Leg 5 – Gary Highway, Windy Corner, Talawana Track to Georgia Bore on the Canning Stock Route, WA

5 July, 2016

Gary Highway – Now that’s a name that could be re-defined. Today we travelled just 116 kilometres heading south towards Windy Corner with lots of corrugation and scratchidoorus bushes. The sound of branches along the duco sure sets the nerves on edge.

The colours out here are stunning. New spinifex, vivid green on the red sand, and older plants sprouted their yellow stalks of red flowers or yellow seed heads. Sage coloured bushes , shrubs with purple blooms and the vivid red flowers of the holly grevillea that looked like large ripe plums from a distance, native papery hop plants.

[Show slideshow]

There was so much to see . Once I walked into the dunes and looked around. Ants were dragging dead beetles into holes, insects were scurrying under spinifex , small animal prints in the sand, the colours of the plants sprouting new amongst their dead relatives.

When we stopped to look at a sign on a drum, Diesel Avenue, a smell led us to four dead camels beside the track, shot, perhaps a part of the cull.

At Wormy Whau Whau Well we drove 16 kilometres down a rough track to the Veevers Meteorite Crater which was only discovered in 1974. It was not as large as the one at Henbury, about 70 metres across. But it was worth the few more scratches on the paintwork.

6 July, 2016

We arrived at Windy Corner, 66 kilometres south of our camp at Wormy Whau Whau, and cold and windy it was. We all signed a note and placed it in an Arnotts’ biscuit tin on top of a 44 gallon drum.

West from Windy Corner was the Talawana Track, the least used of any road we travelled on. Spinifex as high as the bonnet grew on the track in parts and branches left track marks in the dust, dirt and probably the paint on the sides of the car.

It was amazing to think that we we were travelling in a place so isolated. For three days on this track we didn’t see another person.

On the Talawana, we stopped at the intersection to Warrie’s camp where the last two aborigines from the Central Desert were taken out in 1977. Apparently they had never seen Europeans. 

7 July, 2016

We were able to get up to 60kph in some sections today and made good time, stopping at a few local landmarks, the wrecked Pajero, the burnt out Land Rover. 

Before the Talawana joined the Canning Stock Route, the track wound through and over red sand dunes with some of the country quite rocky in parts till we came to a string of salt lakes, some with water. There are so many landscapes here.

Georgia Bore was our camp for the night. Water for showers and clothes, zebra finches in the puddles, a clear starlight night, a crescent orange moon dipping over the horizon and a warm campfire made this a good spot.