A trip on the Ghan
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Tarcoolawritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
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Tarcoolawritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
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Between Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie,
along the whole length of one of the world’s longest railways, there
is only one major junction. The place is Tarcoola, where The Ghan
leaves the transcontinental line and turns north towards Central Australia.
Tarcoola
was a goldfield, named after a race-horse, a thoroughly Australian approach
to things. Gold was found in 1893, the year the horse Tarcoola won the Melbourne
Cup. The gold rush was brief, but the railway brought an extension of life.
It needed Tarcoola as a service point for steam engines, but the diesels
ended that. The construction of the new railway to Alice Springs in the 1970s,
and the selection of Tarcoola as the junction, gave it yet another reprieve,
and the little town on the edge of nowhere can still boast the last pub until
Kalgoorlie or the Alice, and a history as a watering place for man and machine.
Tarcoola Pub
Tarcoola, the
survivor on the edge of the outback, is the exception to the story of so
many railway villages in Australia. Created by the railways, then abandoned
by railway progress, their sites lie unmarked along the railway maps of the
nation. Sometimes a building remains, or a stockyard, or a rusting loop line
on rotting sleepers, left in place because that was cheaper than to remove
it....
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