Great news. We are back in Erldunda and back in the Telstra Mobile Network. This means that I can use my Telstra Dongle to access the internet now that I have been able to recharge it. Life is suddenly full of opportunities when you have a recharged dongle!
Now, "What is all this about Erldunda and the Centre of the Centre?", I hear you ask. Well it is about the location of the centre of the Australian continent and it starts like this.
In 1860, on April 22 to be exact, the explorer, John McDouall Stuart, on one of his many expeditions to find a route from the south of Australia to the north through the centre, found himself at a spot where his trusty sextant and chronometer told him that he was equidistant from the north, south, east and west coasts of the mainland of Australia. Not unreasonably, he understood this to mean that he was at the centre of the continent.
He marked this spot on his map and named a nearby hill Central Mount Sturt after his friend and mentor, one of the other great explorers of Australia, Captain Charles Sturt.
Now here is where an interesting little quirk of Australian history occurs. Stuart wrote all this up in his diaries and when he got back to civilisation, civilisation being defined as Adelaide 1860, he had them typeset for publication because he needed to make a quid, but that's another story. In doing this, the typesetter made a mistake and set Sturt as Stuart. Before the error was discovered and could be rectified, it had found its way into official government documents. As we all know, official government documents do not contain errors and so the name became Central Mount Stuart and remains so to this day. So, poor old Charles missed out on a monument that he richly deserved and John received an honour that he did not seek and which was equally well deserved. I suspect that John was a bit embarrassed by this because he may have felt that his fellow explorers and members of the Royal Geographical Society may have thought that by naming a mountain after himself, he was a bit up himself. Anyway, I digress.
So, here we are with the centre of Australia defined as being Central Mount Stuart which is about 6 kms off the Stuart Highway (not the Sturt Highway!) partway between Alice Springs and The Devil's Marbles (time to look at your maps).
For years, many Australians who liked to think about these things were quite happy to think that this was the centre of the Australia. Other Australians who liked to think about these things were not quite so sure. Then we get to 1988, the bicentennial of European occupation of Australia. Big celebrations and lots of activities to mark the event. Some people thought that one such activity should be to locate the correct position of the centre of the continent. So some members of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia got together and did a lot of complex measurements at no less than 24,500 points along the highwater mark around the Australian coast. They then fed all these data into a really good computer which told them that it had found the real centre of the continent and that it was correct to within an area of 10 square metres. They named this point the Lambert Gravitational Centre after Douglas Lambert, a former director of the Division of National Mapping and a major contributor to the mapping of Australia
In the 1930's Cecil Madigan who knew an awful lot about the geology of Central Australia, calculated the centre of the continent by the simple method of using a metal cut-out of Australia with a plumb-bob and string. When he found the point where his cut-out was in equilibrium, that is, when suspended by the string, it always returned to the horizontal after being moved, he knew that he had found the gravitational centre. Interestingly enough, by using this method, he selected a point less than 11 kilometres due west to the Lambert Centre position.
Other people have also located the centre at other points in this area. But I am not going to go into that because it spoils a good story.
So we come to Erldunda. What has all this got to do with Erldunda's title? Well, the thing is that the Lambert Centre is located on the edge of the Simpson Desert about 120 kms or so from Erldunda. As we all know, in Australian distance terms, 120 odd kms is nothing, its just next door. So, on that basis, the Erldundians, all four of them, have claimed the centre for themselves and given themselves the title of Centre of the Centre because Erldunda is in Central Australia. Simple, isn't it?
By now, all of you will be asking yourselves, "Why is he rabbiting on about all this"? "Who cares?"
The answer is, "because there is bugger all else to do in Erldunda on a Thursday afternoon, or any afternoon for that matter." Except, of course, go to the pub, which is what we are going to do now.
But before I do that, I should explain that Erldunda is a typical outback Australian roadhouse. It has a caravan park/ campground at the rear of a complex of buildings. The buildings house a servo (filling station to my American readers), a small general store, a takeaway food and coffee outlet and, most importantly, a tavern and it is the tavern to which we are going at 4.30 because that's when Happy Hour starts.
Tonight, I hope to load some King's Canyon pictures onto the previous posts. So, if you are interested, you should be able to have a look at them over the next couple of days.
No comments:
Post a Comment