Australia (Part 2d)- Western Australia
Australia (Part 2d)- Western AustraliaApril/May 2001
By the time we had ground to a halt in the middle of nowhere, Western Australia, my parents' reliable Mazda 2000 Automatic campervan had got us around 21,000km of the awesome Australian continent without a hitch.
The sun was high overhead and the road temperature was blistering in the upper 30'c. The heat burned through my clothes, as I lay on my back and unscrewed the spare and rather bald tyre from under the rear of the van. We got the shredded tyre off, but because of the van's position on the road edge, I couldn't pump the jack high enough to get the inflated spare type on. Cars zoomed past us at crazy speeds of 150kph, as we stood on the edge of the highway debating how to solve the problem.
A battered old pickup truck pulled up, and two fit looking Aussie males got out. "Having problems?" they asked. They had been abseiling high above us in the Pinkerton Ranges and had heard the explosion. Within ten minutes, they had jacked up the van and slipped on the spare. We were very relieved and as they walked away, I told them to wait up. From inside the van I produced a 6 pack of beer. "It’s the least we can do for your kind help" I said, as I handed it over. With a broad smile, one of them replied "No sweat mate. This will go down a treat. Welcome to Australia." and off they drove. Thankfully, so did we.
An hour later, at the Western Australian Border, there was a full quarantine ban on bringing any fruit and vegetables into the state. This was a necessary precaution to keep the dreaded 'fruit fly' at bay, which could decimate their crops. An officer climbed in, poked around the cupboards and then satisfied himself with the few offerings that we had produced in readiness. Free to go, he reminded us to move our watches back 90 minutes. We were now on WA time.
Western Australia is the huge, less discovered part of Australia. It covers 2.5 million sq. km, almost a third of the continent and about the same size as Western Europe. It has vast deserts lying to the east, 12,500 km of pristine coastline bordering the west, and 350 million-year-old ranges lying in-between. Its scale is such that it extends over several different climatic zones.
In 1985, I had caught a non-stop 60-hour bus ride from Darwin to Perth, the capital of WA in the far southwest. On this journey, it would take us two weeks to cover the same distance, but this time, I would see it properly.
Eager to reach Kununurra, the first major town, and get the tyre replaced, we sacrificed a lengthy detour to see Lake Argyle. Created in 1972, by flooding a one million acre cattle station called 'Argyle Downs', the lake now covered 1000 sq. km and was Australia's largest (manmade) inland sea.
This creation had led to the birth of Kununurra (I never did learn to pronounce the bloody name) which was a blossoming new town of 6000. The Ord Irrigation Project, harnessing Lake Argyle's unlimited water supply, had enabled the dry dusty landscape surrounding the town, to be turned into an oasis of rich fertile cultivated farmland. A host of tropical fruit (bananas, mangoes, paw-paws etc) plantations could be seen from Kelly's Knob lookout. Along with the agricultural boom, tourism is the other major industry business because Kununurra is the 'Gateway to the Kimberleys'.
Just outside town is another lovely place - the Hidden Valley National Park which afforded us a beautiful walk through a fiery orange coloured valley composed of pancake-layer red sandstone. Many trees and bushes had been labelled with information and it was nice to put a name to all the vegetation that we had passed.
Kununurra also has one of the most frustrating landscaped road systems I'd ever come across. The roads radiated out in circles from a single roundabout and you could never take a direct road anywhere. Somehow, considering that we were quite adept at handling cities of millions, it was a little frustrating to continually get lost and always end up back at the roundabout.
Consequently, we passed on another sight: the 'Celebrity Tree Park' featuring trees planted by such luminaries as H.R.H Princess Anne, Rolf Harris and Harry Butler (who?). Sorry Rolf, I had to go see a man about a tyre. It was probably these same trees that the local kids were vandalising.
This is Australia 8: We heard about this vandalism on the first aborigine radio station that we had discovered. The comical 'Police Report' by a local, obviously white policeman told us about the vandalism and the success of their drink-driving campaign, with a friendly reminder to the locals that "no grog should be brought into the footie ground when the season gets going".
His latest news was even funnier. He told of a local helicopter pilot who, a couple of days before, had flown a geologist into the nearby outback. As the chopper landed amongst the tall dry grass, it sparked off a fire that engulfed the chopper and the pair were stuck in the bush overnight. A search party picked them up the next day. After he was dropped off, the chopper pilot, then drove his car home, but went over the side of a bridge, destroying his car. Tongue in cheek, the policeman concluded "We're now wondering what this clown's third strike will be".
The Kimberley is "one of the world's last great wilderness areas" (Oz tourism). Covering an area of 424,000 sq. km, it is three times the size of England with a population of 25,000! It has fewer people per kilometre than almost any other place on the planet. Situated in the far northwest of Western Australia, its immense and diverse landscape encompasses rugged ranges, gorges, waterfalls and some pretty scruffy Aborigine-dominated towns.
We rolled on towards Halls Creek through some of the best scenery we'd seen in Oz. To imagine this at home please follow these instructions: Take an endlessly straight flat empty two lane bitumen road beneath a clear blue sky. Remove all signs of inhabitation. On either side of the road throw in some lush green grasses and fat grey bottle-shaped boab trees in the foreground. Behind them, in the distance, again on both sides, construct some low-lying, few hundred metre tall, flattish pink and red sandstone ranges. Stick some fresh but dead kangaroo road kill on the road and let enormous brown wedge tailed eagles pick at the corpses. Sprinkle the area with a few million red small lumpy termite mounds, and leave the whole thing to bake in the roasting 34'C temperatures for the rest of the day. If you get bored, light some controlled bush fires to clear the undergrowth, which will leave a contrasting carpet of black burnt soil. Your scenery is done.
300km of this recipe later, we stopped for the day. Our cameras were exhausted. Halls Creek was largely an Aborigine community and they had facilities such as the 'Sobering Up Shelter' and 'Frail Aged Hostel'. Attempting to cash in on the increasing tourism, this small dusty town calls itself the "Home of the Bungle Bungle".
The Bungle Bungle National Park is billed as the "wonderland that waited 350 million years to be found". It is a vast, uninhabited, unpassable area of striped, sandstone 'beehive' towers, high ridges and steep gullies. The only way to see them is to take a scenic flight. But not today.
We were told at the newly opened (as in, still being built) tourist office, that every aeroplane and helicopter in the Kimberley region had been commandeered for a week to help fly out supplies to stranded isolated Aborigine communities which had been surrounded by floodwater. Two months after the event, they were finally out of food.
