Day 39 Spent the day at Menindee, a town on the Darling river with picturesque lakes around it. As there was rain last night, most of the road into and around the National Park were flooded as they are unsealed. So we contented ourselves with reading the Sunday papers beside the Darling and then going to have a look at the Weir at Menindee lake. Overnight: Lake View Caravan Park, Broken Hill

Day 38 Checked out some of the sights in Broken Hill including The Big Picture Gallery which among other paintings houses a huge canvas which was a lot more impressive than we were expecting. In the afternoon drove out to see the Living Desert Sculpture Park which is a series of 12 huge sculptures on top of a hill. We opted for the 1km uphill walk rather than driving to the top. Once there it is rather strange and quirky but impressive. The sky was getting d...

Day 37 We were seated in the classroom of School of the Air by 8:15am This was originally setup making use of the pedal radio, broadcasting lessons to the kids in remote outback stations. Later, car batteries were used as power supplies and later still the interactive lessons were converted to be given over the Internet. Today was the last day of term and they were having their Easter assembly. It was very cute "this is Lucy from Pooncarie, over" and Ben from...

Day 36 Getting a tensioner replaced in the car (something to do with the fan belt ?!?) so have a little courtesy car to potter around town in, a Diahatsu Hairdryer or something like that. As Broken Hill is so isolated from the rest of New South Wales, it operates on South Australia time, a difference of 30 minutes. Found out today that BHP of BHP Billiton stands for the Broken Hill Proprietory Company Ltd. It was setup back in 1885 and like most Australian to...

Day 35 Visited the absolutely excellent Wadlata Outback Centre in Port Augusta. This series of video presentations and interactive displays charted the history and hardships of early settlers as well as insight into aboriginal methods, tools and dreamtime. Michael had a go at trying to type out a message in morse code but all he got was a series of E's (dot) and T's (dash) rather than any meaningful combination of the two. In fairness my attempt wasn't any be...