Whyalla

Whyalla is the second largest city in South Australia, after the capital Adelaide. It is massively industrial, with a huge steelworks and a separate LPG fractionation plant. We had hoped to do a tour of the steelworks, but for some reason they have been suspended for the last couple of years. We are only 2 weeks too early, as they are starting again on the 15th Feb. There is a fine layer of red dust over the whole town, from the iron ore stockpiles at the steelworks, although there is also a surprising amount of grass in the town's parks and gardens, plus quite a good golf course (which we, of course, had a game on).

Whyalla sits on the western shore of the Spencer Gulf, and, like Port Lincoln, it has quite an active aquaculture industry. In Whyalla's case they raise kingfish in huge pens in the gulf just

north of town. One of the local high schools has set up their own small aquaculture operation, to provide training to help equip students for future employment in the industry and we went on a tour of this operation. As seems to happen frequently, we were the only people on the tour, and the teacher showed us over the tanks holding the various sized barramundi and talked about what the students did. There were also a couple of tanks full of yabbies, apparently they started with one breeding pair and, like rabbits, now have yabbies galore. Apparently the really small ones get sucked into the water filter and turn up unexpectedly in the other tanks, so now the whole place has yabbies. It was quite an interesting way to spend an hour, for $10 a head how could you go wrong?

The caravan park is on the foreshore of the Spencer Gulf, and when we arrived it was low tide. The shores of the gulf in this area are incredibly shallow, and you could see people still only knee deep 400 metres offshore, fishing for crabs. It is obviously a generally successful pursuit, because there were dozens of them wading around (people, not crabs). I wonder how often people misjudge the incoming tide and have to swim back to shore?

About 30km north of town there is a conservation park, conserving 'a good example of the native flora and fauna of this semi-arid area'. We did an interesting short walk up the only hill in the park, and even got to glimpse some of the native fauna as a couple of rock wallabies bounded out of our path. We also did a scenic drive up the shores of the Spencer Gulf, which was made more interesting by the provision of information boards giving an insight into the landscape and natural and man-made history. All in all, we've happily filled in an enjoyable couple of days in a town noted more for its heavy industry than its tourism potential.