This bungled our attempts to view the wilderness along with the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater, which at 800m wide and 55m deep is the second largest in the world. Oh well, I suppose it will still all be here in another 350m years. That scenery, that you so carefully imagined, disappeared west of Hall's Creek. The sandstone hills died a death and plain old boring bushland returned.
Fitzroy Crossing, 300km further on down the road is another real backwater town. Set beside the Fitzroy River (supposedly one of the "world's largest rivers"), the first bridge was only constructed in 1935 and went underwater during every wet season. Even as late as 1984, there were only two telephone lines here.
For a real taste of the Outback, the old original pub called the 'Crossing Inn', had been suggested. It was the kind of place where anything could happen and where drunks still got thrown out via the windows. When we found it around lunchtime, in the middle of nowhere, about 200 angry looking Aborigines and a couple of police cars surrounded it. It didn't look very inviting. Neither did the policeman who suggested we "get out of here".
Just outside town lies the Geike Gorge, carved out of the 350m year old Devonian limestone reef. Promoted as another Katherine Gorge, it is far less spectacular, but still an interesting sight. The gorge cut through two different coloured limestones. The bottom half above the river is bleached white rock and above that, the rest of the cliffs are reddish brown. It looks like someone tried to clean one of nature’s dirty baths but gave up half way through.
The narrow river only filled one side of the gorge. The rest of it was sandbanks and dried cracked mudflats, which the river obviously flooded in wet season. We took a 10km stroll through the gorge and it was so hot that when I attempted to walk across the sand in bare feet, its heat soon blistered them. You can do a boat trip down the gorge, but the lovely trail is just as good. There are a number of other gorges in the vicinity. Without, however, a sturdy 4WD to tackle the rough dirt trails, you are doomed.
Cue the dreary bushland, boab trees, yellow wattle, dead cows, birds of prey and boring flat desolate empty roads all the way to Derby. Stuck on the coast in the middle of nowhere, it had a few attractions of limited attention.
Just outside town stood the gigantic boab 'Prison Tree'. 1500 years old, it was 15m in circumference and the bottle base was hollow. A narrow crack in the outer bark was just big enough to climb into the tree. In the 1890s, when pioneer pasturalists fought the local aborigines for the land, they locked up Aborigine outlaws in this tree. Peering in, through the foot wide bark, I estimated it could hold 6 skinny men - standing up.
The pioneers won the battle, and near the tree lies an old wooden 120m long cattle trough, the longest in the country. Built in 1911, and supplied by a windmill powered bore, it was evidence of the cattle drives that once took place here in bygone days before the advent of the road train. At any one time, 500 bullocks could drink at the trough water, before being led through Derby's wide main street and exported. Derby also has the highest tide range in Australia (around 20m). But late afternoon, the tide was out and we were out of there too.
Broome was established as a pearling port in the 1880s. By 1910, it produced 80% of the world's Mother of Pearl, fished out by a multicultural Asian collection of Japanese, Malay and Chinese. Now it's 11,000 population falls back on its history to sell the place.
Fortunately, they have another asset: Cable Beach "One of the World's Top 5 Beaches". For the record, it IS a magnificent 22km stretch of beautiful flat yellow sand, backed by windswept sanddunes and fronted by an ocean that washes it clean daily with 10m high tides. But it is certainly NOT one of the Top 5. These Oz tourist promoters should get out a bit more.
It is however, worth the drive. The beach is so long that the lifeguards patrol on Quadbikes. If David Hasselhoff and his 'Baywatch' bimbos attempted to run down the beach, they'd still be running by the end of the series. Not that there was much wave action today for the sea was as still as a millpond. Or people. It was vast enough to stick an average Blackpool or New Jersey summer season crowd on it and they'd still have to all yell to each other. After a dip, a lengthy stroll along this sandy promenade revealed something else. The beach was covered in huge dead transparent jellyfish (‘stingers’) that had washed up. No waves? No palm trees? and stingers? Top 5? Come on!
We also failed to find the 'Dinosaur Footprints' at Gantheavme Point (a sign would have been nice to give you an idea of where to start looking), but, in the rather over-touristy centre, we did find the 'Sun Cinema'. Built in 1916, it is the oldest, continually operating outdoor theatre in the world and still shows a movie every night while you sit in a deckchair under a canvas roof. It was unique in another way. In the 1930s, before a levee was built, the tide would often flood the cinema while the movie was on. It was the only cinema where you could enter by foot and leave by rowing boat! They had photos to prove it.
We made tracks for Port Hedland along 650km of what is called 'The most boring road in Australia'. Yes, it was dull - endless flat stretches of road, no towns, no hills, low grasslands and about 3 isolated roadhouses - but it was no worse than many other parts of Australia. When the radio channels disappeared, it was just a case of having hours to count the road kill and ponder life's questions: The question that seemed to reappear rather frequently was 'what are we doing here, stuck on such a boring road?'
The payoff, midway, was '80 Mile Beach'. It lay south of Sandfire Creek Roadhouse, 10km off the (not so) Great Northern Highway, along a smooth but unsurfaced, lipstick red dust track. At the end of this track was an isolated, almost empty caravan park behind the sanddunes. The beach, while not quite as wide as Broome's was very similar, just as impressive and about 80km longer. Fisherman drove their 4WD’s along the compact sand to reach their fishing spots. Fishing was obviously very good in these parts. The caravan park even had a sign that said 'PS - leave a few fish for the next bloke".
A glorious light yellow and grey sunset unfolded over the wide horizon before it all turned dark. From the Ladies toilet, there came a scream. A long 5ft black headed python snake, with beautiful black and white narrow vertical stripes had fancied its chances, but changed it mind and slithered out through the grass. A few of us stood and watched it, amazed at such a beautiful creature. Someone uttered "Is it poisonous?", to which came a rather grumpy broad Aussie drawl "It must have been, if it was after my bloody wife on the toilet. I wouldn't fancy my chances in there with her."
You can't beat getting up at dawn to find 80 miles of deserted beach before you. Then you wake up and smell the coffee. It is time to leave and return to the 'boring road' and make your way into a region called the Pilbara.
Just before Port Hedland, you can take a side road and make a 460km return detour to the "Union run" Marble Bar which is Australia's 'hottest town'. In 1923, it set a world record for 160 consecutive days over 100'F (38.7'C). When I had bussed past in 1985, they were celebrating yet another 100 days at that temperature. It was so hot, that the iron ore and gold field miners would start their shifts at 2am, end at 10am, then hit the pub and pass out until the next shift.
