TOURING THE GAWLER RANGES
Anyone venturing into South Australia’s northern regions will attest it’s a land of boom and bust. Signs of past settlements remind us of times when flourishing agriculture turned into heartache. The Gawler Ranges region is such a place but for many travellers it’s forgotten, not even scoring a mention on the South Australian Government tourism site.
Being off the radar might be the best thing for those visitors who seek it out, because it means less crowded campsites as you take in genuine treasures of an outback experience.
The region is about 600km north-west of Adelaide and is bordered along its southern extension by the Eyre Highway, which was named by the first European tourist to the area, Edward John Eyre, in 1839. It was on this journey he noted the Sturt’s Desert Pea, which he described as “a most splendid creeping plant”. The flower is now South Australia’s state emblem and can be found throughout the area after good rainfall, which, with an annual average at 295mm, is infrequent. Interestingly, the first European record of the flower was actually by William Dampier in 1699 on the West Australian coast.
Eyre named the scenic arid hills after the SA governor of the time,
