Uncover the best of the Yorke Peninsula
I should have brought the first aid kit. But it’s only a short walk and, apart from some loose rocks underfoot, the sun is the biggest menace on an otherwise benign trail. I’m deep in conversation with my daughter, who has spent most of the morning swatting March flies that stick to her back like sprinkles on fairy bread, when I see it. A snake. It slithers swiftly across our path. Shiny scales, whip tail. If I hadn’t set a world record for high jump, I’m sure I would have trod on the blighter.
We’re exploring Dhilba Guuranda-Innes National Park, at the southern tip of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, and the wildlife is coming thick and fast. The Yorke, on the lands of the Narungga People, is the state’s middle child – a slender land mass between the better-known Eyre Peninsula to the west and the Fleurieu Peninsula to the east, with the estranged cousin of Kangaroo Island/Karta Pintingga adrift to the south. On a map, the Yorke looks like Australia’s answer to Italy’s ‘boot’, minus the stiletto, and with the kind of gnarly profile that comes from being battered by the Southern Ocean for 40 million years.
This is a make-up mission. We’d previously explored the Fleurieu and the Eyre (before a dash across the Nullarbor), but the Yorke had eluded us. Perhaps because it’s deceptively big, with a 485-kilometre coastline. Shores of that magnitude call for a warm-weather jaunt, so we time our visit for high summer, setting off from Melbourne in that slumbrous period between Christmas and new year.
