The Spectacular Toe:
Innes National Park on Yorke Peninsula
with Keith ConlonIt's the tippy toe of the "bottom end" of Yorke Peninsula. A rugged coastal wilderness, much of Innes National Park is just as the Narangga aboriginal people knew it.
As we stood neat to the modern navigational light high on the cliffs at Cape Spencer, with Althorpe Island gleaming in the winter sun in Investigator Strait, the sense of timelessness was strong. The first, the rest of the world knew about this spectacular coast was on the charts plotted by the young English navigator, Matthew Flinders.
He named Yorke Peninsula after a formal colleague at sea, and Lord Spencer in the Admirably would have been chuffed to see his name on the cape here. And his son, Viscount of Althorpe, scored the islands offshore. Their 100 roomed home in Northamptonshire is the resting place for Princess Diana, a direct descendent.
Innes National Park attracts 150,000 people or more a year. Some come to sense the drama and danger of the 70m cliffs laid down as ancient seabeds, birdwatchers search for the elusive Western Whipbird (its discovery here helped with the creation of the National Park), while heritage hunters head for the old mining town of Inneston and its port at Stenhouse Bay.
The surfing and fishing and camping are big lures too. We watched a refired couple hauling in big Tommy Ruffs as fast as they could rebait their lines, and toss them back into the boiling breakers below their cliff ledge cranny.
Across a beautiful cove Western Cape rose defiantly towards the Southern Ocean before Yorke Peninsula finally succumbed, with 2 billion year old base rocks projecting into the surf.
A short walk round the headland we stood on, Postcards camo' Andy McEvoy was shooting the magnificent Pondalowie Bay. Inside two large islands, it's a millpond, and that's why through the summer you'll find a handful of cray-boats moored overnight.
Their owners, and a handful of others, have temporary homes in on idyllic shack town in the sand-dunes of the long beach. Further round, we spotted a lone tent of a surf-rider. "Pondy" is regarded as one of the best wave breaks within easy reach of Adelaide.
The local clan of the Narangga people called the place Pandalawi, meaning rocky waterhole. It was good fishing for them too, and they herded kangaroo onto the small peninsula we'd walked and clubbed and speared them for a feast.
The pristine and thick mallee scrub of Innes National Park is broken by large salt lakes. They've been mined for gypsum and salt for more than a century. A Scottish family in Melbourne knew a lot about the calcified gypsum beneath the salt, and how it becomes plaster for building and decorating when it is cooked. And so Bill Innes took a mining lease on the big Marion Lake, only to get into strife in the 1890's depression and sell the works on.
Even now, in summer, the gypsum mine still operates, with twelve truckloads a day taken away for plasterboard manufacturing. Originally, however, all the gypsum and plaster from the area came out of a major port which is now a pretty spot with a great fishing jetty - Stenhouse Bay.
On Postcards, I pointed to the stonework at the top of the cliff above the jetty.a long haul for the winches that relayed whicker baskets taking gypsum down to the waiting ships. And a long way up for Mrs. Florrie Innes! She came up in a basket to join her husband, Stan, at the new Innes family venture that began behind the bay in 1913. Bill and brother Stan took up a lease on what became Lake Innes, and the tent camp round it turned into a solid limestone built town with its own Post Office and school, butcher and baker and all.
It was called Cape Spencer until 1927, when the residents petitioned successfully for the name, Inneston. As the local lake was mined out, the focus shifted to Stenhouse Bay, and so in the 1930's, Inneston was largely abandoned. Several cottages are still inhabited though - these days by visitors who hire them for a few days in a spectacular national park.
Inneston is a story in itself, and we included it in this week's program in its own right.
Back at Stenhouse Bay, a few kilometres by the old railway route - turned - walking trail, the township is gone there too. It is, however, the Park headquarters and there is a petrol, supplies, food and tavern general store. The fate of Stenhouse Bay was sealed by the demise of extensive mining - but the port was killed off when the first good road was extended to the tip of Yorke Peninsula in 1960.
The last ships called in 1972. But one stayed. An old sailing ship, The Hougomont was scuttled just off the cape at Stenhouse Bay in 1932. Its service as a breakwater is long gone, but it's now part of a maritime heritage diving trail along this coast. That's another story too - for a Postcards program in a few weeks.
One of the wrecks is part of the image of Innes National Park. The Norwegian barque, Ethel was washed onto a narrow cliff - surrounded beach here in a January storm in 1904. Now de-constructed' into a mess of plates and ribs on the sand, it was photographed over the years as an intact ship through to a hulk.
Sixteen years later, the coastal steamer, Ferrett ground ashore in a fog. The ship's boiler pokes out of the sand in winter, adding more fascination to the "bottom end".
In our short stay, we could not get to know the other great charms of Innes..the wildlife and the flora. But even the quickest tour on the good roads of the park will very likely introduce you to the emus and kangaroos. We spotted several groups.
The elusive Western Whipbird is so shy that even ornithologist visitors are challenged, to score a sighting, but is one of the reasons why the Park was declared in the 1970's.
Dene Cordes, a great friend of National Parks all over South Australia, also points out (in his thesis on Inneston) that it was the gypsum mining leases which preserved the mallee here from farming.
It's a jewel of a legacy, with many facets. Innes National Park is very popular on long weekends with campers and day visitors. For a sense of solitude, try getting there off-season.
Information on excellent brochures, fees and booking for accommodation:
INNES NATIONAL PARK
Stenhouse Bay 5577
Phone: 08 8854 4040
Fax: 08 8854 4072
