My TravelOzBlog: Civilisation along the way

After Alice, Halls Creek was the first town we came to. We stopped the night here, stocked up for our two nights at Purnululu, and stopped here for lunch on the way back from Purnululu to Fitzroy Crossing. So not the greatest of sightseeing spots.

There's an 'Old Halls Creek' which was abandoned in 1955 with the town moving to less hilly country when a new road was put through. The old cemetery remains and traces of the town, a few street signs, footings of buildings. The largest remainder is ruins of the old post office, made of termite mounds crushed and turned into mud bricks.

Fireplace at the remains of the old Post Office

A local legend is “Russian Jack”, famed for carrying/pushing a sick and injured prospector in his wheelbarrow from Derby to Halls Creek in the 1880's during a gold find. The injured prospector is a great-grandfather of a friend of mine!

"Russian Jack" monument

And the local butcher lived up (down?) to his advertising boast when a stew made from his meat was the only meal our cook made that could be criticised.

Would you buy meat here?!

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For us, Fitzroy Crossing was merely a stopping place. Mind you, the camp site was about the best we stayed at with a terrific shower block – you come to appreciate such things! It was a full day's drive from Halls Creek to get there, then in the morning it was up and off to the Geikie Gorge cruise before heading straight on to Broome.

The river at Fitzroy Crossing - literally miles wide when it floods

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Broome is a booming place, houses going up all about.
I'd never seen the point in a resort until arriving at Cable Beach Club. Excellent indeed for completely chilling out, unwinding, relaxing. The only negative was the shortage of washing machines as we all brought out our dusty, dirty clothes from the previous week ... hardly a serious complaint. The grounds were beautiful and extensive - so much so that I kept getting lost between my studio apartment, the pool and the restaurant! The climate is such that the restaurant has no walls at all along what would be the wall looking out to sea. So easy to see the sunset and the camels coming back from sunset rides .... one of which I'd never intended to try. No reason for a camel to suffer me on its back!

Because of the unexpected Cessna flight, I didn't get to see too much of Broome itself, the biggest “didn't see” being the lighthouse and dinosaur footprints at Gantheaume Point. We arrived back from the flight in time to catch the presentation at the Pearl Luggers museum about how pearling was done “in the olden days” - pretty horrific really. After that, I walked around the town centre and bought a couple of 'sun block' tops – cover-alls to wear instead of using lashings of sun block cream. Later, the iced coffee wasn't half bad either!

The Staircase to the Moon wasn't the perfection of the advertising brochures. You did get the idea of what it could be like but smoke in the air turned the moon red and lessened the reflections on the water. But the rising red ball was magnificent in itself and was accompanied, at our viewing point, by a 30 minute didgeridoo solo that was hauntingly beautiful. There was no disappointment at that turn of events.

Glimpses of Broome here. Including the best I could manage of the Staircase to the Moon. Aboriginal men wore pearl shells much as a Scotsman might wear a sporran!

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Derby was our morning tea stop (by the wharf) before starting up the Gibb River Road. The town, on King Sound which has Australia's highest tidal variations, up to 11m, is smaller than I expected but well kept, giving the impression of an active, prosperous community. New civic buildings added to that impression. I loved the median strip in the main street, planted with boab trees!

On the approach to town there is an historic boab, believed to be 1,500 years old, whose hollow trunk was used as a prison for Aboriginals. Nearby is a concrete water trough, built in the early 20th century, that could handle 500 head of cattle at a time fed by bore water. Initially it didn't run dry but that only lasted a couple of years so a windmill took over pumping in the water. Over-use of natural resources is obviously nothing new!

A bit of Derby here.

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Oh dear, Wyndham, also smaller than I'd expected. Was this ever a godforsaken place!! Or so it seemed. Perhaps appearances were deceptive ... there is a busy port there. And it's home to the 20m long “Big Croc” .... another “Big” Australian! At the entrance to the town is a collection of sculptures, an Aboriginal family and some native animals.

The Big Croc

Aboriginal family group

We had lunch at the lookout where you're supposed to be able to see five rivers flowing into the Cambridge Gulf. But it was hard to distinguish grey sea, grey mudflats, grey sky. Smoke again. Photos taken by friends Joan & Ken only a couple of weeks before tell a very different story.

