A walk this morning further along the track to the north of the west of the road. It continues in quite a way with plenty of camping spots available. We then headed back and to the east of the road to the Original Jupiter Well (now pretty much filled in).
Breakfast then collecting the washing we had done last night. Not a lot of moisture out here so it dried overnight.
On the road again and 18km down the track we came across another of Len Beadell markers - well a marker pointing to the Len Beadell marker a little off the road (on the original track). It was here that Len's grader suffered a catastrophic gearbox failure which resulted in a stop to the road building until the following year.
Further along the track we came across an abandoned community. We're aware that it was called Nyinmy but have been unable to find out anything more about it. By the look of the tractor and the buildings (colorbond) it would appear that the community was created in recent times (well in the last 40 years) With a little help from "google" did find the following:
The Pintupi are an Australian Aboriginal group who are part of the Western Desert cultural group and whose homeland is in the area west of Lake MacDonald and Lake Mackay in Western Australia. These people moved (or were moved) into the Aboriginal communities of Papunya and Haasts Bluff in the west of the Northern Territory in the 1940s–1980s. The last Pintupi to leave their traditional lifestyle in the desert, in 1984, are a group known as the Pintupi Nine, also sometimes called the "lost tribe". Over recent decades groups of Pintupi have moved back to their traditional country, as part of what has come to be called the outstation movement. These groups set up the communities of Kintore (Walungurru in Pintupi) in the Northern Territory, Kiwirrkura and Jupiter Well (in Pintupi: Puntutjarrpa) in Western Australia. There was also a recent dramatic increase in Pintupi populations and speakers of the Pintupi language.
Inhabiting a very remote part of Australia, the Pintupi were among the last Aboriginal Australians to leave their traditional lifestyle. For many, this occurred as a result of the Blue Streak missile tests which began in the 1960s. As these missiles would have a trajectory landing in the desert areas known to still be inhabited, government officials decided that these people should be relocated. A number of trips were made to the area and Aboriginal people were located and moved (or encouraged to move) into one of the settlements on the eastern fringe of the desert, such as Haasts Bluff, Hermannsburg and Papunya.
Could Myinmy be the Outstation mentioned for Jupiter Well? It is still a mystery (to us) as to why it's been abandoned. We did think that it might have been a case of "whitefellows" setting up the community in the middle of nowhere and there being no ownership for it from the indigenous population but reading the above, perhaps that is not the case.
A photographic camel and a photographic snake as we travelled along - not that the sanake hung around too long.
We called into the Kiwirrkurra Community for fuel. Found the roadhouse but no one in sight. Some kids on bikes told us to knock on the red door but that didn't get us a result either. As we had enough fuel to get us to Kintore we didn't hang around too long. Later we thought that perhaps the community was operating on Northern Territory time (were no too far from the border) and in the NT it would be lunchtime.
Before heading back to the road we had a look at the remains of Len Beadell's ration truck. It had been moved from the road to the community to stop souvenir hunters from taking bits. You just have to shake your head, don't you!
The burning of the ration truck just added to Len's troubles after the transmission failure of the grader:
On 8 November the grader broke down with a major transmission failure. Further road making was interrupted, and a lengthy towing operation of 800 km back to Giles began, using the bulldozer to tow the grader, with the water trailer attached behind it. The average speed of the bulldozer train was 3 km per hour, with an estimate of about a month for the journey. Every two hours while the bulldozer was travelling, a halt for greasing the track rollers was required. Towing had barely begun when the cook's ration truck with all of its supplies caught fire and was burnt out on 12 November. Beadell was forced to make an emergency trip to Alice Springs to obtain replacement food, a return trip of around 3000 km. Meanwhile, the towing operation continued, and the team was reunited 10 km west of Sandy Blight Junction. Reporting on the funny side of a total disaster, Len Beadell tells the story that seeing that the 1400 l water tank was boiling and set to explode, he shot a hole in the side of it with his revolver, and finding some tea leaves in the debris, made a cup of tea. The sugar had melted into the sand so it was a question of one shovelful or two?
Back out on the GJR we had a brief stop at the Len Beadell marker indicating the stop where the ration truck actually burnt and another at the grave of Maurice Pollard who we presume perished when his vehicle broke down, before stopping for the night at Buck Hill just before the Northern Territory Border.
We climbed the hill, a steep, rocky climb but great views. And then another glorious sunset.
