Bound for South Australia - 5: SA's border guards fail to stop me!

 

 

 

Here they are, doing their best! 

I made it into South Australia eventually, defying their best efforts to keep me out.

 

In fact it was all a bit scary and confusing trying to work out how to get into and out of South Australia in these uncertain COVID border restrictive times.

I'd decided to avoid the Mildura/Sturt Highway option when I read that if you got the permit regulations wrong you could end up trapped in Victoria, unable to go forward into South Australia or back home to NSW.

Hence the Broken Hill/Barrier Highway route. SA is open to NSW I'd read. But not quite! You still need a permit, I found out just in time. You need to have declared that you didn't have symptoms and hadn't been to Victoria, and to have printed out the online form. When I hit the border, there was nothing there. I sailed through. Except that more than 100km further into the state, suddenly there was a police checkpoint! They needed to see my permit. Would they really have sent me back all that way if I hadn't had one?

Bound for South Australia - 4: Broken Heel

Broken Hill's a mining town, but these days it's the legacy of films made in and around it that attract all the tourist attention. 

First there was Mad Max. Then the drag queens of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert have led to the creation of a Broken Heel Festival (postponed due to COVID this time). 

Top attraction is the very colourful Palace Hotel, featured prominently in the movie.

Bound for South Australia - 3: Wilcannia

I had a lunch stop in Wilcannia. It's on the Barrier Highway between Cobar and Broken Hill, and it's often mentioned in the context of poverty, disadvantage, and social problems.

From Wikipedia:  From the 2016 Census, Wilcannia had a population of 549 with 407 (74.4%) people being of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, mostly from the Barkindji nation.^[11] Wilcannia has 223 private dwellings.^[1] The town was listed as one of the most socially disadvantaged areas of New South Wales according to the 2015 Dropping Off The Edge report.^[12]

 

It's on the Darling River, and used to be a major inland port. These days there's often no water, because of climate change induced droughts, and massive theft by upstream irrigators. Some did arrive earlier this year though, and the river isn't quite dry at the moment.

Bound for South Australia - 2: Cobar's big hole

I sort of knew about Cobar's mines, but when I innocently went up to the town's sightseeing lookout, I hadn't expected to look down into something like this. They mine gold, silver, lead, and zinc.

Bound for South Australia - 1: Nyngan ninjas and bogans

 

Nyngan was well positioned for my first overnight stay en route to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia recently.

I quite liked Nyngan. It has two official sights to see. There's the Big Bogan, which was very controversial, I gather, when it was erected. The term has rather negative connotations, after all, but then we are on the Bogan River here, and in the Bogan Shire! They've decided to own it.

It's also got a stuffed and mounted Iroquois helicopter. This is one of the actual machines that evacuated the entire population of the town during serious flooding in 1990. 

It's also got the classic country town fine dining option: a bowling club with a Chinese restaurant. Not one that serves real Chinese food, like city ones would serve these days. This is the good old glutinous goo 1960s Australian chow mein stuff. Yum!

Backyard birds

 

It's just been Backyard Bird Count Week. I did my usual 20 minutes count, and spotted all the usual rainbow lorikeets, noisy miners, sulphur crested cockatoos, etc, and a family of king parrots happened by at just the right time too.

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a rather over-friendly king parrot who came to visit us a few weeks ago.

 

 

And a very big family of rainbow lorikeets.

 

 

 

 

 A tawny frogmouth

And a brown cuckoo-dove I spotted nearby last week. I'd seen these before, without quite getting round to identifying them properly.

Gladys

It's not been a great year for waratah flowers, our state's floral emblem. Sometimes they're everywhere and looking glorious. This year they've been few and far between.

I did spot this flowering plant over the road though. It's looking a bit sad and past its prime. I'll call it Gladys.