Camping at Red Lake on Pernatty Station

About 20km travel south and then west from Pernatty Homestead saw me at Red Lake, a trip on the ATV (quadbike) that took around two hours.

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Red Lake, a great place to camp and a stark landscape to photograph.

The trailer carried my tent and other camping gear, fuel, water, food and cooking utensils for several days outback travel and camping.

The boxes on the bike held camera gear, emergency equipment, GPS and satellite phone as well as more fuel and water, the two essentials.

So as the afternoon wore on, I set up my camp away from the stark landscape I’d come to photograph, where there was ample firewood and a fairly flat area to pitch the tent on.

Getting a meal in the dark didn’t appeal on the day, so after an hour or so photographing it was back to camp and light the campfire.

The wood was myall, an acacia that burns quite hot and leaves good coals. By the time the veggies were pealed, the fire had burnt down, so I pulled the coals apart, put the camp oven (dutch oven) in the gap and placed as many coals as I could push up, on top of the camp oven.

A camp oven is a cast iron pot with a cast iron lid and wire handle like a billy handle. I use a camp oven for camp cooking all the time. A camp oven can be used for baking a roast, a loaf of bread, a damper or a cake, in fact, anything that you’d bake in the oven at home can be baked in the camp oven.

Camp at Red Lake on Pernatty Station, outback South Australia.

While the veggies slowly cooked in the low heat, a wander around the nearby sand hills and a few digital landscape photos, featuring the myall trees with their stunted and contorted forms, worked up a good appetite. Spuds, pumpkin, sweet potato, carrots, oninoin and apple with the addition of a small can of tuna made a hearty meal for this outback traveler and camper.

The new tent worked out well. It’s only just big enough, with the wind blowing the walls onto my head at one end and my feet at the other. But this new tent is more robust than my previous one, in part, perhaps, because it’s not as high.

Also new, is the self inflating mattress. Much more compact than the foam mattress that I’ve carried in the past and quite comfortable to sleep on. Not too bad when it comes to packing up, it deflates and rolls up with a minimum of effort.

Boiling the billy and baking the veggies in the camp oven for a hearty meal.

The satellite phone is great! First I phoned in my coordinates to my son at Roxby Downs. That’s the most important job. Then I called my dad in Melbourne. Probibly the only phone call he’ll ever get from Red Lake on Pernatty Station in outback South Australia. Then it was time to phone my wife in Bega in New South Wales.

It was a few days past full moon so the moon rose a couple of hours after sunset. I had no idea how much of the brilliant moonlight the brand new tent would transmit. Waking in the middle of the night I got my pants and boots on, all ready for a big day’s photography, only to find it was still five hours till morning. When the moon is up, the outback nights are so bright it’s easy to see what you are doing without a torch.