FOLLOWING THE LINE

BURRA TO PETERBOROUGH, 87KM

Terowie hit the headlines on 20 March 1942, when US General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the south-west Pacific, arrived in the bustling railway town 230km north of Adelaide.

Travelling by train from Alice Springs to Melbourne via Adelaide, MacArthur made a speech that was to become one of the most famous of World War II.

“I came out of Bataan and I shall return,” MacArthur said on the platform of the Terowie Station, after his contentious retreat from the Philippines.

Today Terowie, 64km north of the old copper mining town of Burra in South Australia’s mid-north region, looks like a movie set — so much that you almost expect to see a horse and buggy trundling along the empty main street.

Known as ‘The Hub of the North’ during its halcyon days as a major railway town that was home to some 2000 people, these days Terowie has a population of around 130.

Settlers flocked here from the 1870s despite warnings from SA Surveyor-General George Goyder, who, in 1864-65 following a devastating drought, advised the colonial government to discourage