Tag: South Australia

Vortex of Madness

Peter L. Curtis

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When we left the town Gladstone, we had it all worked out.

Leastways we thought we did.

Gladstone was a small nowhere town in the what was known as the mid-north of South Australia – where there was an awful lot of ‘north’, like about 500 kilometres of it.

Anya and I had pitched our tent in a caravan park and were planning to ride our bikes to another nowhere place called Port Broughton, which was situated on the coast about a hundred kilometres south west of Gladstone.

The weather report forecast a light northerly wind in the morning which would blow up around midday and increase during the afternoon, ahead of a cool change in the evening.

Studying our map, we found a series of back roads which would take us south to a town called Redhill and from there, another unsealed back road heading west to a place called Port Broughton. In this way, we would ride south with the northerly behind us to Redhill and then in the afternoon, head west to Port Broughton when we would have the northerly as a side wind.

Distance wise, 70% of the trip was to Redhill. We calculated that the rest of the trip to Port Broughton would take at the most, around 2 hours.  

But the weather report was wrong and we found ourselves heading into vortex of madness. The last leg of the journey which was supposed to be the shortest turned out to by far the longest….. 

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The Inland Sea

Peter L. Curtis

 flinders

In 1802 a ship called ‘The Investigator’ captained by a young man named Mathew Flinders left England on its way to Australia.

Flinders was assigned with a special mission: to find out what Australia was.

No one knew. All was speculation.

No one had ever circumnavigated Australia.

A hundred years before, the Dutch had mapped the long western coast of Australia. James Cook had mapped much of the eastern coast. But there were still many bits of the puzzle to be filled in, the major one being the enormously long southern coast stretching from the tip of present day Western Australia to Melbourne; 7000 kilometres of it. 

There was intense speculation of there being a vast inland lake or lakes in the centre of the Australian continent with a huge river – a Ganges, an Amazon, a Nile – connecting it to the coast. For Europeans the idea of a huge continent with no major rivers or lakes was inconceivable. Their experience was that large continents and mighty tracts of water went together. 

 Flinders was charged with sailing along the southern coast of Australia and finding the mighty river – and then sailing into the centre of the continent and mapping the inland sea. 

He was in for a surprise and not the pleasant kind….

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