To me, the most redeeming feature of Port Wakefield is that there are three highways leading out of town! The artwork on the pub is excellent and there are a number of very attractive old stone buildings but most of the town is a collection of shacks. The town is on the shore of Gulf of St Vincent but the shore is all mangroves with a 4 metre wide gutter along the edge. They have built a very attractive small picnic area on the shore so maybe in a few years it could be worth a visit. I was one of the few campers who stayed two nights, probably says it all. I had expected street art rather than a painting on the wall of one pub. Click on the photo to get a bigger view.
The focus of the painting is the Port Master which is painted in fine detail.
On the Port Wakefield Road to Adelaide about 50 Km south of town is a collection of protest sculptures constructed by a local farmer in protest to a government decision to build a dump nearby, the best is of a cockroach. I didn’t visit here and I did have a photo of the cockroach but the person who took the photo asked me to remove it, despite the fact that I had acknowledged the origin of the photo. So sadly you will just have to imagine a four metre cockroach!
I didn’t mind pulling out of Port Wakefield and the further down the Yorke Peninsula I travelled the more interesting the landscape became, lovely Mallee scrub along the verges, a bit of undulating country and a few hills. The only thing common with the country I’d travelled was the relentless brownness, everywhere is so dry and the only green is the trees. Made me homesick for Victoria, so green in comparison.
I’m camped at a lovely seaside caravan park in Stansbury about half way down the Yorke Peninsula on Gulf of St Vincent. The park is less than half full and very quiet toward the back where I am located. I booked for a week and will have a look around the peninsula. On the way here I called in at Port Vincent to check out the water tower which had been finished only the day before. The artist was just leaving so I had a chat, he was heading of to Melbourne to do some more murals, this was his first water tower.
Not bad for a first off! The “back” of the tower was good as well.
According to the info I found on the Internet, the Stanbury water tower should have been finished but, instead, the artists only started on Monday, the day I visited. The guy I spoke to (the other was 30 feet up in the air) thought they would be finished in two weeks, it will be really interesting for me to see how it progresses. Here is yesterday’s photo, there is a black outline of a big crab on top of some brown graffiti. Hard to pick but the white paint is on the outline of the crab.
On re-visiting on Day 2, most of the top parts of the tower were painted and the crab was easier to see. The guy on the high-lift has a spray gun about a metre long and he can spray up to 2 metres away from the surface from the end of the gun. So he can cover a lot of the tower without having to reposition the high-lift (except for up and down).
It will be so interesting to watch progress. After a very casual start to the day I set off at about 11 to see the area around Stansbury and a couple of towers. The first was at Coobowie about 20 Km down the coast, another very small town of about 200 people. The “tower” was a tank but very well painted with a coastal theme.
It was good to have a camera with a fold out screen as I had to take these shots over over my head to keep the fence out of frame.
The tanks is about 3 metres high and 9 metres in diameter. The name “Coobowie” is Aboriginal for “Wild fowl water”.
About 5 Km beyond Coobowie is another small town of Edithburgh, a little bigger with a population of around 450 people, it even has two pubs. There are 200 lakes in the area that were mined for salt and at the time of that mining, Edithburgh was the third busiest port in South Australia.
The water tower is out of town on a flat brown plain, it was quite windy but I decided to put the drone up to avoid getting the fence in the photos and also so I didn’t have to climb over a fence with barbed wire on top!
You can just see me at the car with the door open to shade the phone, it is hard to see what is coming back from the drone camera when the phone is in the bright sun. To run the drone you connect your phone to the drone controller and the phone screen displays the picture the drone camera will take. The phone also displays other drone controls and drone settings. The drone controller itself has the two joysticks you use to maneuver the drone plus some other controls. In this photo I like the dolphin in the tank part of the tower.
The lighthouse on the tank section of the tower is of the light on Troubridge Island which is about 8 Km off the coast of Edithburgh. Obviously the sea is an important part of the history of Edithburgh, which named after the wife of a eminently forgettable pommy 19th century SA governor.
Back to Stansbury where I noticed a mural on the side wall of the Blue Lime cafe. A blue car seems to be there all the time so I had to manoeuvre (thank heaven for spell check) two photos together as the panorama function on the camera would leave the car in the photo. Click on the photo to get a larger view.
I used to work in Port Wakefield way back when I was a DoD employee. As boring as it is, it appears to be a lot more colourful now than it was back then! I didn’t spend much time in town but continued south to the Army artillery/proving range on the coast. We used to fire rounds up to 30km to the south, down past Parham, and sometimes we’d fire across towards Ardrossan and beyond (although not as far as Stansbury) when we needed more range. Seeing the names of the towns in this region has brought back many memories: thank you 🙂
Let’s just say Port Wakefield was not a highlight in this trip, but interesting to hear of your association with the town. Ardrossan was where I turned inland to head north west to Kardina.
Hello,
The photo of the cockroach sculpture is mine. You did not ask for permission to use it. I kindly ask you to remove the photo
Thank you