DAY 94 – Esperance – Balladonia Roadhouse

Good Morning Esperance!
 
Low 7°c (45°F) – High 20°c (68°F)
393km
 
Despite all good intentions this morning’s packup was pretty slow.  I woke with a very swollen face and a headache to start the day.  Not ideal but we have to get moving.  Sleep wasn’t very forthcoming as I lay awake worrying about whether we were doing the right thing moving on but we eventually got on the road around 9.00am only to strike high side winds yet again making the trip to Norseman very slow.
 
Our original plan was to stay in Norseman and bath Kitty before starting the Nullarbor run given most (if not all) of our stops between there and Ceduna would not have general access to water.  But with Norseman only 200km away, it would mean we would be spending hours just sitting in the caravan for the afternoon and so we decided to just keep driving as long as we could.  The same old scenery along the way, although I had to smile at the irony of an old water tank that had been painted blue with the letters R U O K on it.  I didn’t feel particularly OK, but we had a joke about “tanks for asking”.
 
We fueled up in Norseman, turned right and onto the Nullarbor, aka Eyre Highway, we drove with some sense of anticipation and excitement for this really iconic road and part of the continent.  The Eyre Highway is a 1,664km (1,034 mi) highway linking Western Australia and South Australia via the Nullarbor Plain. Signed as National Highways 1 and A1, it forms part of Highway 1 and the Australian National Highway network linking Perth and Adelaide. It was named after explorer Edward John Eyre, who was the first European to cross the Nullarbor by land, in 1840–1841. Eyre Highway runs from Norseman in Western Australia, past Eucla, to the state border and continuing to the South Australian town of Ceduna where it then crosses the top of the Eyre Peninsula before reaching Port Augusta.
 
The construction of the East–West Telegraph line in the 1870s, along Eyre's route, resulted in a hazardous trail that could be followed for interstate travel. A national highway was called for, but the federal government did not see the route as important enough until 1941, when a war in the Pacific seemed imminent. The highway was constructed between July 1941 and June 1942, but was trafficable by January 1942. Though originally named Forrest Highway, after John Forrest (WA’s first Premier), by the war cabinet, it was officially named and gazetted Eyre Highway, a name agreed upon by the states' nomenclature committees.
 
While the finished road was an improvement over the previous route, it was still not much more than a track and remained such throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Efforts to seal the highway began in Norseman in 1960, with the Western Australian section completed in 1969 and the South Australian section finished in 1976. Further improvement works have been undertaken since the 1980s, including widening and reconstructing portions of the road and for this we are truly grateful.  I’ve seen old photos of people making this trek throughout the early 60’s and they were not pretty!
 
Neither Shane nor I are quite sure what we expected the Nullarbor to be like with the exception that it was likely to be straight and boring.  And while we haven’t yet got to Australia’s longest straight part and technically not yet on the Nullarbor Plain, it still wasn’t quite the same as other places we’ve been aside from more straight stretches of road (Western Australia is definitely still the King of straight roads) and it definitely wasn’t boring.  The vegetation and terrain is constantly changing and there is always something to see.  One positive in our change of direction was that we now had a tail wind – the general reason why it’s recommended to travel anti-clockwise around Australia in order to take advantage of the regular Westerly winds that blow across the bottom of the continent.  Though the signs now warn of horses as well as kangaroos jumping over emus – still no sign of any of these but we’ll keep you posted.
 
There is pretty much nothing between Norseman and our destination at Balladonia.  The name Balladonia is an Aboriginal word meaning "big rock by itself".  The area was settled in 1879 and the original Balladonia homestead was built 28 kilometres (17 mi) away from the present townsite. From 1897 to 1929, Balladonia was a station on the Perth-Adelaide telegraph line, due to a previous coastal line being shorted by salt spray from the Southern Ocean.  The arid climate and lack of suitable water sources restricted the town's development.
 
In July 1979, the area gained worldwide attention when the re-entry of the Skylab space station left a trail of debris across the nearby countryside.  Skylab was the first United States space station, launched by NASA, occupied for about 24 weeks between May 1973 and February 1974.  It was operated by three separate three-astronaut crews. Major operations included an orbital workshop, a solar observatory, Earth observation, and hundreds of experiments.  Unable to be re-boosted by the Space Shuttle, which was not ready until 1981, Skylab's orbit eventually decayed, and it disintegrated in the atmosphere on July 11, 1979, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.
 
Skylab orbited Earth 2,476 times during the 171 days and 13 hours of its occupation during the three crewed Skylab expeditions. Astronauts performed ten spacewalks, totaling 42 hours and 16 minutes. Skylab logged about 2,000 hours of scientific and medical experiments, 127,000 frames of film of the Sun and 46,000 of Earth.  Solar experiments included photographs of eight solar flares and produced valuable results that scientists stated would have been impossible to obtain with un-crewed spacecraft.  The existence of the Sun's coronal holes was confirmed because of these efforts.  Many of the experiments conducted investigated the astronauts' adaptation to extended periods of microgravity.
 
Skylab's demise in 1979 was an international media event, with T-shirts and hats with bullseyes and "Skylab Repellent" with a money-back guarantee, wagering on the time and place of re-entry, and nightly news reports.  A report commissioned by NASA calculated that the odds were 1 in 152 of debris hitting any human, and odds of 1 in 7 of debris hitting a city of 100,000 people or more.  Special teams were readied to head to any country hit by debris.  The event caused so much panic in the Philippines that President Ferdinand Marcos appeared on national television to reassure the public.
 
A week before re-entry, NASA forecast that it would occur between July 10 and 14, with the 12th the most likely date, and the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) predicted the 14th.  In the hours before the event, ground controllers adjusted Skylab's orientation to minimize the risk of re-entry on a populated area.  They aimed the station at a spot 810 miles (1,300 km) south-southeast of Cape Town, South Africa, and re-entry began at approximately 16:37 UTC, July 11, 1979.  The station did not burn up as fast as NASA expected. Debris landed about 300 miles (480 km) east of Perth, Western Australia due to a four-percent calculation error, and was found between Esperance, Western Australia and Rawlinna, about 130–150 km (81–93 miles) radius around Balladonia, Western Australia. Residents and an airline pilot saw dozens of colorful flares as large pieces broke up in the atmosphere; the debris landed in an almost unpopulated area, but the sightings still caused NASA to fear human injury or property damage.
 
The Balladonia Roadhouse also has a museum covering a range of subjects including the area’s Aboriginal heritage, European exploration and settlement, the history of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, construction of the Eyre Highway, artifacts from settler's life and information about local flora and fauna.  However the main focus is on the fiery re-entry of the Skylab space station (which incidentally coincided with Balladonia's centenary of settlement) and includes documents from NASA, a recreation of actual events, photos and related ephemera, and a life-sized replica of some of the debris that had landed on their roof.
 
The caravan park itself is just a number of power poles amongst the trees at the side of the roadhouse.  You pay and find a spot which made us grateful to have arrived around 3.00pm as we were the first to arrive and had our choice of sites.  We set up Kitty’s pen much to her pleasure, and enjoyed a bit of sunshine while it lasted.  Internet was nonexistent and phone reception about the same so after a visit to the museum, we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening reading and going through photos and enjoying a rest after a big almost 400km day.