Wickepin to Harrismith 1999

Wickepin to Harrismith, day 5, Thursday 14 October 1999. The morning was cold and sunny with strong WSW turning to NW winds. I left the Wickepin Hotel at 8:41. The going was easy, as expected, and I didn’t need to shelter for the whole journey. Large storms passed to the north and south of me but I was in a corridor of clear weather and frequent sunshine the whole way. This was amazing luck. I had expected a day of general cloud cover with general rain, but this had already broken up into avoidable belts and patches of heavy rain moving across the land with wide spaces of clear weather.

Harrismith

I rested at 327 and 343 and rolled into Harrismith as expected at 357, 11:03. At 348 I passed the junction of the road that goes south to Toolibin. The sign said Harrismith 19, Narrogin 47. So it seemed that Narrogin was 66 km from Harrismith by this route.

The hotel was noisy with the TV and radios of builders working on the hotel and the proprietors cleaning inside. I apologised for being early, but it wasn’t a problem. The lady introduced herself as Jane, shook hands and showed me my room and the shared bathroom, then made me a cup of coffee. She explained that they were doing the place up and apologised for any inconvenience. She showed me a whole album of photographs of the renovation process. Next morning I bought one of these in lieu of a postcard. It was taken in June 1999, 4 months before I got there. I was running low on film in my camera.

The floors were of broad planks, highly polished. There were no keys yet to any of the rooms but I was told that this didn’t matter out in the country. I could lock my door from the inside if I wanted – it was a Yale lock with a keyhole outside and a small handle inside. At the other end of the room a glass-paned door led directly outside. It closed by means of an old brass latch. The wind was very strong and I was asked to keep this door closed otherwise the hinges could get broken. Only one of the beds was made up and Jane said she would make up the other one if I chose it, but I chose the one nearest the glass-paned door for the light and air. It had no blankets, only a sheet and a thin doona.

I locked the bike up just outside my room, Room 3, on the verandah, since there were two beds in the room and no space for a bike. It would not get wet since it was in a sheltered space beside the bathrooms.

I had a rest and shower then went to find the wildflower reserve. It was a large area surrounding a cruciform airstrip, the only airstrip in the shire of Wickepin. The windsock strained against its pole, showing a strong northwesterly. The town’s water tank was nearby on the highest point. The day was sunny but the wind still very strong and increasingly cold.

I enjoyed a couple of hours rambling this way and that along the tracks through the wildflowers. I didn’t find a single orchid but there was a rich variety of other stuff, which I cannot name, not being a botanist, but I enjoyed looking at it. I seemed to have arrived at the peak flowering time and the previous night’s rain had brightened everything up. One notable feature of this whole area was the lack of trees. Of course any trees near the airstrip would have had to be removed but there were still none at a great distance from the runways. I think that the whole reserve used to be cleared agricultural land which had been reclaimed to form the wildflower reserve.

A white thing sticking up out of the scrub caught my attention and I pushed towards it. It was a small Cessna plane flipped over on its back beside one branch of the airstrip. One wing was crumpled but the propeller was undamaged. The plane belonged to Ozetours Safaris. I thought it must have been flipped over by the previous night’s winds, but the album at the hotel had a picture of it so it must have been like that for a few days at least. A car came out to look at it while I was there. They must be still figuring out how to set it the right way up again.

I used up the last of my camera film and would not be able to get any more until Narrogin. I should have bought a disposable camera in York.

At last I left the wildflowers and went to look around the town. There was little of it but signs and markers told of more in former days. In front of one large area were the words ‘LEST WE FORGET HARRISMITH SCHOOL 1925 – 1971′ spelt out in coloured stones set into the ground, in front of a stone cairn with a brass plaque saying that this was the site of the Harrismith School. There was a bare patch of ground, then behind that was a rectangle of bitumen, cracked all over and nibbled at the edges, with, still discernible, white lines and circles such as used to be marked for netball on old bitumen playgrounds. I walked on this sole remnant of the school thinking of 46 years of children playing, shouting, eating sandwiches, bullying and forming cliques, and lining up quietly for queen’s birthdays and prize-givings, on this patch of ground.

More markers told of former tennis courts and other buildings and facilities. An area of rotting broken fencing and rusting wire, overgrown with tall wild oats, was marked ‘Harrismith Sale Yards’. There was a large playing field that looked rough and unmown, but the cricket wicket was a new-looking strip of carpet and as I looked around I saw that the pavilion was new. I inspected this – it was only built a few years ago and the Harrismith Cricket Club is alive and well.

As I walked around the trees looked different from the ones closer to the coast – they looked more like the trees you see ghosting past the windows as the Indian Pacific train glides eastwards on its first evening.

When I got back to the Hotel I told them I had found no orchids, and they said, oh, they’re all down beyond the trees, the other side of the paddock, on the flat ground. I didn’t feel like searching for them, unfamiliar as I was with the area. I wouldn’t have time the next morning, as I wanted to leave early to tackle the second Challenge Day of the ride.

I wanted to go back to Narrogin by the southern route, through Tincurrin, where there was a shop, and Toolibin, so that I would not repeat any of the road so far taken. It seemed that this would involve more than 20 km of dirt road, and the people at the hotel confirmed this, said it was more like 25 km. They said it was bad when it was wet because it got muddy and soft, but it wasn’t any worse than the beginning of it that I had seen branching off at right angles to the road that I had come in on that morning. I walked on it and the surface seemed good and it was inevitable that I would try it. I prepared myself mentally for a journey of 70 km to Narrogin with a headwind, but coming from the SW and not too strong.

I watched the Zimbabwe test cricket match on Sky TV in the bar for a while, then ordered Devil Wing Dings and a pie with chips and salad for dinner. I ordered this in the bar but took it into the dining room for convenience. I bought a couple of bottles of Powerade at the same time, for the next day’s long effort. Afterwards I went back into the bar and had another lemon lime and bitters and watched more of the cricket, also studied the notice board. This little pub was obviously an important community centre in this bit of Deep Country. There were notices about the forthcoming Wickepin 1999 Bug Bash, a giant party which happens once a year on Wickepin Oval. There were several posters advertising canola swathing, ram sales, mulesing, drenching and so on.

As I went to bed and had to go outside to get to the shower I was glad to find that the wind had dropped to a light SW drift. The forecast had told of a clear day for the Friday with rain developing late in the day, by which time I expected to be comfortably indoors.

It was very cold and I borrowed the doona off the other bed before retiring.

Reading at Harrismith: 357. Km for day: 46. Aggregate: 279. Km per day: 56. Kph to Harrismith: 19.7.

Wickepin to Harrismith 1999

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