5-4-3-2-1- FIRE!

A local Wetheral connection with Woomera prompted us to spend the night there, to visit the local museum.

The connection- of course- was that the late Killoran Hotel on the village green was the building in which many of the Rolls Royce technicians were based in the 60s while testing of the Blue Streak rocket was going on at Spadeadam, just 30 miles away, and of course the firing range was at Woomera here.

In its heyday there were 5000 people here, nowadays just 100, mainly caretakers, although the Australian rocket testing is still carried out here, occasionally! It reminds us of a ghost town, the only people around are tourists, and those working in the museum and Information centre, and the occasional miner passing through on his was to the Olympic Dam mine 50 miles up a dead end road. The museum was fascinating, it told the whole story of Blue Streak and Harold McMillan's decision to cancel it. However it was used afterwards as the first stage of a European satelite launcher.

We saw the remains of a Blue Streak test rocket recovered from the desert, as well as many other rockets and missiles that had been tested here.

While travelling down here we passed Lake Gairdner, a huge dry salt flat that has been used for world land speed records many times. Just a couple of hundred miles away the British Atomic bomb was tested in the 50s, before testing was moved to the Pacific Islands. Unfortunately it was not possible to remove all the Aborigines before firing, and many suffered from burns and radiation poisoning, something covered up at the time as Aborigines were very much second class citizens at the time.

Travelling on from Woomera we came across our first sightings of wild emus, many groups of them roam the semi desert here.

So- on now to Port Augusta, and our first glimpse of the sea for well over 2000 miles and ten days travelling.