Port Hedland (15,000 pop) is no slouch itself with 258 days a year over 30'C. It is a huge industrial conglomerate that supports the surrounding and extensive, iron ore mining companies. The iron ore is brought into town for refining on trains with up to 240 'bogies' (open freight wagons). These are the longest and probably the heaviest trains in the world. Powered by 4 powerful diesel locomotives (two at the front, two in the middle), they can stretch for 2.6km each! We saw one leave town with 112 empty bogies. It took over 10 minutes to pass by. The refined iron ore is then exported to Asia - about 66 million tonnes of the stuff annually. On the day we arrived, there were a couple of massive container ships from Japan and China which weighed in at 165,000 tonnes each. Tours of the BHP Iron Ore Refinery and Port were unfortunately closed that day.
The other major industry is solar salt production. Along the coast, vast, shallow manmade seawater filled 'evaporating pools' are naturally dehydrated by the sun and the salt is then further crystallised in other ponds. As you approach the town, you will see three tall conical shaped mountains of stark white gleaming salt. They were the biggest hills we'd seen in miles and they were edible. You could give every person on the planet a bag of chips and tell them to file past for their salt and there would still be enough for seconds. That is, if 96% of the salt wasn't used for industrial purposes which is more profitable. These enormous 500,000 tonne stockpiles were regularly visited by road trains which would roll up with their 3 empty wagons, get filled with a torrent of salt from a long pipe and head to the port where it would be dumped into a massive ship, also destined for Asia. The scale of operation in Port Hedland is both incomprehensible and unbelievable.
Leaving this testorone pumped town, we had an appointment to make in Karritha. But there were some fun and games first. Just before Whim Creek Roadhouse, a police block of 3 cars, flagged us down. While one officer checked my driving licence, another walked around the van." Come and have a look at this" he waved at me, pointing at the front left tyre. It was so badly worn that the steel cabling was poking through (and I had been religiously checking the tyres every day since the blow-out). "If that went at 110kph, you'd be dead mate". He took a look at the rear tyres (retreads we got in Tasmania). "These are ratshit too". He suggested we put the spare on at the nearby roadhouse and get the ratshit tyres replaced in Karritha.
This is Australia 9: Here is a list of the latest Aussie Cop slang:
Bowling Ball - Policewoman
Pointy Head - Officer
Gasoline Cowboys - Traffic Police
Dogs/Puppies - Surveillance Squad
Ducks on the Pond - Police on the road
Filth/Toecutters - Internal Investigators
Freddy - a Police ID
Hamburger with the lot - charge criminal with numerous offences
Hommies - Homicide Squad
Jury F***ers - People called for Jury service who have been done by traffic cops and hate the police
Mouthpeice - Solicitor
Rock Spider - Paedophile
Shoppy - Shoplifter
Snowdropper - someone who steals women’s' underwear off washing lines
Soft Cock - person with a few prior arrests
Spanker/NACA (Not A Copper's Arsehole) - ineffectual member of the police force
TJF - The Job's F*****
Wilfil and Obscene - a flasher
I was relieved that these gasoline cowboys had stopped us and that they were happy to wave us on with no fine or taunts of "snowdropper!". So at Whim Creek ("free camping and showers"), we replaced the offending tyre in double quick time, since we were now professional tyre fitters.
If you take a short detour north to the coast, just before Karritha, you will stumble across the ghost town of Cossack. This was the home of the North West's first pearling industry back around 1870 and a major goldrush in the 1880s also inflated the town's importance. The gold ran out and the Pearlers moved to Broome. By World War 1, a handful of residents remained. Now there are about, er, 6.
This historic town has had a few of it's central buildings restored which you can visit - the courthouse, police station, prison and a couple of warehouses. It was completely deserted during our visit and we had to peer through the windows. A real ghost town. Even the Youth Hostel, in another restored building showed no sign of life. A mile long lane takes you out to the old cemetery where Japanese and Chinese tombstones are segregated from the white folks. En route, you walk past overgrown foundations and broken down walls where 'Mrs Doolittle's Boarding House" took in lodgers, and various shops supplied the miners. The bush and the sand have reclaimed most of the town. It was amazing to think that a town could appear from nowhere with a few thousand people and then die out again within a fifty-year period. It's a lovely desolate, but picturesque place if you are passing through.
I had never heard of Karritha, until I received an email shortly after arriving in Australia. Ross had read my accounts of Vietnam and Laos on my homepage, taken his family there for a holiday and had a great time. If we were passing by, he wrote, we should "drop in for a cleansing ale". So we did.
Ross turned out to be about my age, was married to his very attractive wife Barb (of Swiss descent, I think) and had three daughters aged between about 10 and 3. When we turned up at the doorstep, Barb said "We've never met strangers via the Internet before" and I wanted to cry "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" and produce an axe but thought better of it. Once the froth had been blown off some cleansing ales, Barb's wonderful 'melon' salad appeared. By the time Ross had 'thrown a few steaks on the 'barbie’ (not his wife), we were getting on like a house on fire and I began to learn about modern life in the Pillar..
Ross worked for the ever-expanding water board, which was trying to keep up with the rapid development. On top of the iron and salt industries there was a larger monster. The North West Shelf Gas Venture had been constructed on the coast in the late 80s to become the largest natural resource development in Australia. It was now supplying both domestic users and Japan. Crude oil was now also being recovered from the underwater coastal shelf. "Typical bloody Aussies" Ross laughed, "As always, we are giving away all our resources to the rest of the world".
Karritha (9,500 pop) was another 'company town', which meant that you got a lot of incentives to move and work here. Factors like appallingly low or free rent for spacious abodes and subsidised holidays were two major attractions. For example, when you took your annual leave, it was automatically assumed that you would head for the metropolis of Perth for some R&R. Since it took 2 days to drive, you would be given two days extra so that it didn't cut into your leave. There were also free flights to Perth for the family. Ross was able to 'convert' these flights and drive time, pay the modest difference and fly to SE Asia instead - and he could afford to take his family!
They were a well-travelled couple who had a refreshing outlook to travelling with their children. They might still be young, but the children benefited from the experience and it "broadened their horizons". Witnessing places like Vietnam and Laos and the poverty of the children there "made them really appreciate what they had at home". I didn't hear a single winge from the girls, not even when Ross continually asked them to fetch some more ales. "Travelling with children also brings a different prospective on a place. People would go out of their way to show the children something and we saw it too. You'd be invited in to homes. Things that sometimes don't happen when you are just travelling as a couple". The kids had ended up playing with Vietnamese children in the streets.
