Here and there: Fourteen - Flinders Ranges, South Australia

I spend a lot of time away from the city and would spend even more time should I not have to work - I guess the motivation to turn up each day is knowing that I've not got long to go before I'll be able to stop working altogether, many years prior to the government-set "retirement age".

I like to get away as often as possible and one of my go-to places is the Flinders Ranges almost six hours (about 550 kilometres) north of where I live. I go camping and off-roading there a lot and sometimes drive to the southern Flinders Ranges just for a hike which I did last Sunday when I drove almost three hours to hike up and down Mt Remarkable.

Here's a few snaps I've taken in the Flinders - nothing all that great and certainly not as awesome as being there in person but they all take me back to various camping trips and activities I've done when there.

Above is one my trucks, a Ford Ranger, that spent a lot of time in the Flinders with me - a highly modified and off-road capable vehicle that got me there and back many times. I loved that truck and used it to the full extent of its capability. I should never has sold it.

I've had people say that there's not much to see in the Flinders and they're entitled to their opinion but when I hear that the opinion I have in my head is, you're a fucken dick head.

Some see nothing, I see an ancient landscape that used to be under a sea, the sediments of which helped form the peaks...I have a photo of the sand ripples of that ancient sea bed that have turned to rock...it's cool. It's about almost endless horizons, cloud formations, mountains, rock formations, colours that change with the time of day, the little native creatures that exist, the wild flowers in September-October...Nothing to see? Nope, wrong. It's brutal, but beautiful.

It's a harsh environment and yet humankind has turned it to their advantage...for a time at least. The Kanyaka Station ruins are testament to that, the rise and fall of human endeavour.

It was run as a cattle station established in about 1852 by a chap called Hugh Proby - He was drowned after being washed off his horse while herding cattle across a creek flooded by storm water and later his homestead passed to others who swapped from cattle to sheep and during those years it was home to about seventy families who operated the station, that a lot of people.

Interestingly, Hugh Proby never lived at the station as it was not complete when he died, (August 1852) and he was buried elsewhere which seems a shame. I've visited his grave which, six years after his death, was marked with a slab shipped from England. I should do a post on it one of these days.

Drought conditions, not uncommon in South Australia and especially in the outback areas, ended the station eventually and now it's just an interesting place to stop and wander about the ruins. I've done it a few times and always feel something when there, the presence of those who once lived there? I don't know really, just something.