Rottnest Island - beautiful scenery & Quokkas

Today we got up just after 6am, had breakfast and waited out the front of the caravan park for the bus that was to pick us up and take us to the ferry terminal in the city where we would catch the ferry to Rottnest Island. We decided to just book a tour with a company rather than try to go ourselves and maybe miss something. There are a couple of companies that we were given pamphlets for so we just picked one and booked through our caravan park. We chose one that offered pick up at our accommodation, morning tea on the ferry, a buffet lunch on the island, a guided bus tour of the island in the afternoon, and afternoon tea on the ferry then return trip back which cost $139 each. The trip from Perth terminal takes about 90 minutes, stopping along the way at Fremantle to pick up more passengers. It was very interesting to cruise down the river and see the city, Kings Park, and all the building, houses and Fremantle along the river. It certainly is a big river and there were so many boats moored in the various harbours or moorings along the way. The houses overlooking the river in some parts are just amazing – huge, and expensive by the looks of them.
Rottnest Island is a class A Nature Reserve and has been one since 1913 which is surprising but the government of the time realized the Quokka (small marsupial endemic to Rottnest) population was decreasing since the native Teatree had been cleared for farming originally and fires had gone through on a few occasions which the Teatree couldn’t recover from so they took the action of making it a nature reserve. The island is 11 km long and 4.5 km at its widest point and is surrounded by a body of warm water known as the Leeuwin Current. Only bikes and authorised vehicles such as the tour buses are allowed on the island so you have 3 choices about how you get around: walk, ride a bike or take a bus. When we got to Rottnest we had about an hour and a half to fill in by ourselves then had lunch at 12pm at a restaurant called Rottnest Lodge. We went for a walk around, looking in the little museum first which was staffed by a volunteer keen to give us as much information as he could. He explained how Rottnest was used as a prison for aborigines for a while with some of the buildings being built by the prisoners then it was used as a reform home for wayward boys ages anywhere from 8 to 17 who had committed such heinous crimes as steeling cakes or assault on another boy (at age 11, I suspect it was simply a boys fight!), an internment camp for Germans and Italians as well as having a base there with soldiers and four big guns placed around the island during WWII. The guide on our bus tour showed us the base where 2,500 soldiers lived and trained and the shack further along where 11 women acted as radio operators or signal people. Interesting ratio of men to women!
After we looked at the museum we wandered along and found ourselves at a little beach that is known as The Basin. It actually has a kind of basin or pool cut out of the rocks near the shore making a deeper pool which would be ideal for swimming. It is quite a pretty, sheltered spot. Next we wandered along and found Pinky Beach where surprisingly, since it was coolish, a couple of kids were swimming and you could see the lighthouse on Cape Vlamingh which we got to see later in our bus tour of the island. By this time we had to walk back to have our lunch which was as it described a buffet of hot and cold dishes and fruit, desserts, tea and coffee. It was quite good food and there was plenty of it so we had a good lunch with ample time to enjoy it before we had to be at the bus stop at 1.30pm. Our bus driver or coach captain as they prefer to be called was the typical character that seem to drive buses, making jokes of everything and picking on Collingwood supporters until he realized that there weren’t’ any on board so chose the next best thing and found some Geelong supporters to tease along the way. We first went to the airstrip where nearby, under some Teatrees were some Quokkas sleeping. They are meant to be nocturnal but we had already seen a few earlier wide away and eating. By the way, there are now about 10,000 on Rottnest so numbers have improved since the island has been cared for. Ross, the driver, pulled down some tea tree and called his friendly little Quokka called Dile (Quokka-Dile!) and he came and fed from his hand. A few others came up also and they were all female with babies in their pouches. (Check ‘em out in the photo – the babies should be out by now!) They are lovely little animals, very cute, and it was great to see them up close like that.
Next we went all around the island to various places, some I already mentioned, and looked at the picturesque scenery of the coastline. We saw the mutton bird burrows at Fish Hook Bay and whales in the distance out from Cape Vlamingh. It was all wonderful and probably enough for us I think; we could never have covered that distance on our own in one day and would not have heard all the interesting facts that Ross gave us so it was a good way to see Rottnest. We got back on the ferry by 3.45pm to be back at Perth by about 5 then we had to drop off people at various hotels etc and ended up back at ‘our place’ by just after 6pm feeling tired but content.

