Departed the Yorke Peninsula

At the popular Tiddy Widdy Beach just north of Androssan on the York Peninsula

Wednesday morning we departed Edithburgh and did a slow crawl up the eastern coast of York Peninsula calling into Coobowie, Stansbury, Port Vincent, Port Julia, Black Point and Ardrossan. They are all very small coastal communities but unique in their own way. Many are the home to huge grain silo facilities with long feeders extending out into the Gulf St Vincent for the loading of ships and barges.

Towards the end of Wednesday we drove inland to our overnight stop at Arthurton where the local Catholic Church extends an invitation to travellers to ‘rest’ behind the church. There were three other vans there overnight so it was quite a pleasant 5 o’clockers.

On Thursday morning, and with some reluctance, we continued north and out of the Yorke Peninsula. We topped up with fuel at Port Wakefield then continued further north to Snowtown, the South Australia settlement known for the ‘Snowtown murders’.

The ideserted bank at Snowtown where the eight bodies were found in 1999. Interestingly, the shops either side of the bank are also still deserted

Between 1992 and 1999 a small gang from Adelaide murdered 11 people from the South Australia area. In May 1999, the remains of eight victims were found by the South Australia Police in six plastic barrels in an unused bank vault in the main street of Snowtown.

Though motivation for the murders is unclear, the killers believed that the victims were deviants or “weak”. In at least some instances, the murders were preceded by torture.  Interestingly, none of the perpetrators or the victims were from Snowtown itself. The notoriety of the murders led to a short-term economic boost from tourism but created a lasting stigma. There are very few in the town who wished to discuss that part of their history.

Sunset at Snowtown before the storm

We departed Snowtown yesterday morning and are making our way slowly back to Adelaide (arriving Saturday 22 March) where will spend a week or so preparing the motorhome (and ourselves) for our journey up through the middle in mid April.

Our intention is to spend the next seven days the Barossa area experiencing the pleasures of South Australia’s ‘Garden of Eden’. We have both been here before but it was some years ago so we are looking forward to the next week. We are currently in the township of Kapunda, just north of the Barossa, and will probably stay here until Monday when we will drive into the Barossa itself.