UNTOLD: WHAT IS OPAL FEVER?
Article Nature and wildlife Content
UNTOLD: WHO LIVES IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA?
20 MAY 2024
Margie and Pete Whittlesea’s backyard is five times the size of Hong Kong and more than three times the size of Singapore. The pair live in the geographical centre of South Australia – a place once deemed uninhabitable. Caring for a million acres of arid pastoral land, the husband-and-wife team are the beating heart of South Australia. But what does it take to not only survive, but thrive, in Australia’s outback?
What does it mean to be at the heart of something? Plenty of places, people and businesses claim to exist in the gooey centre of it all. The council is the heart of the local community. The pub is the heart of a small town. But not many places actually are the technical middle. Unless you count Mt Eba.
An unassuming pastoral property nine hours north of Adelaide that is, in fact, home to South Australia’s heart. Mt Eba has the unique honour of being the exact geographical centre of South Australia, deep in Australia’s outback. A landscape famous for its ‘nothingness,’ the outback is often referred to as ‘uninhabitable’ due to its harsh climates and low rainfall.
Yet, there’s Margie and Pete Whittlesea – inhabiting the nothingness. If Mt Eba Station is the heart, then Pete and Margie are the lifeblood. As the caretakers of Mt Eba Station, Margie and Pete have found a way to not only survive, but thrive, in one of the harshest environments in the world.
Meet Margie Whittlesea
What does the heart of the state look like?
“[It’s] probably a bit hard to understand the vastness,” Margie quips. “It’s a big open space…so there’s just a whole lot of nothing out there.” If you’ve found your way an hour up their driveway – a bumpy red dirt road intercepted by cattle grids – you have already come further than most. Driving up to ‘Mt Eba HQ,’ you are met with a smattering of dwellings – both old and new – an immediate sign that this outpost has existed in some way for hundreds of years. Old stone buildings, newer prefab ones, great big sheds housing seemingly too-small gyrocopters. And on the outskirts of this little village? A graveyard. One of the tombstones, dated in the 1800s, reads ‘accidentally shot on purpose’.
Margie at home, in the heart of South Australia
Upon arrival we are guided to the homestead in our search for Margie – but she’s hard to pin down. The thing is, Margie doesn’t really sit still. She’s always fixing, fiddling or filleting. She’s constantly thumbing her cropped hair behind her ears, lest it interfere with today’s tasks. When meeting Margie, you are immediately struck by an aura – and it’s not the constant thrum of the two-way radio in her kitchen. You immediately sense that this keen-eyed, quick as a whip woman has a strong will. You need only look down at her hands, where – if you look closely – you’ll notice the slightest tinge of ochre red has stained the cracks and crevices. A sign the outback has worked its way beneath her skin in the nearly 10 years she and husband Pete have been managing this station.
The station extends to the horizon
She describes her backyard, the centre of the state, as ‘a whole lot of nothing’. “But, you know, its got a beauty of its own,” she says, as she looks out at an unending horizon. “It’s flat, with small undulating hills around…if you’ve never seen it before, it’s spectacular… to see the big open spaces of nothing.”
Mt Eba is a pastoral station
What is an agricultural station?
Australia’s version of a ranch, think of a station like the Dutton’s land from the hit television series Yellowstone – that is, if you switch out the horses for gyrocopters and quadbikes. Instead of fighting off property developers like Kevin Costner’s character, Pete and Margie are fighting to feed the world. Most Australian stations span an area comparable to some European countries. That is because the land is so parched, you simply need more of it to meet the needs of thousands of animals. At just under a million acres, Mt Eba certainly qualifies when it comes to scale. To drive to the furthest reaches of the property can take five hours. It takes less than four to drive from Paris to Brussels. “We drive to go and check [on] water points across the property, probably twice a week...you can do the whole water run [and] it can take five hours,” Margie says. "It's a substantial area to cruise around."
It's all about survival out there. Margie Whittlesea
It's a land of sweeping plains, interrupted only by the odd decommissioned rocket launched from the Woomera Testing Site, the looming silhouette of an active mine site and the kaleidoscopic Anna Creek Painted Hills. “We do shearing once a year, we're going into our main shearing…we’ve also got cows as well, and they’re spread all over that million acres,” Margie says. “The challenge for us, especially out here in the pastoral land, is to keep our animals alive out there. “Like it's all about survival out there. So, to see all our sheep come in for shearing time, and getting the number that we've got, that's success for us.”
Agriculture accounts for more than half of Australia’s land use, while the global demand for sheep meat, particularly the quality that Australia produces, is insatiable. The value of sheep meat to the Australian economy is expected to hit $4.4 billion in 2024-2025, with many countries around the world reliant on Australia’s food production. “Everyone needs to be fed, and the population is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” she sighs. "We're trying to (feed the world), or a very miniature part of the world and also clothe the world, with wool."
What does it take to not just survive, but thrive, in Australia’s outback?
