Part V
After our huge gastronomic experience we decided that a walk was in order for our last day and set off to walk around within Wilpena Pound itself. We settled on the walk to Hills Homestead which is just over 3kms from the Tourist office. The homestead was settled in the 1800’s and was run by five of the Hills children whilst their father and mother ran another homestead some distance (about 100 km’s) away. The boys were looked after by their 12 year old sister Jessie who was sent by her parents to care for them. What an experience it must have been for the poor girl. At the restored homestead there are details of how she and her brothers tried to make a profitable living on the holding through flood and drought, trying grazing and then cropping. There are details of the children joining the rest of the family at their parents’ property for Christmas during a drought and praying for rain. Rain they did get, but there was so much rain that when Jessie and the boys returned to the farm all the roads they had worked so hard to put in place to facilitate taking their grain crop to market were washed away. So no more cropping was to be attempted.
Finally after her father died all but one of the boys left the property and Jessie went to live with one of her sisters where I hope she had a better life than she would have endured on the station. There was also a magnificent carving of Indigenous men and that is the photo.
Our next stop will be back down to Hawker and then up to Lyndhurst ready for our exciting flight in a helicopter over Lake Eyre.
After our huge gastronomic experience we decided that a walk was in order for our last day and set off to walk around within Wilpena Pound itself. We settled on the walk to Hills Homestead which is just over 3kms from the Tourist office. The homestead was settled in the 1800’s and was run by five of the Hills children whilst their father and mother ran another homestead some distance (about 100 km’s) away. The boys were looked after by their 12 year old sister Jessie who was sent by her parents to care for them. What an experience it must have been for the poor girl. At the restored homestead there are details of how she and her brothers tried to make a profitable living on the holding through flood and drought, trying grazing and then cropping. There are details of the children joining the rest of the family at their parents’ property for Christmas during a drought and praying for rain. Rain they did get, but there was so much rain that when Jessie and the boys returned to the farm all the roads they had worked so hard to put in place to facilitate taking their grain crop to market were washed away. So no more cropping was to be attempted.
Finally after her father died all but one of the boys left the property and Jessie went to live with one of her sisters where I hope she had a better life than she would have endured on the station. There was also a magnificent carving of Indigenous men and that is the photo.
Our next stop will be back down to Hawker and then up to Lyndhurst ready for our exciting flight in a helicopter over Lake Eyre.
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