Early morning start to get a bus to get a ferry to get onto my tour bus
Rob's Sheep Shearing
Emu Ridge Eucalyptus Distillery
Seal Bay
Little Sahara
Walk down to the beach with Kangaroos, Koala, Ants forever
Distance:
Total Distance:
Another early start- 5am this time.
Cereal bars and an apple for breakfast again
I checked out at 6am, having left most of my stuff in the hostel's luggage room.
At 6:30am I was getting on a full coach, ready to get the 9am ferry. The coach driver would occasionally tell us everything we could possibly need to know about the tiny townships we passed as we went down to Cape Jervis. There were even a couple of stops to collect post for the island.
By 8:30am I as on the ferry and fast asleep.
The crossing is only 17km, across the Backstairs Passage to get to Penneshaw- pronounced "Penisshore". No one else laughed. Guess I've heard of Peniston in Yorkshire too many times. I keep some comments to my internal monologue, which might be a good thing on these little tours.
Sleep deprived and hungry our first stop was "Rob's Sheep Shearing". Rob has a few hundred Merino sheep on his family farm. These are one of the few breeds of sheep that people can still keep commercially based on their wool production. For most shepherds the profit is purely in meat- the value of wool can be so low some years that it doesn't even cover the cost of shearing. However Merino wool is so valuable, especially the good quality wool from younger animals, that they can be kept purely for that purpose. Even male lambs, normally slaughtered for meat, are kept for some time in order to get the valuable wool off them. The ewes, meanwhile, will last around 6 years before their wool is too course to be more valuable than their mutton.
Rob has three sheep dogs, all Australian Kelpies- a smaller sheep dog, nearly the height of my knees. Two are trained as paddock dogs- to go out into the pasture, bring the sheep in, then push them through the system of pens. The other is still young but has been trained as a handling dog. He would jump up onto the sheep's backs whilst they were lined up in the handling system, then run along them, resulting in them moving forward and bunching up. This means Rob could run the system with just him and the dogs, his youngest ensuring the sheep kept moving when he was medicating them in he system or shearing.
He shearing was the same as any modern sheep shearing (see YouTube). We also got some of Rob's background- a farmer's son on his father's farm, having bought up his brother's share, now with kids who should take over. He trained as a shearer at 17, never wanted to make a full career of it, but the money was good, there weren't many other jobs at the time, and there weren't many shearer so on the island. But, unlike most shearers, he's kept the work light, so still has a back that functions and doesn't have bow legs.
For increased profit the family is trained to sort its own wool. The dirty and coarse stuff is less valuable, so gets removed. Equally animals that have had a hard, stressful, time due to nutrition, weather, age, or three lambs to feed, often produce poorer quality wool. So wool is sorted and put into the appropriate box, where it will later be turned into bales.
One thing of interest to me was the proper wool table they have. The table top is a spiral of 1 inch diameter piping, maybe 5 feet across, which spins atop its tripod. Loose wool is lost through the table and the fleece is spun so the dirty wool can be picked from the edges. Makes a change from the stack of pallets and tarpaulin we use at home.
Emu Ridge Eucalyptus Distillary was next! Apparently Eucalyptus oil was once the island's major export. Young branches would be harvest, their leaves having the most oil. In a huge pot (approx 15 feet across) the leaves would e cooked over a timber fire until the oil was boiled out, leaving behind a blackened wad of leaves and branches.
Now 97% Eucalyptus oil is farmed and manufactured outside of Australia (who are these people?!?). Yet, with the down turn in farming over the years Emu Ridge decided to go back into the business trying to make a pure Aussie Eucalyptus oil. Once this was a success they've also moved into Emu oil and tea tree oil.
I don't know where the Emu oil comes from. There weren't any Emus on the island until the farm imported three, two makes and a female, as mascots. Then the female attacked and killed the two males. Now she just sits in her enclosure, waiting for groups such as ours to come along, have lunch, then give here any green waste we have. Seemed quite happy to have out left over salad.
We were given a long list of the benefits of all of the oils and soaps the farm sells. The main things seemed to be that eucalyptus works well as an anticongestant and Emu oil is an anti inflammatory. But I'm sure the Internet will tell you it's good for everything.
