Awake early again , opened the window to find a rainbow and some light rain . After breakfast we headed down to Marble Bar Pool to see the Jasper veins in the rock after some rain .
Unfortunately the rain had pretty much dried up , only a few puddles of water in amongst the rocks - we splashed it around to get some photos .
Back to the park and to find a powered site so we could get the washing done and also get things charged up . There were quite a few departures this morning , so we had a few choices - we grabbed a drive through site about 20m from where we were last night - talk about a long drive !! Didn’t need a driver revivor station hahaha
After doing everything that needed doing , we had some lunch and then headed out for the WW2 airfield that the Japanese couldn’t locate during the war . The airfield was positioned on Corunna Downs Station , some 35 klms from Marble Bar , through some interesting country . There are outcrops of white quartz here & there - you can tell by the scattered white stones strewn down the hills . The road seemed to be a series of dips through water courses , plenty of corrugations and sand as well as sharp rocks . The road goes past a disused mine , with piles of spoil beside the main pit .
The airbase was cleverly designed and camouflaged with spinifex and netting , the heat haze also helping . It was far enough inland to be out of range for most enemy aircraft . Long range B24 Liberator Bombers could fly from here and return 14 hours later . They achieved many bombing victories and stopped the invasion of WA !!
It would have been horrendous to have been stationed there - so hot - extreme weather conditions to be living in tents !!
Enough history , back to reality , we drove in and finally got our bearings , driving along one of the taxi ways from the plane bunkers to the runways . It’s a bit of a self guided mystery tour . There are 2 runways , a north south runway and the main east west runway which is longer . Driving down the north south runway , you get a grasp of what went on out here , the runways are about 40m wide and both are still quite usable , it’s just the trees & shrubbery on the sides that would need to be trimmed . At the end was a marker for a gun pit installed there , then there was the army camp , pity most of it is now overgrown with spinifex , so things are a bit hard to find . This is the north south runway -
We found the concrete remains of the hospital , assorted pieces of equipment in one of the old workshops & where water tanks were mounted on an ironstone ridge . We also got some better views of the surrounding area from where the water tanks were .
The bunkers where the planes were housed are just big U shaped sand & gravel banks . They used to cover the planes with nets and attach spinifex grass & bushes to it . You will have to imagine the ute is a bomber in it’s bunker !!
That’s it for today :-https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zuhh9t59WI-VJJth0TpjI7__pGs&usp=sharing
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