Destinations > Andamooka

The Andamooka 4x4 Precious Stones Jamboree was to have been an awesome weekend of 4WD events, including precision driving and navigation tests, along with a tagalong out into Mulgaria Station. Public liability insurance problems crippled the event in 2002, but organiser Pat believes that the problems have been sorted and that the event will go ahead in 2003.

Despite the problems, many 4WDers made the trip out to Andamooka and on the Friday evening there were better than 20 vehicles parked in the main street. The locals turned on a barbecue dinner to welcome us all to town, setting the scene for a great weekend.

The tagalong was the highlight of the trip. Many of the drivers and passengers had never ventured into country like this before and we were rewarded with some of the most stunning Outback scenery in Australia.

To make matters a little more interesting, it rained. To most folks, a drop of rain is nothing to write home about, but if you consider the fact that it rains four or five times a year in Andamooka, this was something special. Andamooka generally only gets about 200mm of rain per annum, which isn't a lot of water. The rest of the time, water is trucked in from nearby Roxby Downs.

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Out along the track there are plenty of things to see - but it'll take an local to point them out to you. It's a vast, empty area to the untrained eye, but to those that know their way around there's a wealth of interesting things to see.

Pat took us to a very special place indeed, to view some fossils known as Stromatolites. I promised Pat that I wouldn't reveal the exact location of these fossils, as they tend to disappear once their location becomes public, but I will say this - they're amongst the finest specimens of Stromatolites I've ever seen.

Stromatolites are the oldest known fossils on earth - they date back better than three billion years old. They are formed when photosynthesising cyanobacteria build colonies - a common occurrence billions of years ago. These days, they only exist in tiny, isolated pockets around the world.

The Torrens Track passes through one of the most interesting structures in Australia - the Dog Fence. The fence was built in 1946, as part of the program to keep the dingoes from the sheep that were being run on the stations in South Australia. The fence itself is about 5400km long - that's nearly two and half times the length of the Great Wall of China - and extends through three States. A few years back, the fence was washed out in South Australia and Brian Lock, whose job it was to help maintain the fence, remembers vividly what the results were. Better than 20,000 sheep were taken by dingoes while the fence was down, proving that the value of this remarkable feat of engineering is without question.

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