West of Adelaide, across the Spencer Gulf, sits the Eyre Peninsula. It's very dry, very empty and somewhat of a last bastion of an almost vanished Australia. There are no fast food outlets here, all the servos are unique, old school style still refilling gas bottles rather than swapping them and selling local produce such as oysters and beef. The traffic is sparse and the cars, when you see them, are in various stages of delapidation as South Oz, like WA, allows rego renewals without a pink slip. The West coast of the peninsula, feels like WA, 20 years ago. Guys sleep in their cars on the edges of surf breaks, then gather down the local still in their boardies and singlets to swap tales of derring-do involving waves, big fish and boats. No pokies, no massive RSL's, half day Sat and all day Sunday closing; there's a lot to like. There is also a lot of empty land.
On the road to Streaky Bay, the first major town on our travel plan, you could choose to go left to the uniquely named town of Poochera. Spectacular in its ordinariness, Poochera was nonetheless the location of an Australian story that highlights the vast emptiness of the continent.
Drive along the highway and you'll pass fields as wide and bare as the Nullabour, windmills working to dredge up bore water and swathes of empty land populated only by Mallee scrub and probably colonies of dinosaur ant. This is a rare species of nocturnal ant found quite by chance, in 1977, near the amusingly named Poochera, apparently by a scientist going out one night to have a wee. Supposedly, he looked down as he was relieving himself and spied the large eyed honey coloured ant and knew, as only the commited entymologist would, that this was a massive find. The ant had only been seen once before, over 2000kms away in WA, near Esperance, in 1931. That's 44 years between sightings. The ant turned out to be the second most primitive life form on the planet, unchanged for possibly 100million years. Only in a place as ancient as Australia could there still exist such a wonderful creature and it is unsurprising that the empty Eyre Peninsula has provided its habitat.