VEC - RATeX 2016, Maralinga (The Big Bang)

[morts]

This year The Volks Enthusiasts Club of South Australia ran its 6th RATeX event and our destination was Maralinga in the far north west of South Australia and we were raising money for the Fred Hollows Foundation.

The 2016 RATeX to Maralinga had a 23 vehicles entered, including 2 from Victoria, comprising 52 participants and from the starting grid at Cavan to our return to Adelaide we completed approximately 2,920 kilometres.


Day One – Adelaide to Kimba, 455 kms

A big crowd turned up to give us a great send off and vehicle preparation was quite varied. Some travelled very lightly while others were packed to the hilt and were spilling over onto roof racks.

The T25 Transporter of Guy Sierp and Andrew Stevens (Chester) was the hit of the morning and was so named due to its demountable Chesterfield lounge on the rear bumper bar! Other accessories accompanying Chester included a Persian rug, a vintage timber floor lamp with fabric light shade, coffee table and a rocking chair – just perfect for camp fires in the great Australian outback!

Our first stop was Lochiel for morning tea and then onto Port Augusta for fuel and lunch however one of our number didn’t quite make it and ran out of gas just before Port Augusta!

After refuelling we travelled on to Kimba and most camped for free at the local football oval whilst another group camped at the sparse Kimba Caravan Park which was effectively a patch of red dirt and an old ablutions block.

On a whim that evening Cat in the Hat played taxi and managed to cram nine adults and two kids amongst our fridges and camping gear into our creaking splitty and weave a slow but steady path to the Kimba Hotel where we had a fabulous meal.

[bulliboy]

WOW you guys know how! great setups Mort keep updating us please.
M

[Cam Biscuit]

Keep 'em coming Morts, I really want to do this event one day.....

[morts]

Day Three – Ceduna to Maralinga, 365 kms

The caravan park was soon filled with the burbling of flat fours as we assembled on the road out front of the park ready for the new day’s adventures. One of the last cars to come out was No Idea, Kai’s 1973, Porsche powered twin cab, however it had left a trail of oil from the camp site to the front gate and a quick inspection confirmed a major oil leak from the oil cooler which required more than a five minute fix. After a short discussion it was decided a small group would remain behind to effect repairs while the main group pressed on for Maralinga.

Our first stop was in Penong for fuel and from here we headed west again through Nundroo and turned off at the Oak Valley turnoff and headed north on the wide bitumen road that was laid to service the nearby Iluka sand mine. We lunched by the side of the road and had a kick of the footy at the Maralinga turnoff where the bitumen turned to dirt and then headed off. The dirt was good in some sections however it was very rough and corrugated in others. This slowed progress somewhat and we also had to beware of old abandoned cars, some left on the road and others just to the side of the road.

Fortunately we made it through the dirt section without any breakages or damage. The terrain was flat and treeless for the middle part of this run, however as we started to climb the vegetation changed, first to mallee scrub and then to casuarinas.

There was real jubilation as we reached the old single lane, pot holed 1950's bitumen road leading into Maralinga and then the first sign announcing we were entering into Maralinga Tjarutja Lands. Our convoy had become quite stretched out by this time due to the gaps we had to leave because of the dust clouds from the vehicles in front.

Shortly after 4.30pm our Tour Guide, Robin Matthews, arrived to welcome us to Maralinga. After a quick warning on the need to stay together we headed off to the Maralinga Village which was accessed via a long, slow climb up from the desolate flat country nto the picturesque sheoak filled plateau on which the site was built.

The actual Maralinga Village is currently being transitioned into a campground and is still very much a work in progress. It was originally built to house up to 3,000 people at a time and there are now only five of the original buildings that remain standing. The balance were dismantled at the closure of the atomic testing programme and all that remains of the rest are the slabs they were built on. The actual buildings themselves were originally built in kit form (ckd) and shipped out from England to be assembled like a giant Lego construction site. The old slabs did however offer a clean, level place to park our cars to set up camp and carry out some much needed maintenance works.

