Day 487 | Coopers Creek: but not the official campsite
71 km | zzOz total: 15,646 km
Seems I can read a synoptic chart, those isobars were widening, the weather was on the improve.
Today was a cool but fabulous day, I only needed 2 litres of the sulphurous smelling, salty tasting, standard issue bore water during the ride, not the 5 of some days in the recent past. Strange to be riding in a wool T shirt, windproof jacket and beenie until lunchtime.
Highlight of the day was the view from the lunch spot overlooking a valley, ie, between 2 large sand dunes, where the ruins of what was once described as the world’s loneliest store, operational from 1923 to 1953, operated by an ex-policeman, “Poddy” Aiston, what on earth was he doing out here. After he decided he loved the area not wanting to be posted back to the comforts of Adelaide he resigned and bought the local station, Mulka, with his undoubtably long suffering wife, Mabel.
By all accounts Poddy was a remarkable character, a self trained scientist who wrote extensively, the co-author of the academic book “Savage Life in Central Australia”, an honorary consulting anthropologist to the Australian Institute of Anatomy, corresponded with numerous people around the globe, took hundreds of photos documenting life on the Birdsville Track, etc.
Not much left of the house, just a chimney and a short piece of wall with two window openings, maybe Poddy didn’t read up on construction as closely as he might, the bore that once flowed 800,000 gallons a day has been capped and the nearby trees are dead or in poor condition.
Up the hill 600 m away under a scraggly eucalypt there’s a sad grave from an earlier owner’s time, a limestone headstone within a cast iron fence for a daughter, Edith Adeline Scobie who died in 1892, aged 14:
“Here lies embalmed in careful parent’s tears,
A virgin branch cropt in its tender years.”