My smoky Wyndham

Joan & Ken's non-smoky Wyndham

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Kununurra was a real mixed bag, the largest town we'd seen since Broome. The town was purpose built when construction on the Ord River Scheme commenced. It's got all the basics you would expect, including a hospital. I know that because I saw a doctor there! If I'd been at home I wouldn't have bothered but because it would be another week before the next chance to see a doctor, I went for a check because The Bug had given me some miserable days and more miserable nights with a hacking cough. No, “just a virus”, no need for antibiotics. But your blood pressure is way too high. Come back in the morning so we can check it again. Well, that wasn't going to happen but it put the fear of God in me, thinking I could blow a gasket at any minute. The first woman to catch The Bug, from the passenger who never should have joined us, put things in better perspective: Of course it's high, look what we've been through. And she was right. Nevertheless, on returning from the trip, I saw my local doctor, wore a 24hour BP monitor and then started medication. The diseases of Western affluence :-(

Apart from that, while remaining with the negatives ... this is the place where mosquitoes made a meal of me, even biting me through my clothes. I still suffer from those too, they're fading so slowly.

At Kununurra it was like rejoining civilisation, leaving the isolation of the Tanami, the Gibb River Road and Mitchell Plateau behind us .... most of us not being entirely happy to do that. Even the non-religious amongst us felt what could be termed a spirituality in that splendidly beautiful isolation.

The camp-ground was quite crowded, I had no choice but to sleep inside my tent. It was the place where smoke was the most oppressive, probably because it coincided with the worst of The Bug. Although crowded, the setting was lovely, on the edge of Lily Creek Lagoon, an offshoot of Lake Kununurra. I was sitting at lagoon's edge, calming down from the doctor's news, when bagpipes began. The piper played three tunes, one I recognised, one I didn't, the third was Amazing Grace. Sun was setting and it was beautiful. Our paths crossed when he finished playing and I was dashing back to the washing I'd left too long in the dryer. He was a young pilot with one of the local tourist airlines, keeping up his practice because he was a few thousand km from his regular pipe band! He said he practised by the lake quite often. What a bonus for bagpipe lovers like me!
After the Ord River cruise we visited the Durack Homestead, family home of one of the most famous names in the Kimberley. The house had been moved, stone by stone, from its original location because it would have been flooded by Lake Argyle. The solid walls, hallway running the length of the building, wide verandah all around and doors from all rooms opening onto the verandah would all have helped keep the place cool - relatively speaking. But it would have been jolly hot to live in more often than not.

We also made a quick detour to Ivanhoe Crossing, not that it's used much these days. With the development of the Ord River scheme water now flows across it so swiftly as to make it mostly unsafe.

I have to put in a plug for Artlandish, an Aboriginal art gallery. I was planning to buy some brightly painted clapsticks for the little English boys but the gallery attendant said No, they're too young for clapsticks ... well, Rufus yes, but I'd have thought Felix would be old enough to enjoy them. Instead, she suggested I buy a book, and a very nice book it is, but at one third of what I was prepared to spend. You have to praise someone who will take a lesser sale so the buyer gets the right thing. It wasn't as though she was going to see me again, she knew I was passing through. I was very impressed.

Lorikeets by Lily Creek Lagoon
More Kununurra photos here

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From Kununurra it was a long day's drive, 512km, across the Western Australia / Northern Territory border to Katherine. This is another major town, a stopover on the Stuart Highway, bigger than Kununurra ... first traffic lights seen since Alice! We had little more than an hour in the town before checking into our motel. A real shower and a comfortable bed!

I bought a necklace at a tucked away Aboriginal gallery and popped into the local library. I did think it a pity that the library was on the first floor of the building, missing out on a bit of passing trade, so to speak. But on speaking to the library staff I discovered the library had been on the ground floor but was moved upstairs after being flooded out a few years ago. I'm afraid I can't comprehend that. The river is in a deep ravine about 500m, at least, away. But it did happen.

I got to ride shotgun for 1½ hours of this long drive. It gave me a different perspective on the passing landscape and I learned more of the life of a truckie from Brendan. Les was watching a film, sitting in my seat in the back :-)

Riding shotgun

Riding shotgun - the camera at the windscreen

showed the road ahead on a screen in the passenger pod

No longer seen on the streets of Melbourne -
a public telephone

Katherine Public Library - upstairs!

Traffic lights - Main Street (Stuart Hwy)

Old bridge on the outskirts of Katherine.
Water rose to the top of the bridge in floods a few years ago.

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Our second last town, township really, was Jabiru. A huge camp-ground booked out for the weekend, mostly for an Aboriginal sports carnival. The kids were well behaved, a couple of their minders could have learned a thing or two from them! The township is small but contains the basics. The permanent homes had lush green lawns. It's ironic that in the middle of the desert there is enough water for sprinklers that we can't use at home. The most notable building is a Holiday Inn, built in the shape of a crocodile. It's so big, and amongst plenty of greenery, that it's a bit hard to see, but you can pick out individual features.

The other main building, a little away from the township, is the Bowali Visitor Centre, a very well set-up introduction to Kakadu. It even includes a small but pleasant library.

The one jarring thing about Jabiru, Kakadu NP in general, was the roads .... so good that you might have been in the midst of well-funded suburbia. It was a bit off-putting after all the off-road driving we had done.