Five days on the road and I’m gonna be in the Coorong tonight…

I’m in Burra, South Australia, a town I remember when last I was here for a weird old house out of town and a slate mine.

Now I have another memory to add – at the motel I camped in for the night I had a 2005 bottle of Tim Adams’ The Fergus for under $30 – a bargain in a restaurant…and it was lovely too. And the other wines on the list were all from the Clare Valley and modestly priced as well – the motel owner told me that he got good deals from the winerys and sold more if he kept the prices low…makes very good sense to me.

I left Alice Springs late on Monday morning for twelve days rolling the length and breadth of South Australia to catch up with Aboriginal people to talk about their knowledge of birds – I only got as far as Coober Pedy on Monday night and had the miserable pleasure of watching my beloved Pies get flogged mercilessly by St Kilda…

I’d forgotten about how beautiful the the rolling hills of southern Arrente country are outside of Alice Springs that gently give way to the wide open plains of the APY lands as you get closer to the SA border. Then as you get approach Coober Pedy the land turns to a gibberous true desert – rocks and low saltbush and not much else. But the last 30 or so kilometres into Coober Pedy are always a shock – the countryside is transformed into a wasteland of mullock heap pyramids attended occasionally by a weird dog-headed machine attached to an old truck. These heaps – sometimes a single isolated pyramid lonely in a hundred acres of dust, sometimes heaps that stretch for kilometres have a strange beauty – here is the guts of the land bought to the surface.

And all that dust blows into the sad wreck of a town that is Coober Pedy, covering all in a fine veil of dust.

The next morning I left Coober Pedy without regrets and headed across to the William Creek Pub, a place with no apparent reason to exist other than to feed and fuel the hordes of grey nomads and others seeking the lost and unattainable grail of the Real (read television version) Outback…through the windscreen of an air-conditioned four-wheel drive or the black veil of one of those strange looking fly-screened hats. And if it is the ‘real outback’ that they seek, they won’t find it on the Oodnadatta Track, which is now so well-maintained that you can travel it at 100 kmh plus leaving only a long plume of grey dust and stones flung at the traffic coming the other way – which at this time of year is almost constant.

But if you stop and look – really look – at this part of the world you see that it is a true wonder with a constantly changing set of habitats – here you drive for an hour between big, red, blown-out sand dunes, there a gibber plain stretching away to the horizon marked by blue-grey hills, now an oasis nestled in the lee between dunes – all green and grey and fluttering of birds drinking at the rare surface water.

Then after a cold beer at William Creek Pub I brave the windscreen-smashing stones flung up by my fellow travelers on the Oodnadatta Track to Maree, another forgettable town stranded by a long-abandoned railway but revived by the constant flow of grey adventurers. Further southward then along the road that follows the abandoned Ghan rail line – the lonely stone huts for the railway workers now abandoned wrecks littering the landscape. Lydndhurst loomed and then faded, easily forgotten. Then to the open-cut mining area of the Leigh Creek coal fields, the small town of Copley and a left turn up into the Gammon ranges – the northern outliers of the Flinders Ranges.

I’ve not been through here before – I’d always passed north-south through South Australia on the Stuart Highway a few hundred kilometres to the west. I climb up from the flatlands and foothills around Copley, a falling sun behind me chasing my shadows as I roll upwards through an ever-changing landscape up to the small Aboriginal community of Iga Warta where I’m hoping to catch up with the Coulthards and their relatives that live there and the neighbouring old mission town of Nepabunna a few kilometres up the road.

Iga Warta, and much of the northern Flinders Ranges, is on land owned by the Adnyamathanha people and I’d found some great stories about Adnyamathanha bird knowledge of birds in their area in the literature and was looking forward to confirming at least some of those stories and perhaps getting some new material.

I can’t reveal too much about what new material I did find at Iga Warta (you will have to buy my book next year for that!) but I had a great couple of days in truly wonderful country nestled in the heart of the hills and mountains of the Gammon ranges – and it was a real and rare pleasure to be out of TV, radio, internet, email and mobile range for a couple of days…

Yesterday morning, after a long interview with local Adnyamathanha traditional owner Clifford Coulthard about his and his people’s bird knowledge I left Iga Warta to head south – en-route to the Coorong, where I hope to catch up with Ngarrindjeri people to hear their stories about birds. As I drove south through Hawker, Quorn, Wilmington and Orroroo to Burra the country changed away from the dry deserts through to the wheat-sheep country of the more closely settled areas of southern parts of the state.

Thats all for now – got to have some breakfast, fill up the coffee flask and hit the road…more soon.