Stump Jump

We continued our shortened exploration of the Yorke Peninsula today with a visit to a few of the small seaside towns on the eastern shore of the peninsula and saw more great beaches, jetties and well maintained small towns. If one wanted a beachfront lifestyle, largely devoid of other people the Yorke (and Eyre) peninsulas would be good places to consider. At the town of Ardrossan we came across a Museum that featured the Stump Jump Plough, ... a what you might ask (see below).

I remember learning about the Stump Jump Plough a wonderful Australian invention that allowed farmers to plough wheat fields in which stumps from the cleared fields had not been completely removed. When the plough encountered a buried stump the plough blade would "jump" over the stump and ploughing of the field would continue. As a kid I learned this stuff but never really understood why it was significant and why it was an "Australian" invention. After all did not all wheat fields have stumps from cleared trees.

Well today my education was completed. The problem of the stumps in the ground, while maybe not uniquely Australian, is particularly a problem in areas where the natural vegetation (before clearing) was mallee trees. As I learned these trees are particularly hard to remove because of the undergrounbd bulb from which they spring and from the fact that fire does not easily kill the remaining stump/bulb in fact fires help it to regenerate. More over the Yorke Peninsula is almost the poster child for mallee scrub being cleared for wheat growing. Hence the stump jump plough was invented and perfected by the Smith brothers who manufactured such ploughs in the town of Ardrossan.

The photo of the blue canopy is just to remind us of these structures as we have seen many of these over playgrounds and school yards. This is a development that has happened since we left Australia and is a sign of the seriousness that communities assign to skin cancer and sun protection.

The last photo above is of a sting ray we saw while walking on the jetty in Ardrossan. It highlights the clarity of the water that we could see the creature so clearly from the jetty.