We go on the train tonight for two nights so there will be no post now until we are in Adelaide but at least our times will be closer to homes then. Till then...

Kings Park

Today Fin washed our filthy car which took quite a while since the bugs that kamikazied onto it were stuck well and it took a lot of elbow grease to get it off. I used the phone line in the caravan park here to upload yesterday’s BLOG then after lunch we went to Kings Park and Botanic Gardens to see if there were any more bodies buried there. There is a wildflower display on at the moment so at least we could see some of the ones that we missed due to the drought causing reduced numbers of them this year. They had them divided into sections of Western Australia so you could see where they normally grow too. The plantings were beautiful and my camera worked hard all afternoon! We walked and walked and walked but the park and gardens are very picturesque overlook Perth from Mount Eliza (62 m above sea level) with fantastic views of the Swan River that is the lifeblood of the city. The park is 406 hectares in size so we didn’t actually walk the whole thing but the part we did see is lovely and an enjoyable relaxing place to spend an afternoon. There are a lot of touches that make it special including plaques of various kinds set in the paving and sculptures, one of which was a very impressive tribute to women. The introduction to it is set in the path leading to the pond where it is situated. The water features were a pleasant oasis among the gardens and one has a great fountain that has one super high spout then when it stops, smaller ones come up two at a time and it is at the bottom of a grassed hill so you can come across it from the top as we did which is very effective. It was a lovely sunny afternoon so it was an ideal way to pass the day.
After dinner at a really good Chinese restaurant that Fin found by chance last time we were here because he wanted to know where the station is for when we go on the Indian Pacific we went back to Kings Park to see if we could get some interesting photos of the city lights. We drove into the street, again by chance, that had lights shining up on some magnificent white trunked eucalyptus trees so they got photographed as well. I was a bit disappointed with the amount of reflection on the river since I expected more since Perth is along the Swan but the tall buildings are not close enough to the water to give a really good effect. You can see what I did manage from the photos anyway. The War Memorial is lit up at night too but the park itself is quite dark in parts but it was still nice to take a walk along and look over the city and river in the dark.

Golden Pipeline, Cunderdin Museum & tractors - 19th September, 2007

Today was planned as basically a travelling day since it is 596 km from Kalgoorlie to Perth but we happened to stop at a public convenience just before the township of Cunderdin and noticed a lot of tractors and other old machinery inside a fence next to a building with a very tall chimney. Fin took a wander along the fence to a signpost in front of the building and found that it was the Cunderdin Museum which is actually in the building which housed the 3rd pumping station of eight for the Goldfields Water Supply which, as I mentioned in the last post, delivered water 560 km from Mundaring near Perth to Kalgoorlie and many towns in-between. It is approximately 120 km from no. 1 pump station at Mundaring and used an existing railway dam to store the water before it was pumped on to the next station. There were three pumps at Cunderdin and they were steam driven so would have required a lot of man power to keep them stoked up with timber so that they kept pumping away. Since the 1950s it has been replaced with electric pumps which these days are computer controlled and water can be controlled and diverted at the tap of a keyboard to fulfil the requirements of the country areas as well as the distant goldfields. The scheme was designed with the eight stations to overcome the difficulty of pumping water uphill over the Darling Range; a total lift of 34o metres, and over such a great distance. It is amazing to think of the feats achieved by early Australians to overcome difficulties and make previously unliveable areas reasonable places to live. Other items on display included the Coolgardie safe which most of us know is the first ‘fridge’ used by many early Aussies consisting of a cupboard with hessian walls that are kept wet to allow the air inside to be kept cool via evaporation. A simple yet fairly effective way to keep foods in the early days. Another amazing item was a chair made of tree branches and an old car seat. I guess you use what you’ve got when you have to!
Next we went outside to look at the tractors and other farm machinery/implements. They had a lot of tractors of all kinds and I took lots of photos because I know my brother-in-law, Rod, will be very interested to see them. He will have to go on a holiday to Perth one day and drive down to Cunderdin and take a look for himself! There is a sign post in yard there that has arrows pointing to different places and one of them is a place I had seen the signpost along the way for and found rather amusing. It is called Wyalkatchem. You have to wonder how these types of names were ever thought of, don’t you? When we had looked in another building at some early household items, a T-model Ford, a 1959 Volkswagen etc a man came along and asked us if we had been in the earthquake house. We said we hadn’t and he insisted we try it; it is a little model house within the same building that has a table & chairs in it and a TV on a bench. You are instructed by writing on the table to press a red button next to it and the TV starts playing a video about earthquakes with a newsreader at a desk then the house starts to shake and the newsreader comments on the tremor, more follow with the house shaking quite a bit. The newsroom on the video is in chaos and then she comes back to her desk and tells us that we have experienced an earthquake like the one in Newcastle. We had no idea what this display had to do with the area until we passed through Meckering and saw tourist signs for an earthquake site so we gathered that there had been an earthquake there at one point. We didn’t stop to look at it because we had to get to Perth in reasonable time to get our key.