Margie claims that “anyone can come out here and survive and thrive”. But could just anyone? Could you? Could you live off-grid, hours away from the closest petrol station or convenience store? Nine hours from the closest city? Could you go months without seeing other people, other than the handful that live with you? “Every six to eight weeks we used to go down to Port Augusta and make sure the world was still going around,” she quips. “[But] personality wise, I think you’ve got to be prepared to work. Don’t just think you sit out here and just watch the birds, you know, fly by and that things are gonna happen on their own.”
It’s also unrelenting. We meet Margie mid-way through mustering – which is when they round up the sheep from every corner of the station and bring them into their headquarters. “We’ve got [contractors] here for the next few weeks,” Margie explains. That’s how long it takes to muster that many sheep, before going into five weeks of shearing. “[You] definitely [need] a can-do attitude,” she says. “You would want to like being on your own and not having many social activities, but then in saying that you can create your own social activities.
“It’s what you make of it – you can sit out here and be lonely, and not see anybody, or you can go off and make the most of it.”
Thriving in one of the harshest environments in the world also requires a level of ingenuity. You develop a fixer personality. A fixer personality type is often defined as ‘a pervasive need to fix others and situations, commonly rooted in compassion’. The outback fixer would say its rooted in necessity. “We will sooner try and fix it ourselves, before we would make a phone call to get a tradie out to fix it,” Margie adds. To get a plumber out to their house, it’s a four hour drive and an “extra two or three grand in travel before they even start the job”. “I think that’s why a lot of farmers are the way they are, because you can’t rely on it," she explains. "You don’t know whether they’re going to be there on time. Farmers and agriculture people have to be able to fix it themselves…otherwise it can turn into an absolute disaster.”
Upon moving to Mt Eba in 2015, the pair wasted no time making the property more liveable – adding dozens of new watering points for livestock across the property and installing a desalination unit to clean their own water. “We’ve made it easier for ourselves [to be] off-grid,” she says. “We’ve sort of drought proofed ourselves here…but a lot of people get intrigued that… there aren’t any powerlines here or anything like that, but we do have the solar panels.” It does beg the question though, why do it? In a world where you can have seemingly anything at your fingertips – travel has never been quicker, communications never easier, food sources never closer – why intentionally live a harder life? It’s a question that Margie admits she fields often, from “people on the outside”. But to her, a woman who was born into a farming family – who grew up skidding her knees and scuffing up her clothes running around properties in the east of the state – the answer is simple. “We don’t know any different,” she says, shrugging at the inexorable truth. “Pete doesn’t know any different. He’s always done it, and he’s good at what he does.”
Margie looking out at her Australian dream
Australia, the lucky country
While it might be a harder life, it’s their version of the Australian dream. “We’re living our dream…we’re not living somebody else’s dream for them,” she shares. It’s the guiding ‘why’ for the pair, who have had to stare the loneliness of this place square in the eye. But after a long career spent managing other people’s properties, when the opportunity to purchase Mt Eba arose, it represented a goal the pair had all but given up on fulfilling. To have their own slice of Australiana. “No one gets to experience this,” Margie insists. “No one. It’s only a rare few people that have this opportunity…so we’re lucky in that area.”
Mustering time
Despite having faced challenges of survival that many living in a city would never need confront, Margie says the word ‘lucky’ a lot. Life is all a matter of perspective. She feels lucky to have a roof over her head. “[To] wake up every morning and look out there, or go for a drive out there, to a whole lot of beauty,” Margie says from her deck chair, looking out to her own heart of nothing. “We’re lucky to see the sunsets, the sunrises. I know you get nice sunsets down there (in the city), but it's sort of - it's different up here. The sunsets and the sunrise are huge up here…so we're pretty lucky to have that. We're pretty lucky to be out here and just listening to the trees, you are just sitting out here in peace and quiet. We're just lucky to have this whole experience really.”
What happens behind the farm gate?
It’s an experience Margie and Pete are willing to welcome you on, if you are willing to venture off the beaten track. Mt Eba station is one of the few working stations in Australia that let visitors join them for a day in the life. Not a recreated scene, or a gated off section, but a genuine tag-along of Australian outback living – like their water runs. “If we’ve got something going on, [visitors] can be a part of it,” Margie explains. “If we’ve got nothing on, then unfortunately, they’re not a part of it.”
Mt Eba is one of the few places to find rest and respite on the drive between Port Augusta and Coober Pedy. Located off the Stuart Highway, travellers who dare to adventure down their drive are rewarded with “peace, the tranquillity, the sunsets and the sunrises”. “You know, we’re not a five-star rating, we’re not a four-star rating, we’re just ourselves,” Margie says, shrugging. “I think a lot of people come in here and they’re surprised of who we are. We’re just ourselves. We are no ‘rating’ at all, we’re just who we are.” Want to visit Margie and Pete? You can stay at a working Australian sheep station and join them on a water run here.
