Day Two on my Eyre Peninsula field trip. This morning I left both Tumby Bay and the bitumen and wound my way gingerly inland on an unsealed road to Koppio. The landscape was dramatic – the deep blue rain-filled sky contrasted with the biscuit coloured hills and every so often there were flashes of green as Port Lincoln parrots with their distinctive black and yellow ring necks flew across the road.
Today I visited the Koppio Smithy Museum, then cross country to the Tod Reservoir Heritage Display, housed in one of the original 1922 homes built at the reservoir when the renowned water scheme was first established; then back to the highway heading south to Port Lincoln to visit the Axel Stenross Maritime Museum and the Kotz Collection of Stationary Engines.
It was a day of meeting more enthusiastic volunteers and passionate collectors; but was it me or did everything start with B today? Blacksmiths, boats, Byron’s carriage, a barbed wire collection, bag lifters, Black Tuesday Bushfires, a chair from the Buffalo, Blackstone engines … then at my last port of call, I met Brian and Barry.
Newly-built meeting rooms seemed to be another recurring theme. The one at Koppio museum, courtesy of an arts grant and a lot of hard work on the part of the committee, is a beauty and will be a great boon to them. The Boys at Stenross have also nearly completed their new meeting space at the top of the stairs next to their office – in fact the work they have done throughout the museum with little outside funding is incredible and a credit to them.
Today was definitely a day of boys and their sheds.
I’ll be downloading more pictures from this trip on to Flickr very soon.