Before too long Volkswagens of all descriptions were scattered around the Village, tents erected and swags unrolled and the focus shifted from travelling and setting up camp to tucker and setting up fire pits. We were provided a generous supply of firewood by our hosts and it wasn’t long before groups of tired, but happily fed and watered Vee-Dubbers were clustered in groups around various fires. We were treated to a beautiful warm night with a sky full of stars – a wonderful end to a great day on the road.

MEANWHILE, back at Ceduna....

Sure enough No Idea had cracked an external oil cooler and was wheeled into a safe corner to work on. Chester was backed up so the couch could be utilised, and a coffee table was erected complete with coffee brewing.

Once again Guy Sierp found himself head diagnostic technician and mechanic with a bunch of willing assistants offering help as required. A TIG welder was located in Ceduna and it was arranged that the offending aluminium oil cooler would be sent over for repair as soon as it had been removed from the Porsche 2.7 litre, six cylinder motor.

Meanwhile the kids rummaged through kombi ashtrays extracting funds for the arcade machine at which they eventually became quite successful. It proved to be a great method of keeping them amused while the “adults” went about the less important stuff.

Once the oil cooler was extracted and repaired Guy et al went to work refitting it along with the whole inlet manifold etc. There was one small problem of a missing 8mm nut no-one remembered seeing however the location of the offending nut became evident upon cranking of the motor. It appeared to have found its way into a cylinder! The excitement of overcoming the oil cooler issue and getting on the road was short lived. It looked like the issue would be terminal and No Idea wouldn’t be going anywhere.

Guy leapt into action and started pulling everything apart again. The missing nut was located in the middle cylinder on the left hand back and a plan was formulated to lever the valve open as far as possible while a modified magnet was slipped into the bore. It worked and a very squashed nut was captured to the great relief of all. The car was ready to be started and the engine cranked and fired up first time! There were jubilant cheers all round and it was now close to 2.00pm, five hours behind the main convoy.

When we arrived at the dirt we felt we were getting close but a look at the map reminded us we still had a couple of hours before we would arrive at Maralinga, indeed it was dark when we arrived at the railway crossing and rang forward to have the gate opened. As tail end charlie, Gus had to waited for ten minutes to get some distance between the cars in front. The sun had set, the moon had risen and the windless conditions meant the dust from our group lingered as it snaked toward the horizon, a perfect moment in the dusk and silence of the outback. We had passed all the challenges the day had thrown at us and had almost reached our goal of Maralinga.

[morts]

Days Four and Five – Maralinga Bus Trip and Maralinga Village exploration

For the next two days we were based at the Maralinga Village and due to the size of our group we had to split ourselves into two smaller groups; one to take the full day Maralinga bus tour on Tuesday whilst the other group would remain in the Maralinga Village and then we would swap over on the Wednesday.

The bus tour, led by Robin Matthews, took in the airport, the Forward Area where extensive scientific experimentation was undertaken, the atomic bomb sites and also the clean up dumps – one in which there is a Barndoor ambulance buried under tonnes of dirt! We even saw a photo of it parked outside the Maralinga Hospital building.

Len Beadell, the well known Australian surveyor who also surveyed the Gun Barrel Highway across the back blocks of Western Australia, Northern Territory and South Australia, was charged with selecting and helping to prepare the sites to detonate these atomic bombs. Once he had located the claypan site that was to become the Emu test site he then identified the airport site and finally the permanent Maralinga Village site on an elevated plateau.

The first stop on the tour is the airport which is about five kilometres east of Maralinga Village and the runway is in remarkable condition and still being used to this day. The runway is the longest and widest in Australia, it is three kilometres long with the landing pads at each end being five metre deep concrete blocks and the whole runway is bitumen to a depth of approximately 450mm – a perfect venue for a future VWMA drag racing meet? The scale of the Maralinga Airport is massive and it is lit by solar powered runway lights so that in an emergency it can be used by commercial jets. It was also chosen as the backup landing site, if needed, for the US space shuttle missions!
A lot of thought went into the planning of the water runoff from the runway which runs in concrete channels hundreds of metres long into a collection pond for purification before it is then pumped up to Maralinga Village, very similar to the old Roman aqua ducts. They even ensured the refuelling pads were separate from the water collection points so no contaminated water would find its way up to the Village.

