Things to do in Woomera, South Australia

Visiting Woomera in South Australia’s outback breaks up the journey going north along the Stuart Highway. Things to do in Woomera, SA, include the Visitor Centre and missile park. But it is far too remote to add to an itinerary unless on a desert road trip.

There’s not an awful lot going on in the South Australian outback. The rumpled Flinders Ranges might show off majestically rugged desert scenery, but beyond that it’s all salt lakes, spinifex and big, wide nothing. Red kangaroos and wild camels love it. Humans? Not so much.

This is partly why driving up the Stuart Highway from Port Augusta to Darwin is so intoxicatingly different. It’s gruelling and monotonous above Goyder’s Line, but the sense of being so far away from anywhere is strangely mesmerizing.

The first break in the glorious monotony on the drive from Adelaide to Coober Pedy is Woomera. The town is 495km north-east of Adelaide and 188km from Port Augusta. After a turn off at Spud’s Roadhouse – the outback roadhouse in Pimba – you enter an eerie military settlement. Everything seems so neat and perfect, like it’s a reasonably well-to-do suburb in a faceless satellite town.

History of Woomera, SA

Then you see the primary school; it has a park full of intercontinental ballistic missiles outside. This open air display of military hardware is all about showcasing Woomera’s somewhat shady heritage. The South Australian outback town was set up in 1947, when the British and Australian governments decided they needed somewhere to blow things up.

The British government was deeply concerned when Nazi Germany began the era of missile warfare in 1944, launching unpiloted bombs on British cities from sites in the Netherlands.

The UK needed such rocket technology, and the Aussies were only too happy to hand over a vast swathe of land in the South Australian outback. Never mind the sheep farmers and Aboriginal communities out there – the allies needed somewhere to test out weapons of mass destruction.

Woomera became the nuclear weapons service town that no-one was supposed to know about – its existence was only officially confirmed in the 1980s.

Things to do in Woomera, SA

Nowadays, the Visitor Centre at Woomera also doubles as a local history museum. The displays take you through the thousands of huge explosions that have taken place in the Woomera Prohibited Area over the decades, and touch on the more acceptable history as a space monitoring centre and launch site. Some parts of the story are beautifully absurd. Special planes were designed and constructed at huge cost just so the researchers had something realistic to blow up with their rockets. Oh yes, and there is also a fully functional bowling alley in the middle of the Visitor Centre – almost certainly the most isolated of its kind in the world.

The displays at the museum are old fashioned, but it doesn’t matter when the subject is so interesting. The overall weird vibe makes visiting Woomera memorable too. Of course, it is so far in the middle of nowhere that most visitors to Australia will go nowhere near it. But if you are driving up the Stuart Highway towards Lake Hart, Coober Pedy and the Red Centre, Woomera is one of the most fascinating stop-offs along the way. Woomera can also be included on the drive from Sydney to Alice Springs.

More under-the-radar Australian towns

Foodie Timboon in the Great Ocean Road hinterland

Laid-back New South Wales beach town, Yamba

Queensland platypus-spotting hotspot, Yungaburra

Historic Murray River town Swan Hill

Undersea helmet walks in Busselton, Western Australia

The once-secret outback military town, Woomera

Arty Adelaide Hills outpost, Hahndorf