Remote Australia - Cook

Hello again. The computer is back up and running.

Cook is located on the Nullabor Plain along the railway line. If you ride the Indian Pacific train you will pass through this place. Total population 5 at the moment although many years ago it was a thriving little town of 80 to 100 people in it's hay day. There was a hospital, school with swimming pool, billiard hall, railway station, ice works, post office and general store. Now there is little remaining with only a few houses left. While we were there we stayed in one of the houses and had a much needed shower.

The people that live at Cook at the moment, clean the resthouse, sump water for the town and sump deisel for the locomotives as well as the generators that power the town. The water and deisel supply is brought in by train from Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.


EH on this sign stands for Eyre Highway.




This is the place where my husband travels once or twice a week on the trains. Port Augusta to Cook is 822kms by rail, and takes between 12 and 15 hours to get there. He stays in a resthouse that contains a kitchen, showering and toilets area, snake pit with pool table (recreation room) and sleeping quarters.




Not much to do or see at Cook....Below is the very wide main street, watch out for cars, lol

Looking north, south, east and west this is what you see!..... the neverending treeless plain called the Nullarbor.

Just outside of Cook on the rough dirt road is a couple of blowholes....On really windy days you can feel the wind in the blowholes all the way from the ocean about 12okms away. On this particular day there was no wind.

Having a barbeque on the Cook road, no need to pull off the road as there is no traffic. We had a few crows hopping around eager for some scraps.

Found some wombat holes that were lived in. There are thousands of these out west.
You can see that bushfires went through here last year. These were started by lightening strikes.

If you look closely at this picture below (just click on picture to enlarge) there is a dingo... I just managed to capture him as he was running away. They are pretty quiet though. A lot of dingoes out here also.

The corner of the old dog fence....heading east and south. A new fence has been built to replace this old one. A dog fence is built to keep dingoes outside of the pastoral/agricultural areas of Australia, so they don't kill the livestock.

Back on the highway are these signs. We didn't see any camels, (Hubby sees quite a few camels when travelling in the train) we did see a few roadkill wombats but no kangaroos this time around.

See you soon,

Tania