It’s a relatively short trip from Coffin Bay to Port Lincoln, which is a nice regional town. If you’ve read the previous post on Coffin Bay, you won’t be surprised to hear that Port Lincoln is also very sea industry orientated, with Tuna farming adding a twist previously not observed.

We chanced upon a very helpful lady at the info centre, who provided us with lots of info and thoughts on different areas in SA in general, which we’d been lacking till then. We purchased a 2 month SA wide National Park Pass. I like SA’s arrangement for NP passes – how does $80 sound, for a 2 month pass that not only covers vehicle entry, but also all camping fees? Bargain I reckon! I haven’t read the fine print, but on face value it seems you could live in SA’s National Parks for just $40 per month (or less if you buy an annual pass)!

Making sure we didn’t waste our $80’s, we headed off to Port Lincoln National Park, around 15km’s south of the township. The terrain and vegetation is not dissimilar to Coffin Bay NP, but there is a wider range of campsites to choose from and because of this we found it a nicer place to stay. We ended up in a quiet spot with a beautiful view overlooking the bay.

Initially we detoured over to Wanna, for our first sightseeing stop in Lincoln NP, before heading up the Peninsula to Cape Donington. September beach (just to the south east of Cape Donington) is quite nice, and has nicely arranged campsites, but with a fairly stiff easterly breeze we decided to head back over to the western side of the island (more protected from the wind) and find a campsite over there.

There are quite few campgrounds along the shore, some not even marked on the NP brochure map. It is at one of these that we ended up staying – Engine Point. There are no facilities (including no toilets) which is perhaps why they are not marked! That doesn’t worry us though, being fully self sufficient with on board toilet, water etc.

Turned out to be a lovely place to stay! We had the place to ourselves, aside from one other caravan that was hidden out of view behind bushes a bit further down the beach. Had a lovely time rock hopping around the headland to the south, and watching the pretty sunset – over water again!!

Monday morning (3/11) we decided that we could do with an easy relaxing day, and that this was a beautiful and suitable place to obtain that! To get some peace and quiet, and give the boys something to do outside, I told them to go off and build a raft. Daniel put the below contraption together! I helped with the high tech thong paddle, but probably should have left him to do that too…

It’s been pretty windy in SA at night time. Not sure if it is something specific to the area, or if we’ve just happened to arrive when the weather is funny, but it seems to get really windy around the middle of the night or soon after in the early morning. If the roof vent is open, it starts banging around, and one night (first night, back in Smoky Bay) I got up to roll up the shade annex. Monday night was really windy again, rocking the motorhome about, and in the morning the wind direction had swung round to a south westerly – blowing off the water onto our campsite.

We’d had a great stay, so Tuesday we packed up and headed back into Port Lincoln, for resupply, before heading up the eastern side of the Eyre Peninsula. Had our first BBQ chicken we’ve had in ages (lunch), and it seems they do’em differently down here (Coles anyway)! Not as much spices/flavouring…

Heading north we pulled off the hwy into several towns on the way – Tumby Bay being the first. Not a bad little place, and we stopped in at a place we noticed – The Gold Factory (bad idea I know Ted….). Fortunately we left with my wallet fully intact, but the guy there liked talking and it was interesting. They make jewelery there, and wholesale to jewelers, but also do a lot of custom jewelery direct to the public. They use CAD and 3D printers for a lot of custom stuff, which they can then use in their investment casting process to produce an accurate replica in gold as to what was drawn in CAD. It’s not new to technology to me – I did my Masters in this type of stuff – but it is interesting to see it applied in jewelery as opposed to industrial uses as I was working on. http://www.thegoldfactory.com.au/ if you are interested in having a look. Nice guy, and they use gold from the Perth Mint.

A quick detour into Arno Bay (I needn’t mention it’s another sea based town…) revealed one interesting observation – all the houses in the main street we drove down (not sure if all streets in the town) all had these large sheds out the back. Some sheds were as big or bigger than the houses out the front! Not sure if it some weird planning requirement, or if everyone in there is just sensible enough to realise the importance of a good shed! 🙂

Tuesday night was free camping about 50km’s south of Whyalla, having just passed a huge open cut mine on the end of the Middleback Range. We wanted to be reasonably close to Whyalla, as we’d booked into a tour to see the steelworks factory on Wed morning. This was a ‘stay in the bus’ type affair unfortunately, but this negative was largely overcome by the guide being knowledgeable, and by him being able to drive us anywhere/everywhere in the facility.

The steel works here takes local iron ore, and processes it into steel billets and other rolled sections. They also export a lot of raw materials, and in the long past it was a ship building yard! I’d actually been through this plant in more detail, when I was doing my engineering degree – a vacation trip with other students to Adelaide, to visit a heap of different manufacturing plants/factories. So whilst we didn’t get to see some pretty cool stuff I’d previously seen, like red hot steel being rolled into completely different shapes at high speed, we still got to see enough to make it worthwhile for us all; including red hot coke coming out of the coking furnace and red hot slag being poured out of a blast furnace. Overall it’s a rather old, dirty and grimy place, but at least we are still producing steel in Australia! A more modern plant would be so much more efficient, but unfortunately it’s hard to imagine such a thing being built in Australia in this day and age.

That’s unfortunate, because I’m not sure about this now widely promoted and accepted idea that Australia should just concentrate on smart innovative stuff, and hence close down much of the more basic and boring manufacturing industries. I think the basic core manufacturing has given us the foundation and knowledge needed to take the next step and be innovative. Its the foundation for the building blocks, and without that core understanding and experience, I reckon that our competitive advantage and ability to innovate ahead of other countries will gradually wane over time.

Take something as ubiquitous and Australian as the sheets of colourbond tin that we see everywhere – on houses, sheds and other buildings. They’re long life, low cost, customisable profiles, and there is some advanced science behind it that is Australian developed. Those sheets of iron have shaped our nation and our expertise in making and using steel has arguably played a major role in us becoming a world lead architecture (think of all the international buildings, Olympic stadiums/structures etc designed by Australian firms). That’s just one example, but the point is that a lot of innovation is concepted, or at least relates back to, the core manufacturing processes and I think we’re making a mistake by deciding these aren’t needed.

Anyway, I’ve been getting a bit off-topic…. Port Lincoln is a beautiful place, and we really enjoyed out stay in the National Park. In the next post we’ll be back to scenic pictures of beautiful mountain ranges; the Flinders Ranges!