Signs and Monuments

Something struck me as interesting in South Australia and that’s the road signs. The road people here aren’t constrained by the 5’s and 0’s decimal mentality in their distance advisories like every other authority in Australia – I felt heartened and yet saddened. To go against the grain and show Streaky Bay as being not 70 km away but 68 km away and Cleve to be 32 km distant shows some measure of free thinking and enlightenment, and yet – would it have killed them to just go the extra mile (so to speak) and put all distances as prime numbers?!! One day! Primes will triumph.

The other thing about signs is the bizarre signs that one encounters in caravan parks. In Cowell I noticed a large sign forbidding the use of Talcum Powder in the Shower Block, denouncing the practice as being hazardous. I wondered where the true danger lay and imagined there must have been an incident that would have been the catalyst for the owners posting such a sign. Did a complaint come from the Mesothelioma Society about inhaling the fine particles, the Asthma Society perhaps, about someone gasping for air or a stern letter from the Society for Orthopaedic Surgeons informing that some old bugger had slipped over on the stuff and done his back in? I can’t wait to get to Queensland – they have signs with long lists forbidding everything (but they always finish them with, Have a Nice Day)

I’ve noticed that South Australia seems to have an awful lot of roadside monuments on its country roads compared with other states. It’s almost as if every time that Edward John Eyre stopped for a leak someone has put up a monument on the spot. We especially wanted to see the monument for author Mae Gibbs out of Cleve. Mae holds a special place for me in that she terrified me as a child with her Banksia Men (thanks for all the nightmares Mae). When we got to it, the monument was quite small. Now maybe those who erected this plaque got it right by sizing it in proportion to Mae’s place in world literature (I mean Snugglepot and Cuddlepie is hardly War and Peace is it); but you’d think they would have talked her up a little bit more than a 16 size font on a small rock. Still, it gets you out of the car and walking around.

                                                      One small monument to Mae Gibbs