We then travelled into what is known as the Forward Area, approximately 30 Kilometres north of Maralinga Village where the majority of scientific experiments were undertaken and a tent city named Roadside Village was established to provide living quarters for these men.

Roadside Village was equipped with its own kitchen facilities, decontamination unit and air strip and also housed and headquartered the Commonwealth Police’s security detail. This security operation included manned security towers built throughout the Forward Area to monitor all vehicle and personnel movements as well as looking for any infiltration that may have come from the harsh desert environment as this was at the height of the Cold War. The Forward Area comprised the seven major atomic bomb trial sites which were criss-crossed by 230 kilometres of bitumen roads. Each atomic bomb site was given a code name TARANAKI, BREAKAWAY, MARCOO, BIAK, TADJE, KOTA and ONE TREE.

Lunch was at Taranaki where the remains of large industrial shed provided us some respite from the sun. Taranaki houses the main burial pit which was completed in 2000 and where 350,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil was deposited. This pit also houses the exhumed debris from the earlier attempted cleanups in 1967 and the 1980’s which was re-buried into this pit. Finally all of the heavy equipment and associated equipment used in the cleanup was destroyed, crushed and deposited into this pit. A five metre layer of clean soil was then brought in from outside the Forward Area and spread over the top of the pit. The pit is still monitored to this day for any subsidence and leakage into groundwater. Mark (Bluebottle) was able to bring a Geiger counter with him and this was set up at various points, however the meter didn’t bounce off the scale and it remained relatively quiet.

Ground Zero of these test sites were amazing, however one of the most impressive sites was BREAKAWAY where the blast was detonated 1,000 feet above ground level and all the red sand below had turned into green glass particles that are only now slowly breaking up, sixty years afterwards. We visited Freshbore where the early pioneer William Tietkins, a member of Ernest Giles exploration party, sunk a well 24 meters deep in an unsuccessful effort to claim the Maralinga land as a Pastoral Lease.

The last place visited was KOTA, a bomb test site that was prepared using cables and balloons but not detonated due to an armistice on nuclear testing. This entire massive infrastructure was built in an eighteen month period at a time when a lot of country towns in Australia still only had a dirt road for their main street – absolutely mind boggling!

On the day you didn’t go on the tour you were free to explore Maralinga Village with the exception of a few roped off areas. This would have been something to see in its heyday with 3,000 people there at any one time. It was well laid out and with a combination of road names such as London Road, Cardiff Road, Belfast Street, Canberra Street, Melbourne Street and Adelaide Street giving it a real Anglo/Aussie feel.

The scale of the whole project was amazing and to see what could be achieved by the British and Australian Governments and their military arms was something to marvel at. We were to learn that as well as the permanent Army village base at Maralinga the Air Force and Navy also had tent villages further to the east. The Maralinga Village also provided a swimming pool, tennis courts and a golf course!

[Cam Biscuit]

Is the place open to the general public Morts?

Or via a booked tour or something?

[morts]

You need to book and they come down and unlock the gate to let you in at a pre-arranged time.

Ours was the biggest group they had had to date and it is still being set up or these sorts of visits. Things take their own time in the bush...

[morts]

Day Six – Maralinga to Smoky Bay, 475 kms

We had an 8.00am start, 475 kms to travel and a lot of it over unmade roads.

On the way out of the Maralinga Village we had a photo shoot at the Maralinga Airport and stopped at the Maralinga entry gate to say farewell to Robin where he pointed out very unusual bush tucker bananas growing on a tree near the gate. Then we were off on the 110kms of rough, often corrugated and always very dusty unmade road back towards the highway. We again passed the recently abandoned reasonably late model cars ‘parked’ on the road and then got back onto the wonderful smooth bitumen and proceeded on to Nundroo where we re-fuelled.

