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Unkindly dubbed "Porta Gutter" by Adelaide's smart set, who paint dire pictures of a town rife with petty crime, PORT AUGUSTA sits at the tip of the Spencer Gulf and on the edge of everywhere else. Despite the name, the docks closed long ago and more recent employment mainstays such as the power station and railways were drastically scaled down during the 1980s - the former rail buildings have been converted to Employment Service offices.

During summer, you should make the most of the small swimming beach at the end of Young Street to escape the dust and heat - the old wooden pile crossing, now a footbridge, and a hundred-year-old jetty, all that remains of the port, make good perches for fishing. The chief source of information is the Wadlata Outback Centre , at 41 Flinders Terrace (Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm, Sat & Sun 10am-4pm; $9; tel 08/8641 0793), which is well worth a look in its own right. Audiovisual technology, didgeridoo loudspeakers and a giant model of Akurra, the Dreamtime snake, are deployed to explain Aboriginal bushcraft and Flinders Ranges' creation myths, while geological and mining displays give a scientific perspective; tales of the hardships suffered by the nineteenth-century explorers Eyre, Sturt (and his boat), Stuart and Giles fill in the background.

If you still feel like exploring after Wadlata, drop in to the Homestead Park Pioneer Museum on Elsie Street (daily 9am-5pm; $3.50), centred around a log-built sheep station building. The 135-year-old homestead has been moved 100km from Yudnapinna and filled with well-restored period furnishings; in the grounds is enough farm and railway machinery to keep an enthusiast enthralled for several hours, along with animals, birds and a photographic museum in a vintage railway carriage. Nearby, the School of the Air , at 59 Power Crescent (10am on school days; $2 for a 30min tour), invites you to listen to a lesson conducted over the airwaves. The interaction is pretty lively and might help explain the better-than-average academic record for students in remote areas who use the school. You could also take a look at the ETSA power station (free tours Mon-Fri; tel 08/8642 0737), which produces forty percent of all South Australia's electricity, or watch the sunset illuminate the Flinders mountains from the water tower lookout on Mildred Street.

Flanking the north side of town on the Stuart Highway is the new and ambitious Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden (Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm, Sat & Sun 10am-4pm; free), a showcase and research centre for regional and international desert flora, the slow-growing nature of which means that the garden's full splendour has yet to be realized; however, a closer look will reveal a surprising wealth of species. The rain-gathering, solar-powered information centre, shop and café underline the ideals of the garden as an ongoing ecological project.