Karoonda and the Mallee

We were heading for Loxton a week or so ago and our preferred route is to go via the back roads and miss out on the freeway traffic on the way to Murray Bridge. We go through this town, which seems to be growing more and more each time we have gone through it, and turn off to go to Karoonda which is on the way to Loxton.
We generally stop there as the town's people have made a very pleasant area for tourists to pull into and have a break. You can go across the road for food or you can take a walk in the 

 centenary park they have created with indigenous plants along lovely paths.
It was great to see an old windmill head mounted
 to remind us of how they used to squeak and grown in the wind whilst pumping up the underground water into tanks for to water their stock or for the homesteads gardens or even household use. As the base says...No wind...No water....No life....

 Being in the Mallee too, there are these wide open skies with fabulous cloud formations.
And they also, have had a good winter for rainfall so far with the crops looking very hale and hearty and the native shrubs looking wonderful. There were quite a few eremophilas
starting to flower and one plant we were unsure of what it was but it had the most interesting clump of what looked like bottle brushes but weren't .

The Mallee of course was eminently suited to the Merino sheep which grew dense wool, so the community have erected this statue as a tribute to the sheep industry of a magnificent stud Merino ram.
I remember helping to get a number of these magnificent stud Rams on Anlaby, where they were kept in a special ram shed,  ready for the Adelaide Show in the mid fifties. The wool was of amazingly soft handle and very very dense.
Those were the days.........