Today I allowed myself to leave a little later than I had for the previous days’ drives, as Woomera is only 2 hours from Port Augusta.

Leaving Port Augusta you basically have two choices, turn left for Perth and Western Australia or turn right Darwin and the Northern Territory. I needed to turn right. There’s nothing between Port Augusta and Pimba. Just roads and cattle grids, which are something of a surprise at 110 km/h, once you go over one you get used to how it feels when you drive over them, but still a surprise at first.

A sign which I noticed as I was driving up to Woomera, but only really processed what it said after seeing it a second time was an ironically hard to see small sign that said “See and Be Seen Use Headlights 24 Hr”. With an illustration of a car with headlights. As I’ve got a black vehicle it makes sense for me. I’m always wary of the times at twilight and near that of having my headlights on so people can see me.

I’ve tried going through Flickr and Google image search in an attempt to find an image of this sign, which like all road signs is well set out. Except it was smaller than most road signs and positioned quite low to the ground. Hence I didn’t catch all of it when I first saw it.

I think maybe it just needs to be one of those things that’s in the tourism booklets or whatever that says ‘if you’re driving in the desert have your headlights on 24 hours a day’. I have looked through “The Nullarbor” tourism map (published by http://www.exploreeyrepeninsula.com.au/) which list various useful things for outback travel but doesn’t say anything about headlights.

I had two destinations today, the former site of the Island Lagoon Tracking Station and Woomera itself.

The former, located next to the a salt lake was a tracking station in the 1970s. From what I gathered online there wouldn’t be much left, just some remains of the building.

It’s located down a road that probably doesn’t have a name, although there was a road sign pointing towards it, but I didn’t pause long enough to look and Google Street View isn’t of high enough resolution to see it.

I didn’t pause because I was trying to keep an eye out for what I’d written on my directions as a ‘semi-sealed road on the left’.

The road was vaguely alright until you got further away from the freeway where it had deteriorated much more down to a gravel road.

Surprisingly I needed to drive a fair away to get to the former site. Disappointingly there were practically no remains of the former tracking station.

I noticed there were some long screws left on the ground, so I salvaged one of these as a souvenir for getting out there.

I think, I would like to go back to this site and go out further to the Island Lagoon and get up closer to its shores. On this trip I had other focuses, I think in the future I would like to return and camp near by to it. Ponder it and its island.

Being there, being 2 kilometres from the highways there was this surprising silence around. Although it was windy, so maybe it was just that.

Continuing on from there there’s Pimba, which is Wikipedia calls a “small settlement”, which appears to be a roadhouse ‘Spud’s Roadhouse’ and a wrecker’s yard.

A very short drive up from Spud’s Roadhouse was Woomera. The town I’d come to see.

It’s a weird town.

It is a defence town, which is only somewhat responsible for its weirdness.

It’s a town that basically stopped in the 1960s and it looks it. Aside from a few TV satellite dishes on the roofs and most houses having solar hot water tanks it looks like it’s stuck in the past.

Driving around the town to its outskirts is also odd. It has sections that have been lair out with roads, power, street lights, even bus shelters but the houses haven’t been built or have been taken away between the 60s and now. Though I suspect given the scrub that’s on these plots they never materialised.

Some roads just stop at “road closed” signs, though there seems to have been the intention that they would go on further.

There were three places I visited whilst in Woomera, the rocket park; an outdoor display of various rockets and planes that were tested at Woomera. The Woomera Museum ($4 entry) and the Heritage Centre.

The museum was well worth the entrance fee. I found the history of the town fascinating. Though I am someone who is quite interested in Australia’s contribution to space and space flight and all the things in between.

In the 1970s they worked out that Woomera was at the wrong latitude to put satellites into geostationary orbit. To do so from Woomera would’ve involved a dogleg manoeuvre in space in order to get it into the right position. So that basically curtailed Woomera as a launch site. But up to that point Woomera had been a great hive of activity and there was much development in various military and scientific technology disciplines.

It’s also a town that has several American influences. Whilst driving around the town (before I’d visited any of these locations) I drove past the oval. Set up with AFL goal posts it struck me as looking a little odd, as behind one of the goal posts was a large fence, when I saw it I thought it was odd. Thinking as I looked at it ‘it looks a bit like a baseball pitch’.

Which is what it was, baseball was quite popular in Woomera because of the American contingent in the town.

The town also has a bowling alley (in what is now the Heritage Centre).

The rocket park is a bit like being in a Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds / Captain Scarlet storage facility. All of the rockets, missiles and other aeronautical objects are very 1960s. There’s also the occasional object that isn’t aeronautical like that

Ikara an Australian made anti-submarine missile. Which looks kinda like the space shuttle.

