Devil's Marbles and Gold mining

Aliens at Wycliffe Well

Devil's Marbles

At the pebbles in the evening

Daniel drilling for gold

We had a busy day in Alice Springs but got quite a lot done – I also noticed how warm it was, more than I remember it being when we were there only a week ago. We dropped by a trailer repair place to get a guy to look at our trailer, and it turns out that a bolt from one side of our suspension has fallen out, basically meaning that we need new suspension (for the trailer). It’s a bit of a pain but hasn’t made us completely immobile, we should just stick to the tarmac until we get it. He couldn’t do it for us that soon so we decided to keep heading north and try in Katherine or Darwin.

So we stayed just outside Alice last night, at a roadside stop (can’t all be as nice as the free camps in the McDonnell Ranges) and kept going today, stopping for lunch at the Devil’s Marbles. These are really cool granite boulders which started as cubes but have gradually worn away to make them rounded (like marbles), and left them balanced in seemingly impossible and precarious positions. Some of them really do look like they should be about to fall down on you.

This morning we also refuelled at Wycliffe Well, a roadhouse which makes claim to be the UFO capital of Australia. It has funny statues outside, and I realised by old newspaper clippings on the wall inside that it meant that we had just driven through Barrow Creek, the place that Peter Falconio was last seen, and was kind of glad to realise after we’d driven through, not before.

After lunch we kept going to Tennant Creek where we just managed to make the Visitor’s Centre in time for a tour of the old Battery Creek Gold Mine which it is next to. Tennant Creek apparently had the last gold rush of the country (in the 1930’s) when someone found gold specks in the magnetite which is all over the ground there. It’s a bit of a pain to get it out though, as you have to first crush the magnetite into a powder then sift the gold out. We saw a big rock of magnetite with a magnet stuck to it and which apparently weighed about 5 tonnes, and it was only about as tall as me (and not very wide). The tour was perhaps a bit longer than the kids were hoping for, but we went down 20m and 200m into an old mine where there is still some bits of machinery which the guide started up for us to show us how they used to work. He worked in the mines around here for 27 years starting in the 1970s, when the safety instructions on your first day consisted pretty much of ‘you’ll work it out’. He’s had arsenic poisoning four times apparently (the arsenic drifts down out of the rock) and had hepatitis when he was 11 years old, but is still going strong at 64 years of age, and no signs of kidney disease. He can talk under wet cement (and underground) but most of what he said was interesting – a real contrast to our last mining experience in Tom Price anyway, as it was on a much smaller scale, and had some history about individual miners staking their pegs out etc.

That took up most of the afternoon, so after ringing Tom to say happy birthday we’ve driven out to The Pebbles – the Devil’s Marbles’ smaller cousin for another free camp. We’re pretty overdue for a shower in this hot weather so hopefully will make Daly Waters tomorrow night.