Smartcarby- Stories of the outback

This year we spent Easter with Raylene and Trevor O'Brien, their children Matthew and Jason and Peter Hillard. Raylene and Trevor were the store a managers and had been for many years and Trevor grew up in the same suburb of Adelaide as I and had even taught my brother to drive many years ago. Peter ran the mechanical workshop and had

Peter Hillard

lived in Fregon for 15 years and had spent his childhood visiting "The Lands" as his mother had been and nurse at Ernabella in 1930's.

On the Friday we all went out to the Go-kart track and blasted around until we were all dusty and worn out then we decided to go out to the airport and watch Peter fly one of his model airplanes. After spending half an hour fueling up and with false starts the little plane finally lifted into the air, it did one turn and plunged to the ground. Wrecking the front of the plane. Wow that was really exciting - NOT. So the boys all piled into Trevor's car and took off into town to get Matthew's plane. Eventually they got that one going but the really strong winds made it difficult to fly and Peter didn't want to spend his nights fixing 2 planes so they gave up on that idea.

The next day Bruce and Peter spent the day preparing Peter's blackpowder rifles to do some target shooting with. We all went out to Officer's Creek and had a blast with them. It was great fun. You have to load the riffles by putting in some gun powder then a wad of material , then a ball and then you knock all of this down to the end of the rifle with the ram rod. Then a cap is placed on the firing pin, aim and shoot. Apparently these riffles where used more as clubs against the enemy than as a rifle as it took so long to load them. You ended up smelling like rotten egg gas from the sulfur in the gun powder. We shot lots of targets, then we sat by the fire told stories, the kids falling asleep while the guys went off hunting rabbits. Eventually we got home at about 2am content from a great day out.

Leonie shooting a blackpowder riffle. Note all of the smoke

Sunday was very humid which is unusual for here as normally the heat is very dry but it was about 42o C (107o F) but we had a lot of rain the night before so it was now humid with the sun out. We to drive out to Alywanyuwanyu (which is on Currie Creek and at the base of Mount Woodroffe) and was half way between Amata and Fregon. It had a swimming hole for the kids to splash around in. We were going to have a picnic and barbie and we would leave to come back before dark. Jason was in his Escort that had the roof cut off and was painted like a safari wagon, Matthew was riding his motor bike, Raylene and Trevor were in their Jackaroo and we were in our car with Bruce's bike in the tailor.

We set off and soon discovered that there were some large pools of water on the road.
"Great fun!", said Bruce with a gleam in his eye. Jason soon got bogged because like all boys he was trying to go through all of the puddles with as much fun as possible. Bruce off coarse decided that because everyone was just standing beside the bogged car and big puddle he would have to proved once more that Valiant will go anywhere. So with great speed we hit the middle of the water sending great splashes of water and mud on anyone standing close. We pulled Jason free and off we continued.

There must be something about not seeing water for a long time because all of the drivers of the cars could not keep out of them. Trevor was having a great time sliding the Jackaroo sideways through the puddles and our valiant would be in hot pursuit . However this was just the beginning to a rather interesting and memorable day...... Cont to inland sea

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