As an aside- Eucalyptus is highly flammable, and one reason why Australia has so many bush fires. It catches fire easily and regrown quickly after being burnt. California decided to invest in eucalyptus after they had too many wild fires and their forests weren't growing back quickly enough. Now they have more fires than ever, the eucalyptus more readily starting these fires.
Lunch was early so we could get to our time slot in Seal Bay. There's a very strict set up here- it's a major breeding sight for the seals, but their numbers are still dwindling.
Inside the information centre that acts as a gateway to the bay they have a Sealion skeleton and skins from a Sealion, Seal, and young Fur Seal. The next day we'd go to another information centre where they had skins from terrestrial animals such as kangaroo, wallaby, goanna (a monitor lizard), echidna and koala. I'm sure we would never be allowed to have such skins in the UK for people to look at and touch. Seems like a great idea though (so long as it's done properly, eg. don't go out and kill endangered animals purely for it), as it allows people to see the true size of the animals, and to feel the texture of them.
Down on the beach we were surrounded by seals, from the massive males showing off with the teenage boys down to the little pups scooting along and playing in the sand. I took more videos than photos because I just couldn't capture the activity and numbers on the beach- nor the cuteness of the pups. We kept our distance at all times- they're still dangerous wild animals- but they rarely seemed bothered about having us there.
It wasn't as busy as the more exposed seal colonies I've seen, such as those under cliffs. There's been a struggle here for nearly 200 years. Europeans found these southern islands, found whales and seals, butchered everything they could safely capture, then profited from it all. The reason this still effects the populations today is due to the fact that, like turtles, seals go back to the same colony to breed as they were born on. So the inaccessible places which suffered from less hunting have had the numbers to rebuild. Whereas the places where one could walk to the seals and kill hundreds with ease have had a harder time rebuilding. Add in the numbers of Great White Sharks around and here the seals are struggling. This is as opposed to the island's rocky outcrops where the seals are struggling to find enough space without crushing pups-which regularly happens.
Turns out learnt about seals gets depressing pretty rapidly.
Like Tasmania Kangaroo Island has its own random giant sand dune. On Tas this was down to it being blown in from a beach. On KI we were told no one's worked out why it's there- it's 6km from the sea.
"Little Sahara" is on private land, so everyone had to sign disclaimers before we got to climb. The owners keep a kiosk near the entrance to hire out sandboards to visitors, although our tour guide brought some for us. It had rained a little, making the surface wet, and I've sandboarded before so I was more interested in exploring the place than filling my every crevice with sand.
Out on the sands I found tracks from birds, wallabies, kangaroos and an echidna. There were a few grassy plants growing on the surface, their long thin roots holding the sands in place. It stretched out for a kilometre or so.
Returning to the group a few people had tried out the sandboards. The ones I'd tried in NZ had been repurposed bodyboards. These were proper sandboards, looking like a wooden snow sled- a long tea tray with handles on each side. On of our Canadians was also given a board like a snowboard, but with not so secure bindings. It sort of worked, but might have been better had the sand been dry.
Our accommodation was a lodge at Vivonne Bay. Here our guide ran the bar and began cooking us dinner on the barbecue. As we waited there were options to borrow the lodges kayaks for the local river or bikes to ride on the road down to the beach. These would have been nice but I got into chatting with the young Canadian couple, the Swiss girl, and our Dutch teen. We compared travel stories and plans and began to walk down to the beach. A kangaroo and joey sat out on the volley ball court quietly eating the grass.
As we passed onto the sandy path we looked up to find a Koala sleeping in the tree. Everyone took photos until he suddenly woke up with a start, ears flying up in surprise as he grabbed onto his branch. "Wow! Where am I?! How did I get up here?!"
After a good laugh we got back on to the track. For about 300 metres the whole place was covered in ants! I was in my big walking boots, but people in saddles got very concerned about being bitten. On the way back we'd just run over the whole lot.
The beach was ok. I've been spoilt, it was lovely- nearly white fine sand, clean, quiet, blue water. By British standards it would be perfection. But I was hungry. Our tour guide turned out to be one hell of a cook- wee steaks, beef and herb sausages, chicken marinaded in something sweet, as well as various salads.
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