WHYALLA

Once again we were in a mining town, with that familiar tang in the air and the dustiness, all surfaces are covered in red dust, a lot of the buildings in the town have been painted a dark red, in an effort to disguise this tinge.
Day one we drove to several lookouts to get a comprehensive idea of the layout of the town and see the view out into Spencer Gulf.
There is a huge steel smelting and manufacturing works producing a range of products.
Going to the visitor centre we found the actual HMAS Whyalla placed on a raised cradle, we joined a tour over her, she had been built at the now defunct Whyalla Shipyards and she did stirling work in the Second World War as a mine sweeper.
After she was decommissioned she was sold to a Victorian company, later the Whyalla Council delightedly bought her for $5,000 and at a cost of $500,000 set her up on dry land for all to see and enjoy.
On that trip we also saw a fantastic model railway containing 400 metres of track with multiple trains going around. The landscape reflects the countryside along the railways to and from Whyalla, Iron Knob, Port Augusta, Mambray Creek, Snowtown and Adelaide.
We did a tour of the One Steel Trak Lok Steel Rail manufacturing centre seeing a blast furnace. Coke making using 65,000 litres of recycled water to cool, and the heaps of slag being recycled to build barriers against dust from the mine blowing into the township.
Saw blocks of steel dropping out of casting then stacks of them being organised by a machine called a 'saddler'. It is then manufactured by huge rollers into 7 different shapes to suit the needs of their customers.
Then we drove the 50 klm to Iron Knob where mining began in the district in 1899 and it has been estimated an average of 1 million tons of iron ore per year was taken out of the open cut mine, totalling 150 million until ceasing operations in 1999.
Due to it being Australia Day the Visitors Centre and tours over the mine were closed, so we enjoyed a little drive around the township, now only partially occupied and so there were some quite derelict buildings.