Four Week Off-Road Trip

In early June I joined a party of 10 vehicles on a 5000km outback trip to the northern Flinders Ranges in South Australia.  Two of us were solo drivers with the rest being couples.

The idea was to spend as little time as possible on the ‘blacktop’.   Why else be a member of a 4WD Club!

The off-road parts of the trip included:

• Hyden – Norseman Road
• The Old Telegraph Track
• The Old Coach Road
• The Old Eyre Highway
• Googs Track
• The Trans Australian Line
• Andamooka Road
• Southern Oodnadatta Track
• Lake Eyre
• Copley Road
• The Great Australian Bight

The start point RV was a Brookton, approximately 140km east of Perth.

Like many of the small wheatbelt towns, Brookton has a small rural open air museum.

Once the group had assembled the convoy headed further east, using various unsealed side roads to reach Hyden.  The first night was at ‘The Breakaways’ on the unsealed Hyden-Norseman road.  This was the same location where I had spent a night several months earlier on the ‘Peak Charles’ trip.

The next day we continued east to Norseman and then joined the western end of The Old Telegraph Track.   This track was originally formed during the construction of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line which was completed by the South Australian SA and Western Australian WA Governments.  The newly formed WA government committed a budget of £30,000 to the project, at a time when the state’s entire yearly revenue was about £135,000.  South Australia used steel poles whilst WA used timber (Jarrah).

All the material was carried by sea to various landing along the remote coastline.  They were then carried onwards using camels. 

One of the many problems was the South Australian Government used American Morse Code whilst the West Australian Government used the International Morse Code.  This meant that at the border telegraph station the telegraph operators sat opposite each other, with a wall between them representing the border between WA and SA. Each message had to be decoded and passed through a pigeon-hole in the border wall.

There are remnants of the line and one has to be careful when driving to avoid old pieces of wire or steel stakes that could easily puncture a tyre.

Our campsite that night was adjacent to one of the old and abandoned telegraph stations gradually being reclaimed by the land.