Woomera: A Modern Day Ghost Town

After driving for a few hours on the nearly-empty Stuart Highway, I pulled off shortly
before noon and
drove into the town of Woomera. I didn't realize it at the time, but
Woomera would be the first of many bizarre things that I'd see in the Outback.
Back
in the days of the Cold War, the U.S. government decided that they needed a large
area of empty land to test-fire rockets and to closely track their progress.
So
with the help of the Australian government, they set up a base here and built a town
which they called Woomera (an Aborigine word meaning "Stuck in the middle
of nowhere") to house the employees. At one time back in the
1950s, over 3,000 people lived in
Woomera and up until 1982, the city was closed to all visitors. It was
something like a "Los Alamos in the Outback," I suppose. Workers in
Woomera had all the creature comforts of modern life, though, including a nice
public swimming pool, an air-conditioned bowling alley, and leafy streets lined
with modern, suburban houses -- all surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothing.
The
base has been gradually phased out, however, and today it's all but closed.
Only 300 people are left in Woomera and by the time you read this, that may be
down to 200. I strolled around this rather bizarre town in the middle of
the desert for a while and got a pretty eerie feeling. It's a bit
unsettling to walk down a nice suburban street while knowing that just about
every house is
vacant. I'll give it credit, though, because Woomera isn't quitting and
the folks in this nice, modern community are struggling to hold on.
I
walked into the empty Visitor Center and talked for about 20 minutes with a
pleasant woman about the town. She was 25 years old and had lived in
Woomera her entire life, but wasn't sure what the future held for her and her
young daughter. "I remember what it used to be like a few years ago
when all the American families lived here," she said. "Everything's closed down now
and it's kind of sad." It was indeed.

Above left:
Rockets on display at Woomera.
Above center: The
empty streets of Woomera. Above right:
Woomera's shopping center has seen better (and livelier) days.
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Woomera: A Modern Day Ghost Town
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