South Australia tour- first leg

One of the first things we did (in our second week in Australia) was to join in a student industrial tour around the state of South Australia. These are a combination of the regular works visits and (one-time) Easter tours at Edinburgh- Australia is so big that a regular weekly term-time visits programme is not practicable because most of the industrial sites are outside easy reach from the city. These tours are specifically designed for third-year students in a four-year programme and are underwritten by the department, which makes a change from the very ad-hoc way I had to finance the Easter tours. Another difference is that they are accompanied by a group of four or more academics and support staff (technical and clerical.) They are not compulsory for the students, however, and the eventual turn-out was rather poor. Collection of a deposit would be useful in future years. The first (and less well photographed) leg of the tour was the southern loop as shown on the map above. Apologies for any technical content in what follows, but I hope that some people in the Edinburgh department will be following this.
On leaving Adelaide we crossed the River Murray at Murray Bridge and then cut towards the coast, going through a wetlands district called the Coorong which is where the Murray discharges into a series of coastal lagoons, the latter rather under stress. Their salinity has increased markedly due to over-abstraction of water upstream in Victoria and NSW.
The first plant we visited was a paper mill and tissue products factory (Kimberley Clarke) at Millicent. What we saw was the tissue forming and packaging side- more interesting to mechanical than chemical engineers. The pulp mill would have been a better visit and this will be arranged next year.


Here's a picture of the front of the bus and the students- not markedly different from any other student year worldwide. This lot in particular are a rather good advertisement for Australia- responsible, intelligent and friendly (but don't let on that I said so.)

We stayed in Mount Gambier, the students in a caravan park and the staff in a rather nice hotel- another significant difference from the Easter tours! To my mind, this is rather inconsistent with any duty of care. However, there has been no incident so far that has made the papers, thank goodness, though in another year the students were expelled from a campsite for bad behaviour and had to spend the night in a ditch behind a service station.

The local tourist attraction is the Blue Lake (above), a water-filled volcanic sinkhole that is (of course) reputed to be bottomless. The water gets blue later in the year due to copper in the groundwater (despite which it is part of the local drinking water supply system). It was no better than grey when we were there. Another noteworthy feature, for a rather small town, is an excellent Indian restaurant.

From Mount Gambier, we returned to Adelaide via Wynn's Coonawarra winery. This was not very busy when we were there, as the workload is at its greatest at the grape harvest time. They take on a lot of seasonal labour and the technology is deliberately selected to make training easier. The person who took us round had encyclopedic knowledge of the wine business. What I learned was:

(1) unlike European wines, it is not legal to use extraneous enzymes to help the fermentation of Australian wines. On the other hand, it's quite legal to add tartaric acid to adjust the pH and even sugars to increase the initial gravity. This accounts for the very high alcoholic content of some of the local products.

(2) The difference between whites and reds is that the former are imemdiately filtered after crushing and before fermentation, whereas the latter ferment with the skins. So there is a higher filtration cost with the whites. They are also subject to chilling and sedimentation processes after fermentation to remove as far as possible the proteins that lead to clouding.

(3) They don't recover the CO2. This would only be attractive if they produced much more sparkling wine than in fact they do.

The only photos were taken at the very hospitable tasting session after the tour.... I make no apology for the anorak. It was really quite cold.

After this, we returned to Adelaide before the next-morning departure to points North. It was agreed that two visits were not enough to justify the southern part of the tour (which was an innovation this year). If we were prepared to stray over the state border, an aluminium smelter in Portland would be a good addition to the programme next year.

One of the students exhibited alarming swine flu like symptoms on the way back and was escorted to hospital by the first-aider for a check-up. She was back for the first lecture without any trouble. The first-aider was laid up with flu for a week. Such is life.

Next instalment- the really long journey to the far north of the state. It may, in fact, extend to two postings.