A few kilometres further down the road we stopped for lunch at the picturesque Fowlers Bay which was named by Captain Matthew Flinders RN in 1802 and there are the biggest, whitest sand hills just as you enter the township.

From there the next stop was Penong and another fuel stop before heading on to the world famous Cactus Beach. The road to Cactus Beach is not clearly signposted as such so you have to do a little bit of homework to work out how to get there. The 20 km stretch of road was again, a rough and dusty track but our hardy VWs rattled across the surface with bone jarring ease. We had a look at the headland which offers three highly regarded surf breaks – Cactus, Castles and Caves and there were quite a few riders out hitting the waves. It was then back into our rides to re-trace our route back on to the bitumen and towards Ceduna.

At Ceduna we re-stocked our supplies of food, fuel and alcohol and headed down the road to Smoky Bay. Not long out of Ceduna we passed Grey Streak and another car stopped at the side of the road but we were waved through and rolled into the Caravan Park at 4.30pm and settled in. The park is located on the foreshore and was chock-a-block and it seemed some additional sites were created on vacant roadway space!

After visiting local family one member of our crew managed to stab himself while trying to open five dozen oysters for afternoon tea and was rushed to Ceduna Hospital where he had seven stitches inserted to hold his finger together.

The jetty on the foreshore had an adjacent netted swimming enclosure and we wondered why until a cheery local casually mentioned that people on the jetty had recently sighted a great white shark in the immediate vicinity!

Dinner that evening was at the local Community Club around 300 metres from the caravan park and where all the menu consisted of was schnitzels. I guess all of us have eaten our fair share of schnitzels over the years but these monsters were amongst the biggest any of us had ever encountered and they were cooked to perfection by the two ladies who ran the kitchen. When the Poole brothers arrived we heard the tragic news that their iconic road warrior, Grey Streak, had suffered a terminal engine malfunction and was incapable of continuing on. This would be the first retirement of any vehicle ever in six RATeX’s – a pretty good attrition rate overall.

[morts]

Day Seven –Smoky Bay to Mount Ive Station 380 kms

All cars gathered in convoy outside the Caravan Park at about 8.30am. Our support vehicle, a Holden Rodeo (Rodeo), was experiencing steering issues that were put down to a wheel alignment problem as there was little sign of obvious tyre wear.

We were soon crossing the Lincoln Highway onto an unsealed road heading north before crossing the Eyre Highway and heading towards Nunjikompita and then onto Hiltaba for morning tea. On the way to Hiltaba we had a short break and it was discovered that both front tyres on the Rodeo were scrubbed right out, one more than the other. One tyre was immediately changed and the steering arm was tightened up to realign the front wheels. It could have been very nasty if the steering arm had separated while travelling at 70-80kph!

We then set off for the Organ Pipes via Yardea and Thurlga Stations to the Minnipa Road turnoff some 57 kms from Mt Ive and then headed south for about 30 kms to the turnoff to the Organ Pipes. The last 10km stretch was signposted as a four wheel drive track only and it was as rough as it gets, with ruts that would swallow a lot of cars and the creek crossings were full of rocks, however the mighty Volkswagens got through, with only one beetle (Niambri) losing one exhaust pipe! My daughter on her L plates had the pleasure of piloting this stretch in Cat in the Hat – a drive I’m sure she won’t forget in a hurry!

The rock formation comprising the Organ Pipes looks unique as the country rock does not appear to be layered like slate which cracks open along flat fault lines but is more like granite. The pipes themselves are square offset vertical columns of rock jutting out from the 100 metre cliff face.