Outside the Heritage Centre is another example of a rocket; the Thunderbird Mark 1, a British made anti-aircraft weapon designed for the UK Army. To me when I was there I was reminded of the “Thunderbolt” a missile that appeared in Doctor Who 'The Mind of Evil'. Now that I can do some research I’ve found that that missile was the Thunderbird 2 SAGW. No wonder it reminded me of it, it is basically the first generation of the missile.

The Heritage Centre was something of an odd mish-mash of areas.

There’s a bowling alley, left over from the town’s past American inhabitants.

You can do your banking there as there’s a Westpac bank branch. Okay, branch may be over selling it a little, it’s a window.

There’s also a little museum / history of the town in there.

Unlike the Woomera Museum out in the rocket park which mostly focuses on the rocket and weapons tests this space in the Heritage Centre gives some background to the formation of the town and how it all came together. This little history is pretty interesting and gave me some background of how it was in the early days.

When the town was set up everything was pretty segregated, due to the military influence. You could only socialise based on your rank. So depending on what rank you were you could only go to certain social clubs. This extended to the spouses of the servicemen there. Which led to many people feeling somewhat isolated when they first arrived in the town.

Later when the European Launch Development Organisation (ELDO) came to the town. These scientists didn’t fit into the rigid military organisation of social and professional classes. So they were housed in the Eldo Hotel.

Said Eldo Hotel still stands and was where I had my accommodation for the night.

It’s run, I found out by Transfield Services.

It’s also not cheap for what it is, a 1950s hotel that was probably upgraded maybe in the late 60s and left like that.

$106.50.

I forgot to ask why it’s such a specific amount right down to the 50 cents.

All the accommodation blocks, and there’s a few, very large blocks in fact have names. I know there’s at least Blue Steel and Redstone. Because I was mistakenly given the former and actually stayed in the latter.

The accommodation had a double bed and then in a side room another single bed along with tea and coffee facilities and fridge. Plus an ensuite bathroom.

The bathroom was interesting because there was a separate shower and bath. Though not a huge bath. It wasn’t the romantic sort of bath, or even something large enough for a person of average height. A small functional bath I would say.

It’s interesting because on the way back to my room I noticed lights glaring in the middle of the corridor back to my room. The lights were brighter than the corridor lighting which is what drew my attention. Wandering down, it was right in the middle of the building, I found communal (though divided into cubicles) showers and toilets (and a urinal). This is interesting because the tile pattern for half of this area matched the tile pattern in my ensuite.

Which doesn’t make sense, if they’d both been put in at the same time then you wouldn’t put both of them in. You’d have one or the other. Every room would have an ensuite or all the rooms would use the shared facilities.

But if it had been re-tiled, when the ensuites had been installed surely that was late enough in the program that they wouldn’t have needed the shared facilities.

It also wasn’t just my room that had these facilities, there was at least one person/persons staying in the room opposite mine (I think a couple) and I saw many other people (tradies overwhelmingly) at the restaurant who were presumably staying the night.

Also in my investigation of the shared facilities there didn’t appear to be any evidence of them having been used. Though there was a rather ominous sign stuck to one of the doors that read ‘Chemical Storage Area’.

The only other possibility that I dismissed as soon as I thought of it was that some of the rooms have an ensuite and some don’t hence the need for these shared facilities. I dismissed this because the Eldo Hotel had originally been built to service the European Launch Development Organisation scientists because they didn’t fit into the military’s way of doing things. Which means all the rooms would be the same. There wouldn’t be some “officer’s” rooms and other bog-standard rooms without a bathroom.

In twilight Woomera is no less eerie. The twilight and the light of the street lights and lights around the hotel only add to the eerie dream-like state the town seems to exist in.

The restaurant and bar was pretty fully featured for a town in the middle of no where. They even had a pear cider that wasn’t Somersby. Bulmers this time, and served in a glass, with ice. Which was nice.

Unsurprisingly it was a quiet night’s sleep, considering there’s no industry, no youths, no nothing really out there.

Ultimately, I would recommend anyone who has an interest in space, rocketry, military or weapons to visit Woomera, it’s a unique experience, out there in the desert. Strange, lost in time, frozen almost, yet it’s still active. There’s still people working out there, living out there. It’s also not isolated. Not isolated in the sense that there’s nothing and no one out there. I had Telstra 3G coverage that was pretty speedy. Roxby Downs is less than an hour away and Port Augusta is only 2 hours away and the petrol station in the form of Pimba’s Spud’s Roadhouse is barely 5 minutes down the road.