19.3.11 – Surreal (Stirling and Whyalla, South Australia)

19.3.11 – Surreal (Stirling and Whyalla, South Australia)

Bill and Colleen

Colleen McBain is a cheerful, friendly lady who now lives in Lismore, near the New South Wales/Queensland Border.  Once she and her sisters played with Bill and Margaret in the long sunny days of childhood.  Her house, just along the road from theirs, was built of large, solid stonework, with green gables.  I saw it first in the pictures she brought when she met us for coffee in the cafe garden, wooden pillars laced with vines through which sunbeams were scattered on the table.  I listened as they reminisced about the teachers they remembered from school; about the beach picnics that all the town children attended, free ice cream and races along the sand; about the cow Colleen’s family kept in their garden and which would insist on escaping and eating the neighbour’s gardens.  Updates filling in the years between, exchanges of detail about Australia and Scotland, and then it was time to part.  Hopefully she will visit us in Scotland, as part of her search for her forebears. 



Meg at Shopping Centre, Stirling



So we left Stirling, travelled through the city, and, passing close to Ardrossan and Bute, headed for Lochiel.  For a Scot, this is increasingly surreal.  All these names conjure up vivid images of green Clyde islands, the pungent scent of seaweed, single track roads twisting through misty mountains and cool silver lochs till they find little highland townships.  Yet here I am in baking sunshine, land completely flat from horizon to horizon, covered only in greyish green low-growing bushes amid bright red earth, or brown stubble grazed by matching brown sheep, and long, long, straight, straight roads.  Lochiel even had a poster of a Loch Ness type monster, and a little way along the road, where a long, wide salt lake shone white in the sun, a monster made of old tyres swam calmly along. 

Along one of the long straight roads, we were accompanied for miles by a long, straight cream coloured pipe.  This is Whyalla’s water supply, coming by overland pipeline 235 miles from the Murray River – the same one beside whose twinkling wavelets we had camped three nights ago.

Whyalla - where the outback meets the sea

Bill's first meal in Whyalla for 50 years!

Then at last Whyalla.  It’s an industrial town, which does not quite fit the smart image that Australia is trying to convey to the world.  This is evidenced by the absence of any mention of the town from tourist brochures and maps.  Even the road signs for it only appeared when we were about 50 miles away, although it is the third largest town in South Australia.  The road passes an immense steel works, covered in red dust. The town appears, carved out of the surrounding bush, compact bungalows lining broad roads.  At once, Bill is transported back to childhood, as his home, his school, his church, the beach he had played on, the roads he had cycled, surround him once again.  And so I served him the first meal he has eaten in Whyalla for over 50 years, and he said he felt he had come home.  Surreal again.