South to Port Augusta

According to the map we've been driving in a prohibited area even though we were on the Stuart Highway. There is a good little museum at Woomera, the town where all residents have a job - you're not allowed to rent a house from the owners, the Defence Department (I think) unless you're working. So there aren't many elderly people in Woomera. We met one volunteering at the museum but he's only there because he lives with his son. The museum details the huge areas put under restriction when the rocket testing programs started after WW2, it details the lives of the highly educated community that lived at Woomera in the 50s and 60s, it has collections of photos and maps and memorabilia and in the park outside there are real rockets. We enjoyed our visit and stayed longer than we had intended.

Then today we travelled south to Port Augusta. It's not very far but it took us all day because the landscape is so interesting. At one stop we met an interesting resident, a cross and brilliantly-coloured stumpytail looking wonderful on the red sand.

Gibber plains

The gibber plains between Coober Pedy and Woomera are covered in very low saltbush and other small shrubs. Is it always like this? They've had some good rains here the last couple of years so it could be unusual. At a glance the vegetation appears a uniform dark grey but actually the colours are varied and subtle, and many of the shrubs are flowering as well. We stopped for a coffee break in a group of sheoaks and sat and watched Budgerigars, Red-capped Robins, Grey-crowned Babblers, Black-faced Cuckoo-shrikes and woodswallows all around us and threw crumbs to the ants at our feet.

As we neared Pimba we saw the first of a series of salt lakes, the water brilliant in the sunshine. Those of you who have travelled this road, and some will have done it many times, will know these lakes and the gibber in various guises - all equally beautiful I'm sure. And we crossed the one and only railway line, the one that goes to Perth and branches off to Darwin. The scale of the landscape is humbling.