On the road to Arkaroola

Wilpena Pound is a thickly wooded, natural mountain amphitheatre in the Flinders Range and a magnet for roos. In the late afternoon of a hot day, a persistent roo joined Roobert for aperitif.

In the morning, we noted a Christmas bus parked outside the reception.

A magnificent dirt road drive is the Bunyeroo Gorge deep in the Flinders Ranges. The road twists and turns and climbs and descends with a breathtaking view at Razorback lookout.

Continuing deeper into the ranges, we came across the poignant grave of Emma Smith who died only two years old when she passed through with her parents on a bullock cart in the 1860s. A thoughtful visitor had placed a toy roo as comfort for the little girl's last resting place.

Further on, at Aroona, we reached the ruins of a remote homestead once overstocked in the 1850s with 1000s of sheep until drought set in and the property was abandoned.

After an overnight stay at Alpana Station, we rattled and shook over a dirt road to Arkaroola in three hours of intense corrugation.

As I walked into Arkaroola reception, the receptionist said she could see something hanging down at the rear of our Coaster. Oh b*gger, I said, that's our water tank destroyed.

Over the next three days, we had the expert help of Roger the Engineer to create new parts and make a go of welding the broken tank back together so it would function for a week or so.

Meanwhile, we busied ourselves with a bumpy 4wd jaunt to the Pinnacles Lookout

We then proceeded further to the Bolla Bollana Smelter ruins from the 1870s when copper rock was brought here by bullock cart from remote Flinders Range copper mines.

In the evening we pulled up a chair and observed the increasingly rare population of Yellow-footed rock wallabies snuffling and jousting for water, salad and roo pellets. The young wallaby only stays a few weeks in the Mum's pouch before she deposits it in a hole in the ground up in the rocky hills where it stays and waits for her to return daily with mouth to mouth liquid and solid sustenance.

The odd Crested Pigeon was one of the few birds also around.

Next to the wallabies stands the fibreglass, telescope dome of an observatory.

Our guide is a laconic US astro-photographer expat, PK, who whizzes us through software magic displaying on two huge screens stunning nebulae, stars, and constellations observed in realtime through the two digital telescopes. A patch of sky that reveals only a dozen stars to the naked eye, suddenly bursts into digital view with thousands upon thousands of stars dragging us deeper and deeper into space.

To finish off the evening, Doug Sprigg, son of the original owner, Reg Sprigg, takes us up a nearby hill to his eyepiece telescope observatory where we marvel again at the wonders of deep space.

With daytime temperatures rising into the 40 degree Celsius range, we stick to the cool of the night for astro photography at a nearby windvane which makes an excellent background for our Coaster under the Milky Way.