March 25 Pinnaroo

Late afternoon we arrived at Pinnaroo, a small border town set of the edge of the Big Desert. Next morning we headed out to explore the countryside, no direction in mind other than the desert. We happened upon a little rail siding Peebinga. It’s pretty much a ghost town now but it was once the terminus of the Peebinga railway line, built in 1914 as part of a major state government project to open up the Murray Mallee for grazing and cropping.

The Post Office (the stone building above) opened in 1926 but closed in 1986 and the railway stopped a couple of years later. The silos however look fully operational.
From there we kept driving over densely vegetated dunes passing signs for bores until we reached a point where a sign said 4WD only. Of course our mighty beast could handle that very well but we decided that we didn't want to risk getting bogged in the heat. So taking turns right and left with no true feel for where we were and hoping we were heading south we aim our wheels back to the highway - and eventually got there!

I wanted to check out the Pink Lakes further east. What a fascinating place, lakes of pure salt formed millennia ago. Each winter the underground water rises and seeps out at the edges of the lakes covering them with new layers of salt; the underground water is 800 more salty than the sea. Between 1916 and 1979 a small township grew up around the harvesting of the salt. The salt was carried to the railway at Underbool for many decade but it was a quite brutal life and not sustainable. 

Only plants that have adapted to high levels of salt can survive on the edges of the lakes, such things as grey glasswort, salt paperbacks and various species of saltbush.

Saltbush cluster around this salt paperbark

The only living thing that can survive in these harsh salt lakes is a single-cell algae which produces Beta-carotene hence the pink colouration of the lakes. In spite of the seeming harshness of the environment, here is a surprising number of creatures that live here - geckos and lizards, native mice, bats, birds. And along the higher sandy dunes grow native cypress-pine and bulokes and even a small orchid emerges in spring. Many of the cypress-pine were cleared for buildings and fencing but now are protected. An intriguing place.

The vastness, the flatness of this desert region creates amazing cloud formations. Huge wispy bands stretched across the sky above us. Breathtaking desert skies.