Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Yornaning - a rural ghost town

There was a time when Yornaning was an important stop on the Great Southern Railway. In the early part of the twentieth century an average of thirty steam trains a week paused to take on water from a dam which had been dug in an adjacent stream bed - a stream that only flowed when there was rain. The dam eventually became too saline for the steam trains, but was maintained as a potable water supply for Narrogin 33km to the south until the 1950s.

Yornaning became a place where train crews changed shifts, and there was encouragement for them to buy blocks of land in the newly planned townsite. Those pioneers who took up the offer first could even have a street named after them. The employees who maintained the line and other parts of the railway infrastructure also were similarly invited.

A hundred years later there is little evidence that anyone lived there. Someone has been very thorough at removing the evidence. The few houses which remain are abandoned and derelict, and there is a sign on an overgrown indicating where the school was. No one lives at Yornaning in 2008 - it's become a ghost town. Mud bricks can be seen in one of the crumbling houses.

Another dwelling nearby is better preserved, however still derelict. The mud bricks are visible, but have been painted. The inside walls appeared to have been plastered with mud and then painted. The floorboards had been stripped from some of the oldest rooms. In other rooms there were quite a lot of old horse race meeting programs strewn about, These seemed to date back to the 1970s. The windows still had their tattered curtains and blinds.

There is a community hall remaining nearby, but it too is derelict. Notice how the floor stumps have been set into 44 gallon drums filled with concrete.

Adjacent is the most robust building left in town, the brick dunnies. From a lamp pole above them came the dim illumination from an incandescent lamp - possibly 60 watts. I could visualise in my mind's eye patrons of picture shows queuing outside at intermission - hoping there were no snakes or red back spiders lurking in the gloom.

At the southern end of Yornaning, on the western side of the rail line is a large, post WW2 grain handling facility. Here is a picture of the northern entry roadway.

Just south of the main silo is an external grain storage area. There were several mobile grain elevators parked there and others were adjacent to the main building. Many had flat tyres, which indicated they had not been used for several years.

On the eastern side of the main silo building was a grain receival and dispatch area. Grain could be elevated into the main silo or loaded onto rail wagons. The rail line is on the right, eastern side of the photo.

Opposite the grain terminal, on the other side of the Great Southern Railway and the Great Southern Highway there were some huge haystacks and large piles of grain covered with tarpaulins. Modern times for a farmer I guess. I've included a photo of them too.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

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