Peterborough

From Coober Pedy I headed to Peterborough. It's the last substantial town in South Australia before you reach the New South Wales border. It was once a thriving railway junction where three gauges of train line met. Back before federation each state adopted a different size of rail line meaning that you had change trains if you travelled interstate. Worse still was the freight which had to be unloaded then loaded on to each different state's rail network. Obviously both of these things are time consuming, expensive and pointless but it wasn't until 1970 that the countries major train lines were standardised. Peterborough thrived until then.

Before I got to Peterborough however I had to head past Woomera. Now this was a place of endless fascination to me as a child. It did really cool things like launch rockets, and test weapons for the army, navy and airforce. It was the subject of those very dull documentaries with an overly English narrator talking down his nose at you in a most condescending manner about how important the work was that was being done here, that you weren't important enough to really know or even understand what it was and even if you were then you weren't allowed to visit because it was a heavily restricted area. So it was happy to see that it become unrestricted. I had to go and check it out.

It is still used to test long range weapons over land. They were going to decommission it all together until they realised it was the last site in the country capable of testing such weapons and that lots of other countries would never have the space so we could let them use ours, for a price no doubt. So there are still lots of it that are out of bounds. Of course it is also the site of an immigration detention centre but I wasn't going to get anywhere near that no doubt.

Well it's a veritable boys own playgound with examples of many of the planes, rockets and weapons that had been tested there over the years smack dab in the centre of town in a place pretty accurately known as "Missile Park". The town itself was pretty strange. At it's peak it could house 7,000 people so there is all the infrastructure there to meet their needs. Sadly there is only about 500 people living there now so it's like walking through a ghost town. Big shopping centre carparks with just one or two cars in them. A closed cinema, a melange of shops in a drab government looking building. The town is laid out in a perfect grid, I've seen more imaginative public toilet blocks. They are trying to market it as a tourist destination but I am not sure they quite know how. I think it could work quite well, especially for military history buffs however its not quite ready for prime time just yet.

From Woomera I headed straight to Peterborough where they tried to get me excited about sitting in an old train carriage and watching a sound and laser light show about the history of rail. I really wanted to be rude and tell them I had finished playing with my train set some years ago but they had done nothing to deserve that. What annoyed me a bit was not that they were proud of their town and that they were trying to make something of it but the person doing the selling obviously hadn't seen it himself. I asked him what he thought of the show and his carefully worded reply was "everyone who I have spoken to who has seen it have said it was excellent". Well if it's the only thing of interest that the town has got going for it you should go to the trouble of seeing it yourself before pushing its virtues on to me. 

Now its going to get down to minus 2 degrees in Peterborough tonight and the prospect of being out in that temperature is not all that appealing. I made the mistake of eating in and had the dodgiest meal at the motel, a combination of scotch fillet steak, honey prawns and a pepper sauce (I know what drugs were they on when they dreamt up that combination). The air conditioner doesn't work and the room is freezing so I'm going to bed almost fully clothed. 

I'm off to Broken Hill tomorrow. Its only about 300 kilometres away. I was last there in 1985 so I am sure things will have changed. I want to head out to Silverton from there (about 25 k's away) where they shot Mad Max 2 and also I'm hoping to see the Pro Hart gallery. The magical whisky tour is almost at an end. Muswellbrook here I come.