White Cliffs - 11 July 2014

It was a cold morning with the temperature below zero, but it was quite warm later in the day till the wind picked up late in the day.

We had a good walk round part of White Cliffs this morning. It is very spread out over a few kilometres.

We walked up past the sports club. The fields are named after Bill O'Reilly, the Australian cricketer, who played at the time of Bradman I think. He was born in White Cliffs. It was an uninspiring field, quite desolate and stony, as was the golf course which we went past later.

In 1981 a Solar Power Station was built as an experimental facility by the Australian National University. It consisted of 14 sun tracking dishes and supplied, for a fee, to the local hospital, school, post office and 12 residences. As a result it was the first commercial solar power station in the world. It closed in 2005.

After lunch we drove the Heritage Trail which takes you through the various claims and old shafts of White Cliffs. The heritage areas have names like Everybody's, Busybody's and Nobody's and on each of the areas was a toilet with the same name!

We stopped off at he Southern Cross Opal Gallery to have a look. It's funny, when you think of a Gallery, you picture a pretty classy looking building but that's not the case here in White Cliffs. It is dug into the hill and it is called a dugout. There were 6-8 wrecks of cars around the entrance. Cars are just left where they drop. In the window of the General Store are ads for Dugouts For Sale.

We like White Cliffs. It is an interesting place and if you were here long enough to meet the locals, they would be fascinating too. When we did the tour yesterday, Graham said he works in the café during the day, does the mine tour at 3pm for a couple of hours and then goes down the mine. The fellow at the Southern Cross Gallery today said he goes down the mine for a few hours before opening the Gallery at 9am.