Eyre Peninsula - east coast

Murray river at Loxton

We’re on the road again after a 2 year break so it’s time for a new blog.

We left home towards the end of May and headed across Victoria into South Australia through Loxton, Burra and across to Port Augusta. These are all areas we have covered in the past so we moved fairly quickly to this point. From here we were into new territory as we moved down the east side of the Eyre Peninsula.

Wyalla was our first stop and this town was a great surprise. All we really knew was that it was a steel town which had been in the news a lot recently due to the uncertain future of the steel works. There is much more to the area. 

We drove out to Point Lowly and Fitzgerald Bay with views of the Spencer Gulf.  We toured the HMAS Wyalla, a Bathurst class mine sweeper and anti -submarine boat, the first ship built at the shipyards in 1941. With a shallow, near flat bottom  and  only 9 feet below the waterline, she had an 80^o  roll side to side, add to that moving through high seas and it was a very uncomfortable ride, often in overcrowded conditions due to rescues from sunken ships in the waters around the north of Australia.

The Mt Laura Homestead Museum had a wide range of exhibits and is worth a visit, and the signage on virtually every exhibit has notable spelling errors to the point where it almost seemed deliberate – perhaps for visiting school groups?

Tumby Bay jetty

We moved down the east coast of the Eyre Peninsula stopping at Cowell and Tumby Bay, both pretty little seaside towns, then on to Port Lincoln at the southern tip of the peninsula.The weather could have been better but we visited the Axel Stenross Maritime Museum where restoration work is still done on old vessels. An entertaining afternoon was spent on board the “Tacoma” a tuna fishing boat built at Port Fairy in the 1940’s and we learned a lot about tuna fishing in the Port Lincoln area.

Scruffy at Winter Hill lookout Port Lincoln