A trip on the Ghan
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Port Augustawritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
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Port Augustawritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
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One port that survived, diversified and
prospered became the city of Port Augusta, a transport cross-roads that managed
the transition from horse and camel teams and sailing ships to the railway
of today.
Like Port Germein, Port Augusta was close to a pass through the Flinders Ranges, the pass called Pichi Richi. Aboriginal tribes used the pass for thousands of years. Camel, horse and bullock teams used it and when the railway age came in the last quarter of the 19th century, Pichi Richi became the iron road to the inland, and part of the route of the original Ghan.
Approaching Port
Augusta
Once, Port Augusta drew the ships of the world to safe moorings and deep
water wharves at the head of a gulf so deeply carved into the coastline that
the normal flushing effect of tides is minimised and the water is extraordinarily
salty. So much so, that sailors believed they couldn’t drown if they
fell in, drunk, from their ships at a Port Augusta anchorage. Old graves
in the town cemetery prove they were
wrong.
Flinders Ranges
and Spencer Gulf
The great grain races from Australia to Europe, when the clipper ships fought for the glory of the fastest passage home with the first of the new season’s wheat, often began from Port Augusta. The windjammers, loaded at great speed from the stacks of bagged wheat on Port Augusta’s wharves, would sail south to the mouth of Spencer Gulf, and south again to the latitude 40 degrees south, then ride before the winds, the Roaring Forties, around the bottom of the world to the South Atlantic, across the Equator and home to England....
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