We have left the Bendleby Ranges travelling south to the ruins of Johnburgh, a small town now reduced to two people. Some beautiful stone work but now chiefly a relic of a time where people tried to farm beyond the Goyder line, the folly of not listening to the science.

We continue on to Carrieton looking at old ruins, lunching at Hawker and then setting up camp with a view of the Elder range and Wilpena Pound. The red moon, just a sliver showing, made for a good night sky shot.

After inspecting northern pastoral lands devastated by a drought in 1864–65, Surveyor-General George Woodroffe Goyder advised the colonial government to discourage farmers from planting crops to the north of a line delineating the extent of the 12-inch (30cm) annual rainfall.

Goyder’s findings were embodied in the first schedule of the Waste Lands Alienation Act 1872, which permitted farmers to purchase land on credit only within designated agricultural areas. From east to west, ‘Goyder’s Line of Rainfall’ ran approximately from the Hundred of Pinnaroo, swung northwest to the Hundred of Commooroo and the Melrose area, southwest through Yorke Peninsula to the Hundred of Wallaroo, then northwest across Eyre Peninsula from the Hundred of Hawker to south of Darke’s Peak, and across to the Hundred of Chilundie near Thevenard.

The law was short-lived; favourable seasons in the north encouraged the government to pass Act No. 22 of 1874 repealing the 1872 Act and allowing the sale of land under credit agreement outside ‘Goyder’s Line’. A run of bad seasons in the 1880s halted the northward progression, forcing many farmers to abandon their homesteads and, more often than not, a severely eroded landscape. Source, click here.

Today we toured the southern Flinders Ranges, checking out Bunyeroo Gorge. Which, after rain here about a month ago it was great to see water flowing in the gorge.