to Woomera, being careful to make sure the pizza from from last nights dinner was secure in the fridge, no way were we going to lose that on today's journey. We were all hooked up ready to go and out of there by 9am and driving toward Woomera, a place that seemed so small and insignificant on our original journey around Australia just over 4 years ago. ... read more

Hey All, Day 3 saw us departing the eerie township of Woomera for Marla. I say eerie because it is a town full of houses with not many of them being used, Dorm type of buildings boarded up but the whole place is spotless. They used to launch and test all types of military planes, missiles and rockets from here. It is still run by the army, AUS & USA and there are still a lot of restricted areas (127 million sq acres), Tracey believes there are massive conspiracy's going on here, so do i! On the way to Marla we stopped in at the Opal mining town of Coober Pedy, dusty & ugly! and thats just the locals!!!! We saw two of our Indigenous friends having a Barney! The woman hit the bloke with a ... read more