A very enjoyable long Friday evening was spent quaffing ales, pigging out and swapping travel stories. As we left to go around midnight, Ross asked what we were doing tomorrow. "Getting the tyres replaced" I said. "Come fishing with me. The wife has given me a day pass. I'll pick you up at 6.30am". Surprisingly, Jo didn't want to come fishing, preferring to get the van sorted out instead.
As promised, Ross turned up with his work mate Richie who was towing his motorboat and had also been given leave of absence from his family. Fishing is the most popular pastime here and the driveways are full of boats on trailers. I counted 6 in Richie's short road alone. To keep up with the Jones in Karritha, forget the 4WD. You need a boat.
We drove up to Dampier on the coast, which is surrounded by the Dampier Archipelago. This was a tightly packed series of 45 deserted low, rocky, grass covered islands offshore, many of which were part of a National Park. After backing down the boat into the water, we took off around the islands. Richie had been fishing these parts for years and knew his way around, but the weather prediction was wide of the mark. Instead of smooth water, it was really choppy and our faces were covered in spray. It was, to say the least, a little rough.
Fishing, Karritha style is somewhat different. They had bought scuba gear, 4 tanks of oxygen and a speargun. Crayfish (lobsters) were abundant in these parts and the home freezers had been empty for some time. Ross (armed with a long metal prong) and Richie (with speargun and a fish bag) geared up and disappeared underwater for the first session. I sat in the boat that was getting thrashed by the waves. Feeling a little queasy (rare for me) I did some snorkelling but the waves pounded me into submission.
Nearly an hour later, Ross reappeared. Removing the scuba gear, we heard a yell from Richie. He had found some more crayfish and needed someone to keep them at bay while he caught them. I geared up quickly and headed underwater.
The crayfish were hiding under a large lump of coral. I got to see the intriguing sight of Richie taking off his tank and gear underwater, hanging on it to while still breathing from his respirator and crawling under the coral to try and reach the goodies. It was certainly different. He failed at his attempt but had still bagged half a dozen previously.
Lunch was ‘snags’ (sausages) and ‘dead horse’ (tomato sauce). We motored to a different area and I geared up for the second session. Just as I was about to leave the boat, I suddenly felt seasick and lost my lunch overboard in four very satisfying hurls into the wind. “Good lunch, Ross”, I mentioned, before joining Richie underwater. Armed with the metal prong, I felt a little like Neptune. We cornered a crayfish and tried to poke it out of its hiding hole beneath some coral from two angles. Suddenly it came scuttling past my face like the ‘alien’ and disappeared. I was a lousy crayfish hunter but enjoyed the opportunity to have another dive in a different area.
When we reappeared, we found that Ross had been using a rod and line and had caught over a dozen large fish. One was an enormous Silver Trevellian getting on for two feet long. Using an another line, I had a go myself and managed to catch a decent sized sea bream. But Ross was on another level. He’d reel out and reel in another fish about every 3 minutes. “Somebody Stop Me!” he yelled ala Jim Carrey in ‘The Mask’. He filled a cold box worth while Richie tried to keep up on the filleting front. I’d never seen so many fish being caught so quickly and all good sizes. How I wish Jo could have been there! It was one of my most memorable days out in Australia. So thanks Ross (and Barb), for everything and for inviting us.
With a serviced campervan that now had new ‘non-ratshit’ tyres all around, we did a long 600km drive to the Gascoigne Coast “Where the Outback meets the Reef”. The NW Coastal Highway passed through flat barren landscapes of red dust, spinifex grass, dried up river creeks, two roadhouses and the occasional Emu. This area looked more deserted than the Northern Territory.
You will notice that I am having difficulty finding new words to describe ‘flat, barren landscapes’. Please get out your dictionary and send me some more suggestions. Fortunately, few of you will ever have to suffer my photo albums. The only way I could capture Australia’s beautiful and unique land was to jump out the van every hundred kilometres or so, and take a picture of the road disappearing to a pinprick in the distance. I will be applying to the Guinness Book of Records for having the “most photos of Australian roads” in the world.
The Ningaloo Marine Park encompasses over 5000 sq. km of ocean and is one of the world’s most spectacular reefs. It stretches along 260km of coastline from Coral Bay to Exmouth and contains 250 coral types and 520 fish species. Whaleshark, humpback sharks, dugongs (which look like large bloated sealions), manta rays and turtles are all visitors.
The small touristy hamlet of Coral Bay is the southern gateway to the marine park. It sits on the doorstep of a beautiful bay with glowing white beaches and clear turquoise water. Best of all, you can walk right off the beach and snorkel over the reef that stretches 2km outwards.
It was tempting to do some diving, but it was overpriced and snorkelling was just as good. The reef only lay a metre of so underwater. One company offers snorkelling trips to see a WhaleShark but it cost over £100! The rather excessive price was because they used a ‘spotter’ plane to fly over the reef. When a WhaleShark was seen, the boat would head to that area and everyone would snorkel around the large brown beast with distinctive white spots. This method seemed to rather take the element of surprise out of exploring the reef, which is the fun part. You never know what you will see. What I didn’t see was a WhaleShark, which is a harmless plankton eater, and with an average 40-ft long length, is the ‘largest fish in the world’.
I spent a good few hours snorkelling over the reef, which was full of massive platforms of cabbage coral. Take your average supermarket cabbage. Enlarge it a few thousand times. Turn it into a brown rock and then fill an acre of seabed with them. About a kilometre off shore, amongst the blue tipped stag antler, I spotted a baby turtle. For the next hour I followed this small beautiful two-foot long creature. It was like having my own privately guided tour of the reef. Every few minutes, it would poke its scaly head out of the water, take in a gulp of air and head back down.
Nearer the beach, I saw numerous blue spotted stingrays with long thin tails nestling in the sand, while fish fed off their backs. A Picasso BoxFish passed by. The first one I had seen since the Maldives, they are nature’s version of the Beatles’s ‘Yellow Submarine’. You could spend days in this area. One warning: the water at the caravan park is pumped directly from a bore and is hot and salty. You discover this when you make your first cup of tea. It tastes of salt! After spitting it out in disgust, you discover that there are a few sparse taps that produce fresh water. Doh!
The road south to Carnarvon saw us pass the Tropic of Capricorn for the fourth time. It also revealed sad evidence that kangaroos had taken a battering overnight. I counted over 25 corpses lying in the middle of the road. It reminded me of my previous 60-hour bus ride through WA. In the middle of the second night on the road, while an epic thunder and lightening storm filled the black night with flashing pitchforks of light, our bus had hit a cow. It exploded over the road, left a large dent in the bus and took 6 of us to haul the bloody carcass off the road. This was enough to convince us never to drive at night. It was just too risky. Besides which, we’d miss all those thrilling ‘flat barren landscapes’.
