Smartcarby- Stories of the outback

We drove into Mintabie, Olga's guests from Adelaide couldn't believe the corrugations on the road ( and this was the main highway wait until be took a back road to get to Fregon. We went straight to the hotel and got our rooms, not what you usually get but an old freezer box from a truck divided into sections wide enough to fit 2 small single beds and a chair. There were no windows so you had to have the air-conditioner going all the time. The advantage was that you never knew if it was night or day.

We went to have tea at the hotel and we started by having Oyster Kilpatric (they weren't on the menu but Olga said that we were "off the lands" and we weren't going near civilization again for 6 months and the chef felt sorry for us. We then had butter fried Burramundie for the main coarse and strawberries pancakes for dessert. Not bad for the middle of the desert. Apparently the chef was working his way around Australia. We had a great night out at the pub playing 8 ball and Olga getting very drunk. We went to bed when the power went off - between 2am and 5 am. All of the town's power goes off as this saves electricity unfortunately nothing then works e.g. freezers, air-conditions etc. The mining here is open cut and none of the houses are underground like in Cooper Pedy as the bed rock is too unstable. So they blast away and clear the rubble hoping to find the amazing coloured rock. Large find of valuable Black Opal have here and one particular young man found an opal that was worth over a million dollars. This I suppose keeps the miners here as there is always the gamble that you will be the next millionaire. There are 2 general stores in Mintabie and Olga's friend Malcom the owner of one of them, so we dropped in to say "giday". You can buy anything there including dynamite - if you want to. I bought the kids some lollies instead although David would have loved to blowup something.

Blue Hills half way between Mintabie and Mimilli.

We drove out of the town thinking that only up here would you drive 3 hours, each way, for a meal you didn't have to cook yourself. We drove down the old mail road through Blue Hills, past the car which was haunted with a Mamu (ghost) and into Mimili.

The Ghost Car was an EK Holden which was bought up to "The Lands" and it was haunted by a women who had died in the car. It had broken down by a gate half way to Mimilli. It was unlike any other car which had broken down, in that it had not been completely stripped of any of its pieces. The story has it that on a full moon there is a women who sits in the drivers seat all day and all night. In fact one of the local truck drivers "Jilpie John", said he was travelling along the road and stopped to open the gate where the car was. When he looked up he saw a women sitting in the drivers seat, he thought that the car had broken down and she would need a lift. So he drove the truck up to the car where the women was staring straight ahead. He asked if he could help her, she still stared straight ahead, so he climbed out of the truck thinking that the women must be hard of hearing, when he walked around to the car the women had disappeared completely. The hairs on the back of his neck were up and he called out to no response. He ran around and climbed in the truck and sped off.

Apparently the women was to appear each full moon and the gate that was supposed to be closed, was run down that many times that they just got rid of it. No one would stop near the car and John swears that everytime he would drive passed it, which was sometime twice a day, something different in the car would be open, like the bonnet or the car door. I was never game enough to stop the car and take a photograph and when Bruce would talk about driving there on a full moon I would get unreasonably scared and told him he could go by himself. He never did!

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