TRACKING THE GHAN

FOLLOWING THE ROUTE OF THE HISTORIC GHAN RAILWAY – FROM ITS TART IN PORT AUGUSTA AT THE HEAD OF SPENCER GULF TO ITS FINAL DESTINATION IN ALICE SPRINGS – IS A GREAT WAY TO TRAVEL FROM SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA TO OUR CONTINENT’S RED HEART.

- RON MOON

THE track had turned into a badly eroded twotrack as it crossed the gibber-strewn tableland country and the invisible line marking the Northern Territory-South Australian border, north-west of a lowly Mt Herne. Somewhere to our east a lonely concrete obelisk on a flat pebble covered claypan marks the border proper and is the most easterly border post along that line before coming to a distant Poeppel Corner on the far side of the Simpson Desert.

The Patrol thumped through a nasty washout that marked a runoff channel for a tributary of Coglin Creek. Just a few minutes later the road to Mt Dare Hotel was on our right and then the low, scattered ruins of the once proud and important Charlotte Waters repeater station, close to the banks of Coglin Creek, appeared.

Established as a repeater station for the Darwin Adelaide Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) in 1872, a store soon followed along with a police station. The OTL had basically followed the tracks of John McDouall Stuart, who blazed his way north from the settled districts of South Australia to the north coast of the Northern Territory during six incredible and tough expeditions between 1859 and 1861.