Carnarvon’s caravan park did not have salt water but it did have it’s own private bowling green. So we pretended to age about 30 years and have a few games. Losing heavily to Jo, a complete novice, I maintain that my performance was hindered by my beer supply running out midway during the competition. I went and sulked in the pool instead.
In March 2000, Cyclone Steve (don’t these cyclones have naff names – how about Cyclone Raging Thunder or Cyclone There Goes The Roof?) brought havoc to Carnarvon. Water levels peaked at 7.5m for 48 hours destroying homes, roads and plantations. It was the biggest flood in 30 years. That’s what is so great about Australia. You never know what nature next has up its sleeve. Unless of course you lived in Katherine in 1998 or Carnarvon in March 2000.
When it is not flooded, Carnarvon, a pleasant if slightly uninteresting place, has a thriving agricultural industry. Irrigated plantations of bananas, mangoes, grapes, melon, paw-paw and more salt harvesting surround it. It calls itself the “Sun’s Winter Home”. Obviously, winter hadn’t arrived yet, because we never saw the sun here.
The scenery became more picturesque a bit further south. From a lookout, we could see the coast on one side and I think I saw Sydney across the deserts on the other, 3000 miles away. Goats became a new roadside feature as did Emu and fox road kill. We turned right onto a wide peninsula, which contains the ‘Shark Bay National Park’.
Shark Bay NP is Australia’s largest marine embayment with over 1500km of meandering coastline. On the World Heritage List, the landscapes and habitats vary from rugged sea cliffs to tranquil lagoons along with beaches of sand and shell. The shallow waters within the Bay sustain a diverse ecology including coral, mangroves and sea grass. This is the place where all those huge Ningaloo Marine Park visitors come for their holidays (Whaleshark etc). It is an absolute gem of scenery and sights and what I’d call ‘unmissable’.
Driving through the red dust that supported low-lying green scrubland, we reached Hamelin Pools, which contain the oldest and largest living fossils in the world. I didn’t know fossils could live, but apparently they do here. The fossils are called Stromatolites and they are typical of the earth’s earliest life forms 3,500 million years ago. These Cyanobiotic (look it up) bacteria supposedly produced 20% of the earth’s first oxygen. Not, specifically these ones at Hamelin pools, but you get the picture.
A 200m wooden boardwalk allows you to walk from the beach, over these strange creations, while local mascot “Stumpy” the Stromatolite tells you about “his family” on information boards. It was quite well done, considering that what you were essentially looking at was a collection of two foot square blobby rocks lying in shallow pools that I would just have called ‘knackered coral’.
We left Stumpy and walked along the shell beach, which had compacted so well, that a disused small shallow (10ft) quarry was evidence that the first pioneers here had literally used saws to remove large chunks of shell rock from the beach to construct their now-long-gone houses.
If you want shells, Shell Beach has got more than it’s fair share. There was no sand. Just trillions of tiny 1cm bleached white clamshells. Picking up just a handful was uncountable. It was part of the coastline of shell beaches that stretches 120km around the peninsula. The shells lie to a thickness of 10m and noone has ever worked out why so many shells ended up here. It is thought that because of the harsh conditions and high salinity, the minuscule shellfish have no natural predators so they consequently breed like, er, shellfish.
When you walk across the beach, the sunshine reflecting off the shells is blinding. There are different levels to this gently sloping coastal formation, which has been shaped by the wind and sea. It was a spectacular wide curved beach with a beautiful passive bay of bright clear blue water gently lapping the shore.
I decided to go for a dip (as you do). A quarter of a mile off the beach, I was still walking and the water hadn’t even reached my knees! The seabed was just tiny shells. There was no vegetation underwater whatsoever. I finally reached waist height, but disappearing underwater was difficult because the sea’s salinity made me buoyant. I spotted a three-foot long brown sea snake meandering through the water beneath me and snorkelled around it for 20 minutes. It was the only sea life I saw. Suffice to say, Shell Beach is absolutely fabulous. Eat your heart out Broome!
Our beachfront caravan park at Denham, the only small town on the peninsula, had no grass, just more bloody shells. I sat and laughed while our Aussie neighbour attempted to drill holes into the shelly ground with his Black and Decker, just so he could get the tent pegs in.
At Monkey Mia, early the next morning, we had the wonderful experience of having dolphins swim right to us. Ok, so it is a little touristy. You roll up to the resort around 8am and directed by a Ranger, you all enter the water up to your knees. The grey bottlenose dolphins then start to appear and come right up to you. We were fortunate to have 7 of them swimming around our legs. What was unfortunate were the other 200+ tourists who lined up with us, video cameras churning away, while the old lady female ranger warbled on with her narration and corralled the crowds like a brooding hen. “Only up your knees and please don’t try to touch the dolphins”. (“But they’re touching me. I haven’t moved, lady!”). By standing at the end of the line, you get the best chance to have them swim right around you, poking their noses out of the water looking for a hug.
Equally appealing were the large collection of enormous pelicans that stood on the beach looking for fish handouts. Reaching up to three feet tall, their massive pink flabby beaks can hold up to 2 kilos of fish (“What a wonderful bird is the pelican. His beak can swallow more than his belly can”). On land, these black and white birds with their big round black eyes, long necks, comical beaks and large webbed feet waddle around and look so graceless. But in the air they are transformed into graceful flying machines that glide across the water until they land back on the water, rather badly, like a sack of fish shit.
Glad to leave the ‘Britz’ divisions, we left Shark Bay National Park for a very scenic drive south to Kalbarri on the coast, along straight, rolling, undulating roads with herds of goats munching the bush. I hadn’t heard of Kalbarri, but the latest tourist literature trying to promote one of WA’s fastest growing holiday resorts seemed to like it and I can now see why.
The town, lying beside the Murchison River, was relatively small with only 2000 people. ‘Rainbow Jungle’ is ‘Australia’s Parrot Breeding Centre’. A relatively new enterprise, it is walking off with numerous tourist awards. You start by walking past large cages of startling colourful collections of birds. Just for the record, these included red tailed, yellow tailed, white tailed, black tailed and Major Mitchell (who?) cockatoos, Bourke’s parrots, princess parrots, red winged parrots , mulga parrots, hooded parrots, king parrots, eclectus parrots (that’s enough parrots – ed) and multi rainbow coloured rosellas (western rosellas, blah blah blah). All these are used for very successful breeding purposes.
