Pinnaroo – An Overnighter before leaving South Australia – Day 306 (Pt.2)

Having visited Wynarka and Karoonda we continued on to our overnighter at Pinnaroo. In caravanning a stop is typically referred to as an overnighter when you pull up late evening and set-up without detaching the van from the car, eat, sleep and do whatever else you might do of an evening and then leave first thing the following morning. Typically no sightseeing is scheduled in.

We actually arrived into Pinnaroo, the centre of a reasonably successful farming community most recently focusing on potatoes, at around 2 pm. By the time we set-up at the Pinnaroo RV Camp (free and pictured above), prepared and had a leisurely lunch it was around 3.30pm. Rather than have an afternoon nap, tempting though that was, we decided to have a walk around the small township, not expecting to see very much. As it turned out there was ample to keep us amused for the best part of a couple of hours.

Our camp was only a couple of hundred metres from the main street and on arriving there the first building we encountered was one of a couple of pubs/ hotels in town – the Golden Grain Hotel.

The hotel was established in 1906 as the then aptly named Land of Promise Hotel – the railway had arrived in town and farming in the area was booming. The hotel burned down and had to be rebuilt in 1913 when it became the Commercial Hotel. It was renamed the Golden Grain Hotel in 1958. 

The hotel was open and a few clients were having a drink in the alfresco area on the main street. Apart from a few other people, passing travellers, at the highway filling station at the other end of the town these were the only people we saw as we walked though the otherwise deserted town where the tourist office, museum and other businesses seemed to be closed for the day. When I started writing this review I seemed to recall it was a Sunday when we visited which could have explained things. On checking we were actually there on a Wednesday so who knows what was going on.

The flag at the war memorial was flying at half-mast. After some research, I have discovered that there was an order for flags to be flown at half-mast on the following day in the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria only, to mark the funeral of a prominent ex-politician. Perhaps the good people of Pinnaroo, less than 10 kilometers outside of Victoria, decided to commemorate the event and lower the flag before they shut up shop the day before! Was the whole town in mourning and was that a wake had seen at the Golden Grain Hotel?

A deserted main street in Pinnaroo

While the town, for years, prospered from the railway passing through, differing track gauges between South Australia and Victoria made rail transport cumbersome. The line through Pinnaroo finally closed when Viterra, the leading marketer and handler of grains in South Australia, announced that no more grain would be carried by rail from 1 August 2015, with the 2015 harvest to be entirely transported by road.

The railway line and infrastructure, including the station building out of shot in the picture below, lie dormant and unused since 2015.

Street side of the town’s combined World War I and World War II memorial I encountered a rather novel (at least to me) clock – look closely at the ‘numbers’.

Pinnaroo War Memorial

Also nearby the war memorial was the Pinnaroo Soldiers Memorial Band Rotunda.

What made this otherwise run of the mill rotunda interesting was the addition of a wind rotatable model aircraft at the apex of its roof. The aircraft is a model Morane-Saulnier N, a French monoplane fighter aircraft used in World War I – the first such plane to be so used according to the plaque.

Passing by the town’s second hotel, the deserted Pinnaroo Hotel

we soon came to the end of the main street from where I could see a prominent entry to Pinnaroo Wetlands which we decided to explore.

The wetlands, the former railway dam, were small but nonetheless well formed and made for a pleasant stroll.

What particularly appealed to me was an abundance of mosaic art dotted around the wetlands. In 2013, the community came together to produce these artworks, with the help of local artists.

Leaving the Wetlands and retracing our steps back though the still deserted town centre we stopped for a look at a small animal enclosure, maintained by the local Lions Club, across the street from where we were staying. In addition to the kangaroos and emus there were also various colourful birds enclosed in cages. As I do not condone keeping birds in small cages I took no pictures.

I did have a chuckle at the positioning of the sign pictured below – right in with the kangaroos and emus – and wondered if I was being invited to select and take my own meat for the bbq from the animal enclosure! As far as I know, Australia is the only country in the world where the people actually eat their national animals – both the emu and the kangaroo featuring on the national coat of arms. As an aside, the kangaroo and emu were chosen to symbolise a nation moving forward, based on the fact that neither animal can move backwards easily.

As it was, we had our dinner already planned so did not have to consider this matter further. Indeed it was now time for that dinner and our last night’s sleep in South Australia ,for a while ….

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The next review from my Adelaide to Canberra road trip can be found HERE.

Should you wish to follow this road trip from the beginning please start HERE.

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