Woomera, South Australia

 

This morning we woke up in Woomera, South Australia. We were headed to Coober Pedy, but decided to first explore the tiny town of woomera. Like I said before, it's an old space science town. I am not sure if there is a standard definition to describe what exactly a 'space town' is, but still it's the best thing I can offer.

 

 Seeing Woomera in the day light made it clear that it was a town built in the 60s, even the bus stops had a night 60's art deco flare to them. It was also evident that the town was once much bigger, and perhaps more important, than it is today having its own swimming pool, three churches, a movie theatre (which shows movies every other Saturday these days), a couple of large playgrounds and the huge hotel (once the housing for the scientists). Not all the scientists moved out, just the foreigners left, the Australian National Defence department still have offices there (and I think they must still be testing things here, I guess the best place to test rockets is in the desert, right?).

 

 The city's past is documented in the heritage centre (which is also a cafeteria, bowling ally and souvenir shop), the lions club of Woomera supports the Woomera Missile Park, which is a park with left over rockets, bombs, planes and anti-aircraft machines in the town centre. It was really neat to see them all just there in the middle of the city centre assembled like a little park. It also drove the point home about the history of the town itself.

 

Along the way to Coober Pedy we drove 350 km through the outback passed huge dried up salt water lakes, which are massive and have a layer of salt on top of the sand. It actually looks a bit like snow. There was one where we actually got to park the car and walk around the lake. The salt crystal was impressively big and perfectly square. The middle of the lake also had remnants of the old Ghan railway that was moved to higher ground in the 1980s because lakes like the one we stopped at kept washing out the tracks. Walking to the lake (which was about 200m, there was also a old rusty car shell which has definitely seen better days).