Gunbarrel Highway & Carnegie Station

September 5^th

So today the remote travel is to begin in earnest and we are both very excited. Woke up to more birds at North Pool and had a leisurely breakfast and pack up. Drove back to Wiluna and checked in at the police station which is what you need to do when you are travelling on these roads. They keep your details and route on file in case something goes wrong and someone is looking for you because you didn’t make contact when you said you would. We are pretty well covered with our satellite phone but you can never be too careful. The policewoman was a young South African who had been in Wiluna for about 6 months. Yesterday we met another policeman who was from the UK. I wonder if they really know what they are getting in for when they come to Australia and get assigned to these police stations in the middle of nowhere.

We started off on the Wiluna-Carnegie Road which is often referred to and considered a part of the Gunbarrel Highway, one of the ‘must do’ 4WD track in Australia. The Gunbarrel Highway was the first of many desert tracks built by surveyor Len Beadell. A surveyor, roadbuilder (over 6000 km), bushman, artist and author, Len was responsible for opening up the last remaining isolated desert areas (some 2.5 million square kilometres) of central Australia from 1947 to 1963. He is sometimes called "the last true Australian explorer".

There were three main reasons for the construction of the Gunbarrel Highway. The first was to provide access for a future meteorological station which was needed to forecast upper winds prior to the testing of atomic weapons in South Australia. The second was for instrumentation along the centre-line of fire for rockets launched from Woomera and the third was to allow surveyors from the National Mapping Council to continue the geodesic survey of little known areas of outback Australia. A consequence of the construction was the completion of the first east-west road link across the centre of Australia. The name comes from Len Beadell's Gunbarrel Road Construction Party so named as his intention was to build roads as straight as a gun barrel. The road was built in four stages beginning in 1955 and was completed in 1958 with a total distance of 1,350 km.

The highway can be extremely corrugated and is renowned for its many washouts but we were in luck on the section of the road we travelled as it had been recently graded and was a dream as far as dirt roads go. There was a lot of road work still going on and we saw loads of huge machinery along the way. We also saw some interesting ‘car art’ along the way.

We stopped off at Carnegie Station (which is the actual official start of the Gunbarrel Highway) for a drink and an interesting chat with the ‘locals’. A lot of the workers are staying at this station. We spoke to one guy who lives in Perth but works here for three weeks on and ten days off. For his days off he drives back to Perth (over 1,000km) in one day in order to make the most of his leave and then does the same drive  to get back there. The money must be good! This is all through one state too which just reinforces how huge Australia is. If you travelled 1,000km in parts of Europe you would have traversed a number of different countries!!

After this stop off we drove a bit further to Mount Nossiter. The people at Carnegie Station said we should definitely go up Mount Nossiter to see the view and then had a chuckle about how it really should be called ‘Hill’ Nossiter. We saw what they meant when we arrived – not one of the tallest lookouts that we have ever seen and at the top (after a short but challenging 4WD climb) there were lots of trees and shrubs which blocked any sort of view there may have been. It was however, a great place to camp so we stayed there and enjoyed beer o’clock overlooking a very cool spinifex circle.