On Wednesday July 27th we cleaned up Nudlamutana hut in the morning, packed the Outback Subaru, and slowly drove to Blinman via the Yunta Road. We had lunch at Blinman — a pastie – -then drove onto Quorn. We stayed in a cabin in the Quorn caravan park and had a pub dinner at the local Transcontinental hotel. We spent the next day in Quorn to explore the town and the surrounding area and to allow me to do some photography.

It was going to be a while before we returned to northern SA. I wondered what would happen to the large format deep time abstractions project that I was working on. Would I be able to continue with it.

Quorn is surrounded by semi-arid grazing country. The Heysen Trail and the Mawson Trail, a pair of long distance trails dedicated respectively to walking and cycling, pass through the town.

 Because of its location at the edge of the southern Flinders Ranges and its old style charm Quorn and the region are popular with filmmakers. More than forty films have been made in Quorn and surrounding areas, including The Sundowners, Sunday Too Far Away, Gallipoli, The Shiralee and Russell Crowe’s The Water Diviner. 

It was back to familiar photographic territory — topographics — of a white settler pastoral town built around the Great Northern Railway and the Ghan. It became a railway centre and a junction for the lines that crossed Australia from Perth to Sydney, and Adelaide to Alice Springs between 1917 and 1937.

 The railways were re-routed after WW11. The last Ghan was in 1956. What remains is a  tourist railway service through the Pichi Richi Pass from Quorn to Port Augusta. The  Old Ghan line to Maree, Oodnadatta, and Alice Springs was left to the elements.  This is pioneer history.