Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park - History

History

The local Aboriginal people are the Adnyamathanha. The current generation live largely on the neighbouring station of Mount Serle and Aboriginal lands at Nepabunna and Nantawarrina. The park is managed under a co-operative system which involves Adnyamathanha people in the running of the park. Also included in the park is a wide strip of territory running 40 km from the edge of the ranges to the shores of Lake Frome, an area which is used by the local Aboriginal people for hunting kangaroos and emus. Curiously, regarding the mining controversies attendant with the park (see below), this area of the park is traversed by the Moomba-Adelaide gas pipeline.

The first European to see the ranges was probably Edward Eyre on his 1840 expedition along the western side of the Flinders. Attempting to find a way through the salt lakes that he thought barred the path to the north, he climbed Mount Serle; in his published expedition journal, he wrote that "to the north-east, the view was obstructed by a high range immediately in front of us". This high range was the southern and western heights of the Gammons.

The next explorer to reach the area was the Surveyor General, Edward Charles Frome, on his second expedition up the eastern side of the Flinders three years later. After finding his route to the east blocked by the lake which would later bear his name, he headed for the highest point in the ranges he could see, which he thought was Eyre's Mount Serle: however, his paintings show it to be Mount McKinlay (named fifteen years later after "Big John" McKinlay, a local who became famous for leading one of several rescue expeditions for Burke and Wills in 1861).

A private surveyor, J.M. Painter, was employed in a survey of the area in 1857 (in the company of George Goyder). His party climbed Gammon Hill and Mount McKinlay (which Frome did not), but didn't penetrate to the peaks of the central range or plateau. One of several survey cairns built on a line they surveyed between Mount Rowe and Arcoona Bluff on the western edge of the ranges has been restored and can be visited today (photo below).

The area has a colourful history of pastoral settlement dating from the turn of the century: the now-restored holiday cottage Grindell's Hut in Illinawortina Pound is named after John Grindell, who ran a small cattle station in the pound in the early part of the twentieth century. Grindell had a difficult relationship with his son-in-law George Snell, who ran the neighbouring Yankaninna station, suspecting him of rustling cattle. When Snell disappeared in August 1918, and a search party found remains at a campfire in the ranges, Grindell was arrested and charged with Snell's murder. Despite the evidence being flimsy, Grindell was convicted at Port Augusta in December and sentenced to death, though it was later commuted to life imprisonment. He was released from prison in 1928, dying two years later at the age of 77. A restored building at the site of his old hut is now rented out as a holiday cottage.

The bushman R. M. Williams is reputed to have learnt everything he knew about boot-making and leather from another man he met while camped in Italowie Gap at the southern end of the ranges; he later became a millionaire and a renowned clothing brand carries his name.

The ranges were explored more thoroughly in the first half of the 20th century: the Greenwood family, pastoralists in the area, had explored the edges in the twenties and thirties, discovering Fern Chasm, but it was not until expeditions by Warren Bonython and others in the late 1940s that the Plateau and main central ranges were investigated and explored. On Bonython's first journey onto the Blue Range in 1946 several kilometres south of Benbonyathe Hill, one of his two companions, Bob Crocker, slipped and broke his leg, which resulted in Bonython walking more than twenty kilometres to Balcanoona station to organise a rescue effort: in the end Bob was carried off the 3,000-foot (910 m) high range by improvised stretcher in a seven-hour marathon.

By 1948 the Plateau had been traversed in all directions, although the highest parts of the ranges are still out of limits for all but experienced bushwalkers.

In the 1960s a group of American astronomers became interested in the higher peaks of the Gammons as possible sites for an observatory, and several parties camped for some time on the summits of Mount McKinlay and Benbonyathe Hill (vehicle tracks were also graded to the summits), but nothing further was done (a large observatory is located at Arkaroola, about a hundred kilometres to the northeast). Relics from these camps remain on the summits of the two hills, and there is reportedly still an overgrown vehicle track along the top of the Blue Range in places.