The centre’s only failures are the most expensive birds here. A pair of Sun Conures, from South America cost them $8000 and after a few years, they still haven’t even got around to foreplay. They tried adding a second female for a little spice without success. They are now checking to make sure they weren’t flogged pandas by mistake.
After playing with a friendly large white cockatoo that said “Hello” but failed miserably to learn the word “Bollocks”, we entered the centrepiece, which is an enormous net covered aviary, and naturally ‘the largest parrot walk in free flight area in Australia’. Here you could walk around while two dozen varied species flew around, dived bombed you, ate at bird tables or honey drips and allowed you to stand within inches while taking their multi-coloured rainbow mug shots. Fun for all the family. I was dragged out after two hours.
Our caravan park was right next to the long narrow wooden pier by the sea. A brilliant red/purple/mauve sunset across the ocean sent us to sleep and we awoke to watch a local volunteer feed a flock of 20 pelicans on the grass nearby.
Just outside town, lies the majestic Kalbarri National Park, a mere 190,000 hectares in size. The red Tumullagooda sandstone is 1000m thick and about 400 million years old. As it was gradually uplifted, the Murchison River carved it’s way through, complete with meanders to form a spectacular gorge which is 80km long. The park has wildly beautiful scenery, sheer drops of 150m to the river, vividly colourful rock faces and tall river gum trees.
We did the 8km long ‘Loop Walk’, which started by descending from the sandstone plateau down to ‘Nature’s window’, which was a large natural arch weathered out of the thinly bedded red and white bonded sandstone, and through which, we could look down across a section of the gorge. Following the river along the top of the lower plateau, we stood on sandstone overhangs to view the wonderful gorge, before descending to the river which we accompanied along sandstone ledges just above it. This took us back round in a loop below the towering red gorge cliffs, over boulder fields, along goat tracks and finally back to (Play School “Today children, we’ll be looking through...) Nature’s Window. ‘Z Bend’ lookout a short drive further into the park, was a fabulous panoramic view of a different section of gorge, where in the midday sun, the red/orange/white sandstone radiated different shades above the sluggish blue river. As with Shark Bay, the Park is ‘unmissable’.
We were wondering when the ‘unmissable’ sights of WA would stop. It is such a strange, empty state of so many diverse attractions and very different to the rest of Australia. If you visit in the Spring/early Summer, (the English autumn) you will find it completely overrun by brilliant carpet mosaics of wildflowers.
A newly constructed ‘scenic coastal road’ (along the ‘Batavia Coast’) took us south from Kalbarri past 150m high, white sandstone cliffs under assault from the turbulent ocean. Turning inland, after Northampton, into the ‘Mid West’ region of WA, the bushland turned into fields of grazing sheep and cattle. It rained all afternoon and when we rolled into a caravan park near Geraldton, we found that it had been flooded by a heavy storm (2” fell in about two hours). This was not good news for my anticipated evening outdoor BBQ.
Ironically, what-to-us-after-so-many-small-dry-places-seemed-rather-large-and-wet Geraldton (23,000 pop) calls itself ‘Sun City’ (I think not. Try another catchy name). It’s standby is the (self-proclaimed) ‘Lobster Capital of the World’ (that’s more like it – think BIG!). So I did a free tour of the biggest lobster (crayfish) factory down by the wharf. Once I’d donned my silly white hairnet, it was quite an education.
The Western Rock Lobster Fishery knows its lobsters from its crayfish. It must do because it is the ‘most valuable single species fishery in Australia’ and on it’s own, produces 20% of the financial turnover of ALL Australia’s Fisheries. Last year, the factory processed 14 million kilos of lobster, 3 million of which were exported. to Japan, SE Asia, USA and Europe, commanding high prices. It is a seriously lucrative business worth over (Oz) $300 million last year (over £120m). It is one of the world’s ‘lobster players’.
The rock-lobster season runs from November to June. It costs a fisherman (Oz) $300,000 just to get a stake in the company before he can start hauling in his fortune. The co-operative Fishery had 150 boats from which fishermen caught the lobsters in large pots off the Abrolhos Islands 60km off the coast. On board, the lobsters were sorted according to strict and carefully graded size requirements. The small ones and any pregnant females were returned to the sea, ensuring that the lobster numbers are kept high (with this method, they are actually on the increase). The lobsters were then brought ashore in tanks of seawater to the factory, graded and stored alive in larger tanks of continually flowing pumped seawater. If some boats were fishing further north up the Batavia Coast, specially converted trucks would bring down the lobsters in tanks of seawater.
To export them alive, they are cooled in a water temperature of 10’C. The lobsters, used to a warmer 16-22’C seawater temperature, decide that this is simply not on and go to sleep naturally. They are then packed in special aerated foam boxes full of pine wood shavings (almost looking freeze-dried) and flown to their destination. At the other end, the buyer just has to put them in hotter water and hey presto, they wake up, and live lobster is on the menu. The system works so well that they only have a 2% ‘death rate’ using this transportation method.
Our tour involved a video of the process from catching to cooking. Then we watched a boat unloading its catch of boxes. Within the factory, we filed past hundreds of tanks, full of lobsters with their skinny, spiny antennae sticking out of the water. Apparently, they get enough nutrients from the seawater to survive. One section had the big boys in – over 2 kilos apiece. We ended up with a display of the packing process. No free samples unfortunately. Jo wanted to hose me down afterwards because I “stank of fish”.
We found Geraldton to be a friendly place where they had made a decent effort to keep and restore their old ‘Aussie-Victorian’ architecture. St Francis Xavier Cathedral was an imposing sandstone ‘Byzantine styled’ Roman Catholic fortress constructed between 1916-38 and designed by a Pommie (English) priest who fancied himself as an architect in-between masses. Inside, the orange and white striped colouring covering the pillars and arches looked like a limited collection of liquorice allsorts.
While we were getting our brake pads replaced, the mechanic told us that Geraldton had a “car crime problem”. What? In a town of 23,000? But when we rolled up to the theatre that night, it had provided a private security firm to keep an eye on the cars.
We took in ‘Circus Oz’ which is difficult to describe, but if I must... It was essentially a collection of 2 dozen street entertainers who had been brought together and accompanied by a strange but very versatile musical band to provide 90 minutes of non-stop circus type acts but with an with an emphasis on comedy to make it look different. It was also aimed at all ages and there were plenty of kids in the audience.
