Small towns of southern Australia

So, we haven't been to many of the more well known small towns in Australia - the ones stuck remotely in the middle of 100's of miles of desert - but we did drive through some crazy and bizarre little towns on the highway to and from Adelaide.  This post has a random collection of strange or cool things from some of the 'speck on the map' towns and some of the roadsigns that we came across.

From the coast at Port McDougall we headed inland. The land is pretty flat and the road generally unimaginatively straight with yellow 'beware of kangaroos on the roads' signs every few kilometres.  As we approached the little town of Allendale East we saw a sign saying "Allendale Cave - 200m" and the road suddenly split sharply. Geoff wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to see another cave so we parked under a clump of low trees and saw a sign saying "Cave".  Blow us down, there in the centre island of the road is a fence surrounding a cave/sinkhole!  The town was established as a watering station for horses and teams of cattle on their way to the coast, and the water came from the sinkhole.  Then, when the road was being formalised, the Contractors attempted to fill the cave in so that they could build the road over it - clearly it was in the way of their perfectly straight road.  However not surprisingly the filling subsided and they had to settle with building the road around the cave. [ two points to note: 1.  The road is not very big - only one lane each way. 2. The cave is only about 4m across.  So why the road had to go straight over the relatively small hole, we're not quite sure! ]

The Allendale cave.

Out of the flat landscape Mount Gambier suddenly rises up as a rugged volcanic peak.  It is a relatively young volcano having erupted only 4800 years ago.  In the crater of the volcano is the stunning Blue Lake which is between 80 and 204m deep.  This water is of exceptionally high quality and is a brilliant blue colour.  It is very strange to stand at the top and look down on this blue lake on one side and the dry flat plains far below on the other.

The Blue Lake

Just outside the little town of Keith, we found this Landrover on a pole commemorating the land clearance scheme in the 1950's to clear native bush making way for grasslands better suited to the settlers/squaters sheep and cattle.  Landrovers were used for this project...

Outside Bordertown (near the Vivtoria-South Australia border) we came across a 'sanctuary'/breeding programme of white kangaroos.  On closer inspection they were just albino's and not very attractive to look at, but they had over 40 there!  A pretty strange sight, and sad to see that the fascination for breeding albino wildlife is not unique to South Africa's white lions...

Australia is full of 'Giant Statues'.  Every guide book you read lists the big items that you can see in an area.  We've come across 2 so far - The Giant Olive outside the town of Tailem Bend and the giant Koala in Dadswells Bridge.  This Giant Koala is 14m tall. We think the real ones are much better looking... 

We thought the name of this town was rather odd.  We couldn't help but ask ourselves "What goes on here?".  We're sure the answer is pretty simple.... "Nhill! "

There is some pretty aggressive advertising in Australia.  Much of it is in-you-face and some of it we feel misses the mark a bit.  These "Arrive alive" signs on the highway were apparently pretty self explanatory... we were left a little confused?

"Don't drive like a button?"

"Don't drive like an weight?"

"Don't drive like a rooster?"