What To Do in Wallaroo

The sun rose on a millpond sea, barely a breath of wind, little wavelets curling happily onto the low tide's wide expanse of white sand. 

 Armed with the official Wallaroo Tourist Drive map I pedaled along the foreshore toward town. The good things about living at North Beach (stunning view, perfect position for ship/ferry supervision, sunsets, rock foreshore preventing pesky 4wds from roaring up and down the beach) was offset by the extra 8km I had to pedal to get to town before going anywhere else. Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The North Beach foreshore had minimal traffic and a stunning view out  to the jetty where a bulk carrier was taking on grain.

 

Further along North Beach my bicycle worked to advantage, allowing me to zip along the path through the sand dune conservation area while all the cars had to take the long way past the salt lake. The path popped out at the North Beach Kitchen which in theory could serve me breakfast but didn't seem to pay too much attention to being open at any particular time.

Nice view, table, sun umbrella.  Just missing the food and drink component...

From the Kitchen I was in spitting distance of town but the pesky marina entrance got in the way so I had to ride big loop around the Marina to get on to the bicycle path that delivered me back to the foreshore of Wallaroo via the site of the old smelting works. I put on my tourist hat and started reading information boards.

Fancy pants Marina.

Site of the Wallaroo smelting works, at one time the largest copper smelter in the world outside Wales (so... 2nd largest, or were there lots of big ones in Wales?  The information board was ambiguous at best).

 

Back in the latter half of the 1800s Wallaroo was the smelting town and export port for the copper mines in Kadina and Moonta, and as such had a large Welsh population, the Welsh at that time possessing secret copper smelting knowledge known only to them. The smelter closed in 1923 and very little remains but what there is was right on the foreshore with a handy path to cycle along and information boards to tell me what I was looking at.

The Hughes Chimney, a fine example of Welsh square plan chimneys and the sole remainder of what was once called a 'forest' of stacks - 13 large and numerous small - at the Wallaroo smelter.

Wallaroo lost its copper trade to low prices and the newer, bigger, and rail-connected smelter at Port Pirie.  The port remains as a busy export port for grains (primarily wheat and barley) grown on the York Peninsula.  Here we have old (smelter ruins) and new (the grain silos which dominate the skyline in Wallaroo).

Beyond the smelter ruins lay Office Beach, so called because it was directly opposite the office where workers waited each week to be paid. Office beach boasted a swimming enclosure where one could swim without fear of becoming an appetiser for great white sharks. No one was allowed to take a 4wd on Office Beach, to facilitate safety of swimmers. Which was a moot point given that the beach was covered in fishing nets laid out in tidy lines and attended by two fishermen and a front end loader with yet more nets in its bucket. 

 

Not that it was crowded anyway.  Two brave swimmers took a very short dip: I suspect that the waters still spoke of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

 

Up at the business end of the jetty the grain loading went on while the usual cluster of hopeful crabbers and fishers did their thing. A holidaying family wandered past but they didn't stay long: the jetty had minimal fencing, the water was deep, and the toddler wanted to chase seagulls.

A very relaxed fisherman.

 

The tourist map took me on a long wander through town, looking at old things. Wallaroo was bursting with old stone buildings both large and small, most of them still in use and a large number being either churches or pubs, where the Welsh presumably repented in one for sins committed in the other.

The Anglican Church; The Baptist Church; the old Police House; Wallaroo's rather grand Town Hall.

 

I stopped at a coffee shop to rapturous bicycle-related enthusiasm from my waiter. She brought me a map of the Yorke Peninsula and went through the Walk (or Bicycle) The Yorke in exhaustive detail. The other waiters got involved and everyone reminisced about childhoods spent in the various ramshackle Yorke Peninsula fishing settlements and bombarded me with detailed information which I couldn't remember and would never need to use.  No one had actually walked or ridden the Walk The Yorke, but they were all very proud of it anyway and were very keen for me to try it.

"So what is there to see around Wallaroo?" I asked.  "What are the local sights?"

There was a thoughtful silence.  "You could go to Woolworths at Kadina?" offered the youngest waiter, as she left to pack up the tables.  "There's a movie theatre in Kadina too." 

There was a bit more silence, and everyone started to tidy up and wipe things.  "Nice to meet you," said my waiter. "Enjoy your stay."

I went back to my ride, which was becoming tedious as I had finished the tourist map and was somewhat saturated with old stone buildings.  Back around the Marina I went, past the (still closed) North Beach Kitchen, along the foreshore, and home to the cats.

Oh.  You're back.

I watched the sun set.

It was a good day.