So, for example, a couple of girls did trapeze tricks, another rolled around the stage in a large steel framed wheel, human pyramids of amazing strength and balance were built, plate spinning was done using anything but plates. The ‘clown’ was a bald three-foot high dwarf, with an artificial leg, and wearing a kilt. He didn’t seem to be the luckiest person in the world. One act led straight into another and there was no time to catch your breath or stop laughing.
Two sketches were hilarious. A tightrope sketch had a wooden ‘dunny’ (toilet) at one end of the wire and the tightrope artist at the other, bursting for a crap. So he’d inch his way across to the dunny, find it occupied and have to go back. The occupant disappeared and so the tightrope walker made for the toilet, only to find no paper. Back he goes, getting increasingly desperate and crossing his legs. He grabs some toilet paper, but someone grabs hold of it behind him and unrolls it so that by the time he gets there, there is no paper left on the roll. This went on back and forth as he started to look rather unwell. He finally made it into the toilet with some paper and suddenly the theatre lights go dark, so he had to come back for a match. This man could certainly tightrope walk.
The other sketch and my favourite, consisted of 3 band members – a guitarist, violinist and large cellist who sat at the front of the stage and started to play some really nice classical music. Suddenly, the cellist was lifted into the air by an invisible wire and started to be pulled around in circles above the stage, while he desperately tried to continue playing the classical piece. He was literally standing on the cello as it was hurled around, still playing (live). Then he lost hold the cello, which was on another wire and tried chasing it through the air. Then suddenly the cello stopped and started chasing him as he tried to run away kicking his legs in air. I nearly wet myself. I suppose you had to be there.
Jo had seen ‘Circ du Soleil’ on tour in Auckland, which is a much bigger, professional and more famous circus along the same lines. She called Circus Oz, ‘amateur hour’ against that production. But then she’s never satisfied. I was just impressed that it was all done live with no mistakes. When you have seen no TV in months, it seemed such refreshing entertainment.
We left ‘Sun City’ along the coastal road in pouring rain. The wind howled up from the stormy choppy sea and blew across the land. Trees were growing at 45% angles away from the wind so they must be used to it. The van nearly followed their example.
The Namburg National Park, outside Cervantes, contained the famous ‘Pinnacles desert’. In this area of red, white and golden yellow sand, there are thousands of bleached greyish limestone ‘pinnacles’ which range in size up to 5 metres tall and 2 metres wide at the base. Dutch sailors who first spotted them back in 1658, before European settlement, thought that they were seeing the remains of a lost city. These formations are actually a group of limestone pillars standing in a small sandy desert. They were formed 30,000 years ago when ancient plant roots formed a weak cementation of calcite within the dunes and which have been exposed by wind and shifted sand. It is known as the ‘Painted Desert’ and is another example of Australia’s ancient past.
We cut inland to the ‘Golden Heartland’ where sheep and cattle grazed and acres of wheat lands lay barren after the summer harvest. Jo remarked “This is just like England – if you remove the single story buildings with their tin roofs, the colourful parrots and the eucalyptus trees”. Which pretty much just left the sheep and cows.
New Norcia is Australia’s only monastic town. Founded in 1846, as an aborigine mission to convert the heathens, it is still the home for 16 Benedictine monks and is another strange place. The architecture, with its strong Spanish flavour and draped with tropical trees is juxtapostioned against the Australian bush. Protected by the National Trust, the hamlet was made up of a monastery, the old convent, museum, two colleges and the palatial New Norcia hotel with its 2 level verandas and gardens (surely too deluxe for a monk to hang out or are they going up in the world?). It was wonderfully peaceful except for about a million pink and white galahs that screamed their beaks off while swooping around.
Smacking of some real culture, it was very un-Australian. Which reminds me of the jokes: What is the difference between Australia and yoghurt? Yoghurt is a living, growing culture. How do you define an Australian aristocrat? Someone who can trace his heritage back to his father. Cruel but fair.
Further into the heartland we found Toodyay, a small bustling country town retaining some of its former glory as “the wildest town in the west”. The impressive red bricked, Connors Mill is Australia’s finest example of an 1870’s steam driven flourmill. But I was more interested in the town’s most infamous character ‘Moondyne Joe’.
He arrived as a convict in 1853, but was ‘pardoned’ two years later. After settling into the nearby bush , he turned into an outlaw who made a mockery of the state police with his daring escapades. He was arrested for stealing a horse, but managed to escape from Toodyay gaol taking the horse and the magistrate’s bridle with him. And so began a series of arrests and subsequent escapes that would amuse the settlers and frustrate the law authorities for the next forty years. He was described by the State Governor as an “immense scoundrel” after he was locked up again, released from his chains to work in the prison yard and then escaped again. As old age set in, he wandered around with an ‘unsound mind’ and died in 1900 at the Freemantle Lunatic Asylum. His photo had him covered in what looked like an entire uncut cow skin draped over his shoulders and his hairy head sticking out rather like a poor man’s ‘Desperate Dan’.
Founded in 1831, York was Western Australia’s first inland settlement. It’s opulent Victorian and Federation (i.e. post 1901) buildings have been beautifully restored and it was popular with the Sunday drivers from Perth. I had been here before in 1985. After an epic 8-hour one-ride hitch all the way from Kalgoorlie in the east of the state, I had checked into the Youth Hostel, which was an old convent. It was one of the strangest places I’d ever stayed in and I was the only person there. Even the custodian lived next door “afraid of the ghosts”. I was sad to see that it is no longer a YH but is being restored as a historical building as Australia continues to attempt to reclaim it’s past.
Perth lay an hour away to the east. It is an enormous city of 1.2 million people. Of the total WA population of 1.8m, 80% of them live in or around the Perth area. I remembered Perth, set by the lovely Swan River, as being a rather pleasant city but it had grown into a sprawl along the coast and now seemed to be modelled after Brisbane with an ugly collection of office towers in the central business district.
I suppose it is still a better city than most, with well signposted, fast moving and huge American-like freeways taking you into a downtown centre of wide grid patterned streets and out to the surrounding extensive parklands. High above the centre, King’s Park, a 4-km sq. area is the best, and from here you can look down at the high rises and the suburban expansion everywhere. Maybe I just don’t like big cities anymore.
The high point was the West Australian Museum, which was a wonderful complex of buildings, which included the old gaol and the original Perth library. It had excellent exhibitions on the ancient and modern history of WA from the geology and dinosaurs through to what is happening today. Next door, the WA Art Gallery had some really good modern art and a collection of Aboriginal work. Both are free and worth a look.
