Oodnadatta

Oodnadatta is a small, remote outback town and locality in the Australian state of South Australia, located about 873 kilometres (542 mi) north of the state capital of Adelaide (over 873 kilometres (542 mi) by road) and 112 m above sea level.

Oodnadatta is a small, remote outback town and localityin the Australian state of South Australia, located about 873 kilometres (542 mi) north of the state capital of Adelaide (over 873 kilometres (542 mi) by road) and 112 m above sea level.

The name is probably derived from the Arrernte word utnadata, meaning "mulga blossom", and the place was for tens of thousands of years a stop on an old trade route for Aboriginal people. It was later used by the Overland Telegraph Line and was a stop on the old railway from Adelaide to Alice Springs, but is now bypassed by The Ghan. The unsealed Oodnadatta Track, an outback road popular with tourists, runs through the town.

The route now known as Oodnadatta Track was traversed for tens of thousands of years by Indigenous Australians, used as a trading route and with stops at the water sources, but there was no settlement at Oodnadatta itself.

John McDouall Stuart explored the region in 1859. The route surveyed by Stuart in his journeys was adopted as part of the Overland Telegraph Line route. Alfred Giles referred to a place called the Yellow Waterhole, or Angle Pole, later was known as Hookey's Waterhole, near Oodnadatta.

Angle Pole (27°30'13?S 135°24'57?E) is the point near Oodnadatta where the direction of the telegraph line changed to a more northerly direction.It is near the Peake cattle station, also known as "The Peake", or Freeling Springs. The ruins of Peake telegraph station exist on the station today. Alfred Giles refers to his only meeting with the explorer Ernest Giles (no relation) at "the Peake" in the 1870s.By the 1880s the telegraph route was being used by camel trains, led by "Afghan" cameleers (actually from many different places), or "Ghans", as they became known, who were brought to Australia for the task of hauling goods into Central Australia for use by pioneer settlers. Many of the cameleers settled in Oodnadatta and Maree, some with families and some marrying Aboriginal women.In the 1880s, Angle Pole was identified as the proposed terminus for the extension of the Great Northern Railway. When the railway was built, a town was established here, and in October 1890 was proclaimed a government township and renamed Oodnadatta.In 1889, Angle Pole was also proposed as the southeastern terminus of a land grant railway from Roebuck Bay in Western Australia. This railway was proposed by a London syndicate and would have been about 1000 miles (1600 km) long, with the wider 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) gauge. However this was never built.The town remained the terminus of the Great Northern until the line was extended to Alice Springs in 1929. The line became known as the Central Australia Railway and the train service on the line was known as the Ghan in honour of the Afghan cameleers. The railway was built with narrow gauge (1,067 mm (3 ft 6 in)) tracks, and train traffic was frequently disrupted by washouts and other damage to the trackbed, leading to a slow and unreliable service.The railway through Oodnadatta was closed and a new standard gauge line was built to the west, bypassing Oodnadatta, and opening in October 1980.Following the closure of the railway line in 1981, Oodnadatta, formerly a government service centre and supply depot for surrounding pastoral properties, became a residential freehold town for Aboriginal people who, moving from cattle work, bought empty houses as railway workers left.

Oodnadatta's busiest era was World War II when the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force set up local facilities to service troop trains and fighter aircraft en route to Darwin.

Tourist traffic along the Oodnadatta Track and the mining industry keep the village alive. The Aboriginal school is the biggest employer.In 2018, the federal government announced a major upgrade to the Track, to better serve both the tourists andtruck drivers on this major freight and cattle transport route.

Oodnadatta has a hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh) and has also recorded the highest reliably measured maximum temperature in Australia: 50.7 °C (123.3 F) on 2 January 1960. A higher temperature was recorded at Cloncurry in 1889; however, this has since been shown to have been recorded in a non-standard enclosure and likely to have been considerably cooler than first believed. There is a large sign in Oodnadatta claiming the town is "The driest town, the driest state of the driest Continent".