The owner of the Pink Roadhouse was killed in an accident
Tributes are pouring in for the long-term owner of the Pink Roadhouse in Oodnadatta, Adam Plate, who was killed in an accident during the Targa Adelaide rally.
Mr Plate, 63, died on Friday when his Lancer EVO VII clipped a tree and rolled down an embankment. His wife, Lynnie was in Oodnadatta when she received the call from the event’s chaplain.
“As soon as he said he was the event chaplain, I knew what he was going to tell me,” Mrs Plate told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We’d had that phone call before when our son died.”
Their son Jack, 20, died in a head-on collision on a country road in 1999. Mrs Plate and daughters Alice, 31, Tilly, 28, and Ruby, 21, spoke of an Outback visionary who spent more than 40 years advocating for the state’s Far North. Best known for signposting the Outback with pink signs, Alice said her father would be remembered as a visionary but polarising figure who fought for the Outback.
“Dad was a man of adventure, a man on the edge who loved that life,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “He wouldn’t have wanted to die of a heart attack in a nursing home.”
While devastated to lose another family member, she was glad her father died doing something he had so much passion for.
“Mum and dad put in a ridiculous amount of hours working at the Roadhouse and doing all the associated jobs they have to do,” she said. “Only recently has he started getting right into his motor racing and bought the Lancer and did it up.”
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