Freemantle, 20km south, used to be an isolated port. Now it has been swept up by Perth’s encroaching expansion. Back in 1985, Freemantle was feeling very smug with itself. Two years before, a ‘billionaire’ called Alan Bond had financed a Freemantle-based, Australian challenge to win the America’s Cup from the Americans for the first time in history. They had succeeded and Freemantle was way fashionable. I had visited the Freemantle Sailing Club to see the cup proudly displayed. But they lost it again, Alan Bond went bankrupt and ended up in prison and Freemantle’s tourist literature didn’t even mention it anymore.
Though really just a tourist town, Freemantle has some wonderful architecture. It has restored many of its narrow-streeted, 1880s stone buildings (at least from the first floor up above the bland shopping level), which have been painted in lovely light pastoral colours of yellows, greens and oranges. There are still first floor verandas on the sides of the pubs/hotels. But there was no free parking anywhere in town, which made you rush around much faster than it deserved.
Freemantle was the base of our excursion to Rottnest Island. Rottnest, or ‘Rotto’, is only a 25-minute (13-km) boat ride away. It is a ‘A-Class Reserve’, 11km long and 4.5km at its widest points, which enjoys a semi-arid Mediterranean climate. Until 7000 years ago, when the sea level rose, it was attached to the mainland. In 1696, Dutch explorers named it “Rats Nest” mistaking the resident Quokkas for huge rats.
The island has a unique style of preserved architecture dating back to the 1800s and a diverse history as a prison for Aboriginal men, an internment camp during both World Wars, a place for salt gathering and a WWII military installation where, amid the growing fear of Japanese invasion, Rottnest was seen as the last defence before the fall of Perth. It also boasts some of the finest beaches you’ll find anywhere so the tourists have been coming here since 1917. There is a sealed road all the way around, but no motorised traffic apart from an occasional bus shuttle service.
We were picked up from our freezing campsite (8’C overnight!) at 6.30am and delivered by bus to the boat. Here we rented bikes, sailed over on the empty first boat of the day with a few workers (the island has no permanent residents) and peddled off, in bright sunshine, for a day’s poodling clockwise around the island’s coastline to take in all the lovely views and beaches.
It was very peaceful. We had the undulating single lane road to ourselves before the lazier tourists arrived around midday. The island was the result of an ancient coral reef, which turned to limestone and was covered in sand. The turquoise coloured water, white surf, and yellow sandy beaches squeezed between the low brown limestone cliffs provided lovely settings. Stands of bushy tea-trees would appear infrequently, breaking up the carpets of low, autumn coloured bushland which looked like Scottish heather in its prime. There were a number of small inland lakes, which had once sustained the small salt industry.
We climbed up Oliver Hill, to old WWII gun emplacements (which had a 9.2 inch gun still in place) and Wadjemup lighthouse in the centre of the island at the tallest point of only 60 metres. The 38m tall white lighthouse was only the fourth largest in Australia but was essential. Countless ships had been wrecked off this island. I failed to see a live Quokka but counted 4 road kill which seemed strange since there is not a car on the island.
As we pedalled back to the only civilisation at Thomson Bay called ‘The Settlement’, I spied a live Quokka nibbling leaves under a shady tree. They are strange looking beasts. Squat kangaroo-like legs support a rather rotund brown furry body with tiny little paws to hold things, a long thin tail and beady looking black eyes. What you’d call – a bloody big rat, the size of a cat
Quokkas are found nowhere else in the world. They still flourish on this island and their major claim to fame (apart from having a really cool name) is that they can survive without drinking water. They get all their moisture from fleshy plants. They have become a little tamer, which in recent years led to a bout of “Quokka bashing”. Those mucho Aussie college boys would come over for a drinking session, and for light entertainment, would find a Quokka, which would roll into a defensive ball when taunted, and the lads would play football with it. The authorities clamped down and eventually sent someone to gaol for the offence, which seems to have stopped the trend. String ‘em up I say (not the Quokkas).
We took in an excellent free guided tour of ‘The Settlement’ with an old retired volunteer guide who loved the place so much, he had been taking his holidays here every year since 1947! (I hesitated at calling him a ‘sad old git’). Henry Vincent was the first prison warden on the island and from the 1830’s used aboriginal labour for 30 years to build a settlement which he designed. It was a real feat of motivation since the Aborigines had no idea how to build anything.
All these buildings remain and are now all seasonal tourist accommodation (including the old gaol). ‘Vincent Way’ is one of Australia’s oldest intact streets with squat one story thick-bricked walls and slabs of limestone for their roofs. They used to be whitewashed until 1917, when the entire town was painted in yellow ochre to remove the blinding glare from the sun. The tiny old whitewashed stone church was especially delightful. We saw a replica of the old pilot boat, which was the only way to bring people and supplies back and forth. Five poor sods had to row 26km to Freemantle and back.
About 3500 Aboriginal prisoners passed through here from the 1830s until 1903. The old cemetery was rediscovered this century with over 350 Aboriginal corpses, buried standing up, facing east. Many died from simple homesickness. Suffice to say, Rottnest Island is certainly worth a visit if you want to escape the crowds for a day.
I had explored the South Western Region of WA beneath Perth on my previous visit, so we skipped it, and headed Southeast for Hyden to see ‘Wave Rock’, through the ‘Golden Heartland’ which had sheep, cattle and horses grazing in the miles of empty wheat fields. We passed an ostrich farm, where hundreds of 10ft tall long legged, long necked BBQ food came bounding up to the fence when we stopped. Like them, a field full of llamas seemed very out of place.
Back in 1985, I had hitched from York to Hyden with an abattoir inspector. I spent the entire day with him as he visited four small isolated, scruffy wooden huts. Behind them were pits full of stinking animal intestines, skins hanging out to dry and enough flies to give India a run for its money. I was in severe pain. My left arm had swelled to double its normal size and I could not even lift it. I managed to pitch my tent in agony at Wave Rock one handed. The following morning, picked up by an old couple, they insisted on driving me to a doctor at Narrogin. The Pakistani doctor surmised that the coral poisoning I’d received off the Great Barrier Reef had milled around my body for weeks and suddenly reacted. A penicillin jab in my backside put me right.
Wave Rock is one of Australia’s unique sights (what another one?). Geologists believe that the original formation has been sculptured by wind and coloured by chemicals over 2.7 million years to produce it’s wave-like character. It is an overhanging wall more than a 100 metres long on the northern side of a granite outcrop and rises 15 metres above the ground like a wave about to break for it’s full length. It is streaked with vertical bands of rusty red, and sandy grey ochre simulating the rolling movement of the sea. It is a long 4-hour drive from Perth and worth about 30 minutes!