Super Pit - Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Today was a “learn about mining in Kalgoorlie-Boulder day”. We went to the Super Pit shop which is the shop representing the Super Pit which is what they call the largest open cut gold mine in Australia and used to be called the Golden Mile. Basically, the Super Pit is designed to extract the remaining ore in the in haloes surrounding the ore bodies which were tunnel mined in the past. When completed the pit will be 3.8 kilometres long, 1.35km wide and deeper than 500 metres. Currently Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines removes about 85 million tonnes of material per year; of this some 12 million tonnes of gold bearing ore are produced and milled. Mining is carried out 7 days a week, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year in the Super Pit. We watched a video of mining operations and blasting there then went to the actual pit to take a look from the observation point. It really is huge and quite interesting to watch the humongous big tip trucks driving along the roads of the tiers collecting the ore. When you see the size of them against a four-wheel drive going along the same road, they really are big! Also, we came across the tray of one being carried on a semi along the road up further and that give you a much more realistic idea of how big they are. Just amazing! Next we went up to the lookout on Mt Charlotte which apparently is very close to where Paddy Hannan who registered the first claim in the area in 1893 made his find. It is also where the Golden Pipeline ends; this being the pipeline put in place back in 1903; it was an incredible feat of engineering in its day bringing water 565 km from Mundaring Weir to Kalgoorlie. The head of the project, C.Y. O’Connor, suffered heavy criticism at the time and unfortunately took his own life before water started flowing through it.
We went to the Australian Prospectors and Mining Hall of Fame next and had lunch at the cafe there then started to look around on our way to the first scheduled demonstration which was gold pouring. It was actually bronze, not gold because the cost of security required if it was gold would be prohibitive. The guy has to wear a Kevlar (heat-proof, flame retardant) jacket and gloves as well as a welding mask to protect him from the intense heat it takes to melt the gold. Next we donned the hard hats and took a trip in a cage down to about 120 feet below the surface and had a tour of an inactive underground mine; the conditions that the miners worked under were incredibly unpleasant – dusty and confined for 8 hours a day with a rather uninviting ‘thunderbox’ as the guide called it, the only convenience. He showed us the equipment they used to use including what is commonly known as an air-leg drill which has a leg filled with compressed air. He got a Polish lady tourist to use it and it was very LOUD and I imagine it vibrated in her hands a lot too. He was a fair dinkum Aussie miner (retired) who spoke very fast in a very outback Aussie way. I don’t think the Polish tourists understood a lot of what he said actually. I think a lot of we Australians found him hard to follow sometimes. He told us on the way down in the cage that it was held by 17 ropes, 16 of which were broken and he did the slip knot in the other one but he said everything with a dead straight face and waited for the reaction. I found him amusing despite his sexist comments occasionally and calling the Polish tourist “lady” all the time and referring to her and her companion as French even though he asked where they were from at the start and knew they were Polish. Hmm, you meet all types around our great country! After the underground tour we had a look at the other displays inside the main building which involved minerals, lots of printed information, interactive displays and videos etc. One video we watched by a prospector made us see how it is so like gambling. He just kept chasing that big find and had to live a fairly Spartan existence to do so. Overall, it was an interesting insight into the mining industry and history in Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
Some interesting facts:
· Western Australia supplies 75% of Australia’s total gold production and about 8% of the world’s gold production.
· It takes seven 220-tonne truckloads of rock to produce a tine two-ounce nugget.
· Nickel which is also mined in the region is used in the production of everyday items such as stainless steel, coins, aeroplanes, car parts, rechargeable batteries & ink.
· The Super Pit comprises more than 3,000km of old underground workings.
· About 85 million tonnes of ore and waste are removed from the Super Pit each year – that’s 232,000 tonnes per day.
· Approximately 30% of the Super Pit work force are women.
· Ore carrying trucks used in the Super Pit are the largest of their type used in Australian gold mining. The new Caterpillar 793C cost $4million and weighs a massive 376 tonnes. They are 6.4 metres high & 7.4 m wide and trave at a top speed of 54.3 kmh carry 220 tonnes of ore in one load and each tyre costs about $26,000 to replace.

