Now we’re Cook-in
Our next, and only remaining Off-train Experience came at the ghost town of Cook. Per the information on the Indian Pacific brochure,
Cook sits 1138 kilometres from Adelaide and 1523 kilometres from Perth. The closest highway is the Eyre Highway a 100 kilometre drive away.
The nearest major town is Ceduna, approximately a five hour drive southeast and the local doctor is located about a 12 hour drive away in Port Augusta.
It might not be the actual middle of nowhere but it’s pretty close. Here’s a satellite view of Cook from Google maps. The blue marker is where the Indian Pacific stops.
Now a ghost town, Cook was one of many settlements established every 30 kilometers or so to serve the Trans Australian Railway that was completed in 1917. It’s not, by the way, named for Captain James Cook who has other recognition in many places in Australia. It’s named for Sir Joseph Cook who had served as the country’s sixth prime minister in 1913 and 1914.
Over time, Cook became a major base for maintenance groups along the rail line with a population that skyrocketed to some 200 people. This meant there was a school,
a swimming pool, and a general store. As the town grew, the idea arose to locate a hospital there. It would serve an area of some 800 kilometers. With no one knocking down the door to take the job, the Archbishop of Sydney posted a public appeal in 1932 that read, “A munificent salary cannot be paid but the man who accepts the post will be provided with an aeroplane.” The hospital, which was named for Bishop Sydney Kirkby did open in 1937 and it remained open for some six decades. Despite the rather sardonic comment on this marker in the town,
the hospital treated about 900 patients annually.
Ghost Town
(Every night the curtain falls upon the day gone down.)
Then came the late 1990s and the rush to privatization. In 1997, the passenger services of the Australian National Railway were sold to the privately run Australian Southern Railroad making Cook superfluous in the eyes of the new managers. By 2009, the population had dwindled to four and it could be officially deemed a ghost town.
I provided my readers with this definition of a ghost town in the post An Earthquake makes a Lake and Labor Day closes a city – Part 2.
(A location doesn’t need to be completely abandoned by all its human inhabitants to wear the description ghost town. If substantial elements of its past remain visible, a once populous place, be it a city, a town or even a neighborhood, can become a ghost town when it is still populated, as long as it has a population so much smaller than it had at its peak that the area is nearly unrecognizable. In many cases, ghost towns are created when towns that arose to support a single economic activity collapse when that activity ends or fails. However, natural disasters such as floods, sustained droughts, or human causes such as war or nuclear disasters can also create ghost towns.)
Wandering around the town a few of us had the opportunity to chat with one of the town managers. He’s one of three or four permanent residents and his main job is to see that the dongas (temporary or demountable housing) are maintained for the train drivers who stay overnight there generally on the leg between Perth and Port Augusta. However, they have other jobs.
Since trains still stop in Cook to refuel, they need to maintain those facilities. They need to manage the water facilities. There’s no working water tower and no groundwater so all the water is delivered by the trains that pass through. They also, to some degree, maintain the decaying infrastructure (so the tourists mainly arriving on the Indian Pacific can safely walk around the place) as well as the buildings such as they are (so the tourists mainly arriving on the Indian Pacific have as many photo ops as a ghost town can present without threat of a building collapsing). And, of course, there are signs of life and habitation such as this in his yard.
We also learned that because it’s so isolated, the town managers actually work on a rotating basis.
After our stop in Cook, we reboarded the train where most of us returned to the club car and not only for the unlimited open bar. The club car had been and would remain a lively place of conversation not merely within our group but also with many of the Aussies making their own train trek – most of whom were continuing on to Sydney.
And the conversation would be wide ranging from politics (especially the impending U S presidential election), family, friendship, and the joys (and sometimes hardships) of travel – particularly ambitious travel like crossing Australia by train. Or, as some will do, circling Australia by car. It’s a trip many of them will take as retirees.
They will do this by using the famous Highway 1. (I’ll report on my ride along a short stretch of this road very near the end of this trip.) Australia’s Highway 1 is a network of six highways (1, National 1, M1, A1, B1, R1) that effectively circumnavigates the continent.
[From Wikipedia By Evad37Original author of GIS data: Copyright – Commonwealth of Australia Geoscience Australia 2013. – Own work;GIS data sources: “GEODATA TOPO 5M 2004” from Geoscience Australia, CC BY-SA 3.0.]
In a tasty bit of irony, it connects all the mainland capital cities to one another with one notable exception – Canberra – the country’s national capital.
The conversation could have continued for much longer than it did but this would be an early night for many in our group. The train was scheduled to arrive in Adelaide at about 07:00 so we needed to be out of our cabins and finished breakfast in time to disembark and be on the platform ready to claim our luggage and transfer to our bus for a ride around Australia’s fifth largest city.
I will end by noting that in those club car chats, I met several kindred spirits who like puns among the Aussies on the train. One of them was N whose shirt demonstrates both the inclination to puns and one reason for the connection we made. (Puns are good to great since I believe there’s almost no such thing as a bad pun. That reaction comes from people who are secretly jealous they didn’t think of it first.)
