 Remember the Tourism Australia promotional campaign ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’. Well, if you mention to your mates you’re off to the Caroona Creek Conservation Park, you could hear something similar from them. We found a brand-new conservation park that I bet none of you have ever been to before. In fact, this park is so new, it’s literally not even on the map yet!
We heard about the park by chance while chatting with a friend who had been there not long before. After a bit of detective work, we found some information, packed up the camper trailer and the kids and set out to explore Caroona Creek Conservation Park in South Australia.
Located by road about 60km north-east of Burra, the park hasn’t officially been gazetted yet, so it doesn’t appear on any map at the time that this article is being written. This proved a little tricky for us, as we got lost a few times trying to find the park, owing to the fact that it’s not well-signposted yet either.
We had arranged to meet up with friends there and camp for a week. Not only did they leave their map behind, then tried to follow my sketchy directions from memory, they resorted to asking the locals and none of them had heard of the park. After driving around for several hours, they finally came across it by accident.
The moral of the story is: if you want to find this park, contact the Department of Environment and Heritage by phone, fax or email and get a detailed map from them!
Being a new park, the signs and facilities are limited, but also brand new. With the Heysen Trail running smack bang through the middle of the park, one of the two designated bush camp areas is set up with a hut, rainwater and drop loos and is there to cater for the bushwalkers passing along the trail.
We camped at the second camp area where an old shearing shed provides shelter from any bad weather that occasionally does blow through. There is also a rainwater tank and spotlessly clean, new drop toilets.
We were there for a week in the school holidays and had the whole place to ourselves. The friends who we were with had gone to Red Banks Conservation Park down the road on their way up to Caroona and said it was packed out with campers, and full of broken glass and other rubbish. A sad reflection on the current state of some well-used parks.
The only time we had any noise to contend with was at dusk and dawn from the deafening bird life. Apparently, there are numerous species of birds in the park, including a handful of rarer types.
In terms of terrain, Caroona Creek Conservation Park is mallee scrub meets Southern Flinders Ranges Gorges. Both camping areas are located down in the mallee scrub and this section is reasonably flat, open country.
At the eastern end of the park, a short drive from our camp area, were ruins of one of the original homesteads in the area. The ruin known as Thomas Hut originally housed a farming family in the area, and there was an information plaque there describing these early pioneers. There were plenty of bits and pieces lying around, such as old crockery, old glass bottles and fencing materials etc, and the kids enjoyed hunting through these for their treasure collection.
Back at our camp area, in the old shearing shed, the kids actually started a display of ‘treasures’ they had found around the park. They were very excited to show me through their collection of ram’s horns, handmade nails, bits of tin and shiny rocks (but, unfortunately, none of the precious stuff that we could have retired on, however).
From the old shed main camp (our base camp), we headed up to the top of the hills and over to the western boundary of the park. With a great view overlooking the south-eastern part of the park, this western track also provides four-wheel-drive access to the park.
The track through here is strictly four-wheel-drive only and it’s this section that allows access to the Southern Flinders Ranges terrain. As we bounced and bumped over rocks and through dry creek beds, we had several pairs of wedge-tail eagles soaring majestically along with us. We saw plenty of wildlife at this end of the park, no doubt attracted to the creek that runs in places through this area.
On one stinking hot day, we pulled the cars off the track and made our way down to the creek to play in the water and see how many tadpoles we could catch (and release).
As usual, the kids started with just dipping their toes in and before long, were somehow wet from top to bottom. The water, however, was crystal clear and we had great fun catching tadpoles there all afternoon.
On our final day, we followed a tourist drive out from the western boundary of the park and headed out towards Pandappa Conservation Park, about 30km north.
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