And you thought your car running costs were high!

Finally we visited the Garden of Remembrance which has a Chinese style and is designed to celebrate the many cultures that worked together to develop the mining industry in australia. It is a space of contemplation and solitude for those who visit. It seems very new and will be lovely when it becomes established.

Gateway to the Goldfields

We left Esperance this morning and headed north to Kalgoorlie-Boulder which is the amalgamation of Kalgoorlie and the nearby town of Boulder which happened in 1998. The forecast for K-B today was 31 degrees so we were heading into warmer weather again. On the way, we stopped for morning coffee at a little town called Salmon Gums named due to the Salmon Gum trees which have a beautiful pink trunk which grow in the area. It took us a while to find the public toilets and picnic tables but once we did, we were surprised at how the town has done the area. A little gazebo exists with information inside about the town from various perspectives including the CWA women. The concrete table has metal plaques set into it with names of people on it and on the path that leads to the car park and ultimately the conveniences, has more special commemorative plaques or bricks set in it. It is very nicely done and portrays a town that is very proud of itself and its heritage. They had planted some flowering gums in the vicinity too and although they make it hard to see the picnic table form the road, they were flowering beautifully and several nectar eating birds were enjoying the spoils. The public toilet was attached to a hall which seemed to be used for a playgroup and both the little girl, who was entering from the hall, and I got a surprise when we nearly bumped into each other. I thought that this was a risky thing considering all the regulations and precautions we take at home in Melbourne but guess that at the moment that is the best they can manage and don’t perceive any risk being a little country town but I would accompany the children if their toilets are used by the public also.
Our next stop was Norseman where we stopped for lunch at a really kitsch little cafe; it had a bottle collection up on a shelf on the back wall of the front part of the shop, a mural along each side wall and paintings hung above them in places also. There was a glass cabinet at the front with all sorts of things for sale in it including sunglasses and ornaments and there were large, empty ice-cream buckets for sale in front of the main counter which was obviously a way to recycle what the ice-cream comes in. The town has an interesting display of corrugated tin camels on the main round-about from the highway into town which I guess relates to the fact that the town is on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain desert and the first stop when crossing from South Australia. We saw the sign pointing to Adelaide! It is also known as the Gateway to the Goldfields. The other thing you see a lot of in Norseman is horses since the town owes its beginnings according to stories to Laurie Sinclair (yes really!) who was camped overnight in the country side nearby and his horse whose name was Norseman scraped at the ground with his hoof and unearthed some gold so when the town was established, Sinclair named it after his horse.

