Day 112 Balladonia

Today we left early for our drive to Balladonia. We stopped at Grass Patch along the way a small town and locality in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia. The town was named after a nearby farm of the same name that had been settled around 1896 and was renowned for bountiful crops and good grass.

The townsite was proposed in 1910 when land in the area was being opened up, and as a watering spot for the planned Esperance to Norseman railway, which was completed 15 years later. Although the area was already well known as "Grass Patch", locals sought a more suitable name for the town when it was gazetted in 1923. Of the three nominated, "Warden" was chosen. However, objections were soon raised about this name and later the same year it was changed back to Grass Patch.








As you continue heading north towards Norseman, the highway runs adjacent to and eventually crosses parts of the massive, ancient Lake Dundas salt lake system. This creates striking white, sun-glistened outback vistas on either side of the road.




Salmon Gums is a small remote locality in WA's Goldfields-Esperance region. Named after the salmon gum trees.



Norseman is the southern gateway to Western Australia. It marks the start/end of the epic Eyre Highway that spans 1, 675 kilometres across the Nullarbor Plain. The largest limestone karst landscape on Earth. Norseman the town actually takes its name from a horse. Legend has it that Laurie Sinclair's horse 'Norseman' scraped the ground with his hoof and unearthed the first gold nugget in 1894. His find also led to the discovery of one of the richest quartz reefs ever mined in Australia.










Balladonia marks the start (or end) of the famous Ninety Mile Straight, one of the longest straight stretches of road in the world, located on the western edge of the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia. The town became internationally famous in July 1979 when NASA’s Skylab space station crashed nearby. This was the same event that I wrote about in Esperance. The wreckage from the disaster covered a large area of the outback.

The world's longest golf course is the Nullarbor Links, an 18-hole, par-72 course spanning 1,365 kilometers (848 miles) along the Eyre Highway across southern Australia. One of the holes is here in Balladonia No 12 or 7 depending on the direction of your travel from Ceduna to Kalgoorlie.

The 1950s Redex Round Australia Reliability Trial was a massive, grueling 10,000-mile (16,000 km) car rally that tested standard production vehicles across some of the harshest outback tracks in the world. The inaugural 1953 event looped the eastern half of Australia, while the 1954 and 1955 trials went all the way around the entire continent, passing through remote Western Australian locations like Balladonia, Port Hedland, and Perth. Drivers faced extreme dust, mud, mechanical breakages, sleep deprivation, and boiling tropical heat, capturing the nation's imagination and boosting standard car sales overnight.