These little fellas are everywhere

I find the Yorke peninsula staggering at this time of the year. Wherever you drive, as far as the eye can see, you see grain fields. It is beautiful; fields of Barley, Wheat, Pulses and Green fertilizers that get ploughed straight back into the paddock, no wonder they call this Australia’s food basket. I cannot express things better than the link below. There you will find all the facts and pictures for this area. The link takes you to one of the main pages. Explore the many fantastic links from there.

http://www.harvestcorner.com.au/#!farming/c84j

After an hour of driving through cropping farms we arrived in Moonta. The town has a central park with a generous grassy area and many shady old Fig trees and public facilities. This is a reasonable size centre which proudly displays its rich copper mining heritage in the many well maintained churches, official buildings and miner’s cottages.

Great architecture

Moonta square

School of Mines

Miner’s cottage

The history is proudly displayed also in an artist’s contribution in the form of a collection of mining related sketches that include a picture of Elizabeth Woolcock, the only woman to be executed ever in South Australia. See pic below:

Artists sketches of mining

Elizabeth Woolcock

An internet search will reveal the following in Wikipedia:

Elizabeth Woolcock (20 April 1848 – 30 December 1873) was born Elizabeth Lillian Oliver in Burra Burra and was hanged in Adelaide Gaol for the murder of her husband Thomas Wollcock by mercury poisoning.

As one drives through the suburbs of Moonta one arrives in Moonta bay. The large jetty here is well known for being a good fishing and squidding spot. Just down the road is Port Hughes, another lovely coastal gem that is expanding rapidly.

Massive Jetty at Moonta Bay

From there we drove through an increasingly arid landscape to the port of Wallaroo. I found the shipping terminal with its massive ship loading infrastructure fascinating. Wallaroo is also a base for the trawling fleet and if you like boats you will enjoy having a look at the trawlers there.

Kadina has the ‘larger town’ feel as you drive through the light industry areas leading into the town. It is a great town with good public facilities and we went for a walk and stretched our legs before we made our way back to Port Vincent. There we spent a pleasant afternoon on the beach  swimming the dogs and soaking up the tranquility.

Port Vincent – even the fish like it!

Old farmhouse amongst the vines

Packed up and drove some 400km to the Clare Valley to do some serious wine tasting. We have been to a number of wine regions before, but never to the Clare. We drove via Renmark and  Kapunda, much of which follows the flow of the Murray. We were surprised by how fertile the region is with massive distances being cultivated and under vines, grains, fodder Lucerne, hay, citrus, olives and more. All this makes the countryside easy on the eye and a pleasure to drive through. From time to time, when we opened the windows, we were overwhelmed by the fragrant smell of the orange blossoms.  We booked into the caravan park at Clare and settled down for the evening. The park is a bit pricy at $ 39  night for a normal powered site. There is also a minimum of facilities for a place of such size and expense.

Great South Australian stone building

For the next two days we set about exploring the region. I have been familiar with labels like ‘Annie’s Lane’ for many years, but there are many less known labels around. The area is green and beautiful and Clare is a great little town. There are visible remains from a prior German era with some buildings displaying their heritage, see pics. I loved the architecture and the look of the sandstone in the buildings. Everybody knows of Hahndorf, but it is clear that there are many more towns where buildings have a German flavour. We saw this in Blythe where one local church building was marked by the sign ‘Kirche’ (church).There are many lookout points that offer panoramic views from vantage points. Other little villages have arenas for ‘Pony Clubs’ and other rural pursuits. Every now and then one runs across charming old cottages in vineyards.
You can see below

Old German Church Building

You can see 4ever

Old Farm Building

Cut Barley