Gawler Ranges

This is the first time that we’ve been on a camping trip outside of WA since we travelled around Australia 12 years ago. So I anticipated there would be lots of reminiscing. Aided by the journal and blog I kept at the time, because so much has been forgotten.

And we did remember our last crossing of the Nullarbor, when we took it so much slower and called in at Eyre Bird Observatory and then drove along the telegraph track for a way, avoiding some of the highway. We remembered coming into Ceduna on a 40+ degree day and having a wheel of the camper trailer come off and bounce into a nearby paddock. We remembered our entire time in South Australia as basically avoiding the heatwave and the feeling of a tinderbox landscape ready to be sparked off by the scorching northerly winds.

What I did NOT expect was to be reminiscing of being in Iceland while being in the arid Gawler Ranges.

It hit us both when we walked over a bare grassy plain and down into a small gully, and we both remembered a similar kind of feeling when walking up empty wide fjordurs in Iceland.

Then we realised the temperature was about the same (post-front it was cold in the Gawler Ranges mid-winter) and we were dressed very similarly as we had been in Iceland in late summer.

There is all the volcanic rock we were clambering over. Here in the Gawler Ranges it is ancient, 1500 million years, and weathered, the sharp edges eroded. In Iceland it is so newly formed in many places you are clambering over recent lava fields.

Even the spinifex looked a little similar to all the colonising moss that covered lava fields in Iceland.

In both places, the ‘organ pipe’ rock formation is an attraction.

But in Iceland there was a distinct lack of any mammals apart from those the Vikings had introduced – the horses and sheep.

Vulkathanha-Gawler Ranges National Park on the other hand was teeming with kangaroos, wallabies and emus. It was like being surrounded by our national emblem. It was apparently also famous for wombats, but on the first three nights our attempts to spot one had been unsuccessful.

On our final afternoon we were driving through a plain on dusk, and just as I was starting to feel bitterly disappointed, there, on the top of a mound, I finally saw a couple of wombat shapes. I yelled and freaked out Tim who stopped the car in a hurry. And then it was on, for a few km there were wombats everywhere, mostly viewed from afar. I tried to get closer, quietly and carefully, but they soon plunged back into their burrows.