Whyalla

[pim]

I saw a lot more of this scenery today. Near Elliston in SA. Population 373. About 650km west of Adelaide ...



Great Ocean Road eat your heart out.

[caskur]

Mar 19, 2021 17:16:03 GMT 10 pim said:

I saw a lot more of this scenery today. Near Elliston in SA. Population 373. About 650km west of Adelaide ...



Great Ocean Road eat your heart out.

stunning.

I wished I was there too.

[pim]

There is a dark, sinister and tragic side to all this rugged magnificent beauty. Elliston is located in Waterloo Bay in the eastern end of the Great Australian Bight which for millennia had been the home of the Nauo people. It’s said that there are none left but they used to say that of the Tasmanian Aborigines until their descendants identified themselves, complete with DNA proof of their lineage, and exploded that whitefella genocidal lie. So with the Tasmanian example in mind I tend to take the 100% extinction story with a grain of salt.

The encounter between whitefellas and the indigenous tribes of the Eyre Peninsula was not a happy one. It began with the expedition of Edward John Eyre who was the first whitefella European to blaze the overland route around the Bight across the Nullarbor Plain into WA and onward to Esperance. He was lucky to make it through alive, not just because of the harshness of the terrain but because of the hostility of the First Nations whose territory he was gate crashing. The Barngarla, the Nauo, the Wirangu, the Mirniny and the Kokata peoples resisted and fought back against the invaders. There were massacres and incidents of violent bloodshed in some of the nastiest Black Wars fought within Australia. The most appalling was the massacre of 250 Nauo men, women and children in 1849 in Waterloo Bay when they were driven over those magnificent cliffs to their deaths. A sombre note on which to end my sojourn in Elliston.

This monument marks the spot where it happened. We’re ignorant of the crime but the First Nations aren’t. They’ve never forgotten ...

[ponto]

Rugged coastline and tragic past....the conservative element would scrub massacres from history.

[pim]

Ponto the blackfellas put that monument up.

[ponto]

You cannot view the landscape without feeling the Aboriginal spirit...like seeing Uluru for the first time....you have the sense it is theirs.

[pim]

Meanwhile, in Streaky Bay, as I continue to discover the South Australian West Coast - in brilliant sunshine ...







The seafood here is superb. We feel out of it because all the other grey nomads have big SUVs pulling caravans while we have our Mazda sedan and stay in rented cabins. You see them with their elaborate fishing gear. All the locals have boats. We just exist on the local prawns and King George whiting. If you enjoy fresh seafood this is heaven.

PS: I still can’t come at the oysters which are so abundant along the SA west coast. Not my thing I’m afraid. But everyone here scoffs them down with gay abandon.

[ponto]

Stop it please...while we are all miserable in floods and bored as where for entertainment thinking maybe driving through flood waters could be fun...

[pim]

The bank of clouds that stretches across Australia to deliver your rain bomb is to the north of here. We'll be having a look at Ceduna today which is as far west as we go on this trip, but we travel back east to Adelaide via Port Augusta on the Eyre Hwy which is the A1. You, Ponto, would know it as the Pacific Hwy. We could encounter cloud cover on that route because it goes inland across the Eyre Peninsula via the Gawler Ranges. Basically this trip has been about the Eyre Peninsula. As Peter O'Toole's Lawrence says of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia: "It's clean!"

[ponto]

You'll have to venture the Stuart Hwy...up to Alice and maybe Darwin.