We only wanted to travel a hundred kilometres, at most, which would see us get no further than Venus Bay. Between Streaky Bay and Venus Bay are Baird Bay and Port Kenny. We turned off into Baird Bay and found ourselves on a well-made gravel road. This has been a feature of our travels around the Eyre Peninsula - well-made gravel roads that have been recently graded. This means that we don't have to stop to reduce the pressures in our tyres to prevent everything from shaking to pieces. Letting down the tyres isn't an issue. Pumping them up again is. It takes a long while to pump up eight 4WD sized tyres.
The road to Baird Bay cuts through cleared farmland. A great many of the farmhouses in the area have fallen into disrepair - a sign of the hard times. Much of the land does not appear to have been cropped for a few years and we did not see a single farm animal. It leads one to think that some of the farms have been abandoned. Folks, if you still don't believe in climate change you need to come to a place like this and see what is happening.
Baird Bay Location
Baird Bay is a very small settlement on the shores of a very large, very shallow, sandy bay. The town doesn't have as much as a shop, just a few houses. The locals have made a cheap campsite for tourists which is located about 70 metres from the water's edge on the "land" side of the road that comes into the settlement. It is basically a gravelled clearing with a small "camp kitchen" styled building and some toilets. The camp kitchen has a gas BBQ and a sink for doing dishes. The locals ask for a gold coin donation to use the BBQ, but there really isn't any way of stopping unscrupulous people from using it for free. To stay at the camp site costs $10.00 per night.
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| The campground, camp kitchen and village at Baird Bay |
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| The day-use only car park, fish cleaning station and "rubbish tip" |
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| Part of the Bay |
At one end of the campground are some stairs that lead up to a lookout. It is not a very high vantage point, but high enough to get some nice views and take some piccies like those included in this blog. On the other side of the road from the campground is a day-use only parking area that is much closer to the beach. The path from this car park to the beach takes you right past a fish cleaning station. These are everywhere in this part of Australia and are a welcome addition. The Baird Bay rubbish tip is also parked at the end of this car park. That's right, parked! The local rubbish "tip" is a tandem trailer with a mesh cage on it. I guess they just tow it to the main tip (wherever that is) when the trailer is full.
Happy as we would have been to camp at Baird Bay, we decided to have a cuppa and then drive on. We saw a road that was signposted "Murpy's Haystacks" and as it took us in the general direction that we wished to go, we took the turn. After a short drive we got to the haystacks.
Murphy's Haystacks Location
You can't really see them from the main road, so I guess that quite few people would drive right past them. The "haystacks" are actually large rock formations, some of which rest on the ground and some that rise up from the ground. What makes them unique is that they a re a form of conglomerate that is different in texture, make-up and colour from the surrounding limestone country. They have been smoothened over the years and have taken on some odd forms which are quite appealing to view. I think that words alone cannot do them justice and have included the photos to give a better idea of how they look.
The story goes that an Irishman named Murphy, who had a penchant for a particular method of farming, was known to constantly espouse how his style of farming could produce far greater yields of hay than traditional methods. One day, when taking a party of farmers on a wagon to a distant farm so that he could demonstrate his techniques, he saw the rock formations in the distance and thought that they were giant stacks of hay. He then theorised that the farmer that grew enough hay to make stacks as large as those "must surely be using my farming methods".
Subsequent travellers along the trail saw the folly of Murphy's "haystacks" but the name stuck and they have been known a Murphy's Haystacks ever since. The formation is on private land and they ask a donation in an honour box to enter. They money seems to have been spent well as there are some very clean, flushing dunnies there, in the middle of a paddock with not another building in sight.
From the haystacks, the road back to the Flinders Highway is bitumen and before long we had turned southeast and were heading for Port Kenny.
Port Kenny Location
It didn't take long to reach Port Kenny. Port Kenny is another small village on the shores of the quite expansive, Venus Bay. This bay is so large that Port Kenny is probably about 12 kilometres from the open sea. The bay is actually more of a lagoon that has an entrance to the sea that is about 500 metres wide, then opens out and I'd guess it covers a hundred square kilometres or so. Port Kenny would be a port for fishing vessels only, as it is too shallow for anything else to navigate.
Port Kenny is also a bit, shall we say, bedraggled. The place has junk left over from a bygone era spread all over the place. Things like old boats and old aquaculture tanks, along with old rope, nets, cars and a host of other flotsam and jetsam are dotted everywhere. The town has a pub and a roadhouse and maybe 30 houses. The roadhouse had some caravan sites but I'm being generous by calling them "primitive". So it was on to Venus Bay Township.
Venus Bay Location
On arrival at Venus Bay you find yourself at the entrance to the large bay that I spoke of in the earlier paragraph. The town is also smallish, possibly with 70 permanent residents, but has a lot of holiday housing that would see the town population get up into the hundreds during holiday times. There is the mandatory pier, a General Store which also doubles as a cafe and triples as a liquor shop, a caravan park and the houses mentioned previously. I will cover Venus Bay in a separate blog.
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