Retracing our steps on the horror stretch we then headed 30kms north back to the Mt Ive Road. We managed to get a blow out during this run – amazingly the only flat tyre registered on the whole trip, however a quick change of tyre and we were off again. The roads continued to be pretty rough but with lowered tyre pressure and a bit more speed the corrugations did not bother us as much and it wasn’t that long before we arrived at Mt Ive. BANG! Who in their right mind would build not one but two massive speed humps out of the same red dirt as the surrounding landscape right at the entrance to the station?? Driving out of glorious late afternoon sun light into the entrance at Mt Ive and now in the shade of an adjacent hill the beetle Niambri simply didn’t see the humps until they were right on the first one. Despite jamming on the brakes it hit the first hump with a huge thump and its roof rack and all items on it went flying through the air onto the road!

It was then on to the fuel pump to fill up, however the fuel had been contaminated with water, apparently by a disgruntled ex-employee and there would be no fuel tonight. Those cars that had arrived earlier were not aware of this and the worst affected were No Idea, Willshemakeit, Foxy and Boris.

The facilities are superb at Mt Ive and they had managed to acquire three buildings from Maralinga, one that is now used as a shop/bar, another as a shed, and the one we utilised the most was once one of the huge mess huts which is now configured as an accommodation block, kitchens, a huge dining area and ablutions block.

After dinner most of our large contingent played a continuous game of table tennis and we all had one helluva time and it seemed a few old sibling rivalries were re-ignited! Afterwards a campfire was soon burning and some of the younger members were the last to bed at around 2.00am.

[morts]

Day Eight - Mt Ive to Laura 320 kms

We refuelled at Mt Ive Station after ‘good’ fuel was hand pumped from a surface tank into 20 litre jerry cans and then into our tanks due to the water contamination in the main tank. Fed, watered and fuelled up we headed off for a new day’s adventure commencing with the obligatory stop at the Mount Ive submarine from where the majority of the convoy disembarked.

We did not get far before the kombi Shazal was in trouble. She would not peel the jacket off a potato, top speed was 60 kilometres per hour and it pulled over twice - first to check the timing, then the air filter, however it continued on (barely) without success. In traditional style, beer in Shazal needed to be sampled prior to 10.00am and by 10.30am the occupants were less worried about their motoring woes and more concerned with the fact their supply of wide mouth tinnies was rapidly dwindling!
At the third unscheduled road side stop they pulled over and rattled the fuel filter – success! Shazal had hit the second speed hump coming into Mt Ive the previous evening at 40 kilometres per hour whilst looking at one of the relocated aluminium buildings from Maralinga. (more likely the English backpacker I'm told!) The airborne jolting experience most likely disturbed rubbish in the bottom of the fuel tank blocking the fuel filter. Once the rubbish was dislodged they enjoyed the long sweeping dirt road to Iron Knob, the last dirt fixation prior to the journey home on the bitumen. Foxy had an issue with his accelerator cable but seemed to have the matter well under control.

Most of the convoy arrived at Iron Knob where the Boehm family’s square back (Wunona) was experiencing a sticky solenoid on its starter motor. Like a stalker the Poole Brothers (Grey Streak) were seen sneakily passing us at Iron Knob on the way to Port Augusta, albeit with their kombi on the back of a trailer. They had blown a piston at Smoky Bay two days earlier and had to pick up a car and trailer to tow Grey Streak home.

We arrived at Port Augusta, refuelled and grabbed a bite to eat and all met out the front of the local Volkswagen dealership. The group then became rather fragmented some heading for home and others off onto our next destination of Melrose.

By coincidence whilst driving through Wirrabera a few of the convoy who were heading to Laura met up with Club member Alf Andersen and his wife Kay who live in Jamestown so they were promptly invited to our final celebration dinner at the North Laura Hotel that evening.
The farewell dinner was a great gathering of warm and friendly people who shared their individual stories from the week. Another successful RATeX adventure to another remarkable and unique destination was now drawing to a close.

Until next time, that's all folks...

[Cam Biscuit]

Time I moved back to SA for the trip next year

[rusty 55]

This so makes me want my bus on the rd for a road trip, bloody house and kids!

[johno]

Epic trip.
Great pics too.
Thanks for sharing