One of the things we observed along the way was the proliferation of the species Litterata glarsbotlii of various types and also Litterata tinnii. These are out of their usual environment and although the glarsbotlii species retains its shiny skin attempting to gain the attention of humans who may help give them a new life, the tinnii lose their shiny coating very soon and are destined to remain where they are. It is very sad! Another species we have seen a lot of along the highways is the Rubatira shredii - mainly the subspecies semii or roatrainii We have seen some quite big specimens but they seem to vary in size.

We got to Kalgoorlie by about 2pm and booked into our 5 star motel; it’s very nice! After checking that the dial-up will work OK we went into town to the post office to try to get some cards posted before 5pm (which we did!) Hopefully they will get to Melbourne in a couple of days. (Ange – check the mail regularly - hopefully you’ll have it for Echidna group but definitely for Platypus before the end of term.) Unfortunately, Tom had some trouble with the street name we put in and after a big drive around, put in the post office in the CBD and got there once we did that. Hmm, every now and then Tom-tom just can’t find the street we want so you have to be careful about relying totally on it.

Esperance - inspirational!

Esperance – what a coastline! We did the drive around the coast road this morning, stopping at nearly every lookout and viewing spot and it truly is an amazing sight. The Southern Ocean is so blue and so wild. There are a lot of rocks also, some that are long and flat looking like a shelf or table and others that are rounded but no sign of really jagged rocks. However, I would hate to try to swim to shore if I fell in from one of the rock platforms. The sea is very powerful and constantly moving here and although it looks beautiful, would be treacherous in some places. The drive along the coast road is well worth doing and doesn’t take long unless you stop for too long at each lookout; I wasn’t allowed to so we only took a couple of hours to make the drive completely around, past the pink lake (which is not pink at this time of year unfortunately) and back into Esperance. We went to the bakery and got something for lunch then went down to the shelter near Esperance Bay to eat it. It was a sunny but windy day which kept the temperature down enough to warrant keeping our jumpers on. Talking to some kids on the little swimming pier nearby, we discovered it is always windy in Esperance. Next to this little pier was a floating pontoon with a ladder and slide thing on it for kids to play on when swimming but the weather was too cold for that today except for a teenage boy that we had been talking to who went in just to show everyone that he could I think.
After we’d had lunch and had a look around we headed to Cape Le Grand National Park where some of the most photographed beaches including Lucky Bay are found and is about 50 km east of Esperance. Along the way, Fin suddenly braked and pulled over and, on asking what he’d stopped for; found that he’d seen some emus that he thought I’d like to take a photo of. He turned around to show me what he’d seen and I was amazed to see a group of maybe six or more emus in a clearing between some trees. Unfortunately all but one of them moved into the shelter of the trees so I didn’t get the photo but we decided to try again on the way back if they were still there which they were. I was stunned when I counted the number in the photo and found that it was actually ten and this time they did not spook and hide like last time, obviously. Maybe old man Emu told them that we were not a threat after last time. You see from the photos I worked out that the one that remained the first time was bigger and paler in colour than the rest and is probably the mob leader. I don’t know much about Emu behaviour but I suspect he is the protector of a mob of female and young.
At the gates to Cape Le Grand, we were surprised to find a self-registration set up if there is no one in the gate house so that is what we did. It relies on trust; you are meant to fill out the form then put your $10 in an envelope which is posted into a locked box and display the form on your dashboard. Different, unusual....
Lucky Bay itself as you can see from the photos is gorgeous; the sand is so white and amazingly hard. You can see where a four wheel drive drove over it but really didn’t make much of an impression in the sand at all. The sound of the waves crashing to shore is most dramatic from up on the higher land around it so I guess it echoes on the rocks nearby. The sea is as before a clear blue that is lighter close to shore then becomes quite dark as it gets deeper. Again, I imagine there could be a strong current out there to be careful of. There is a campsite just nearby with an amenities block for campers and there were maybe half a dozen campers there. We entered the beach from the campsite path and came immediately upon a mass of seaweed; some as deep as 30 – 40 cm! We had to walk across it for quite a while avoiding the parts that were deceptively very wet underneath if possible. Finally, we got past all that onto the hard, white sand which crunched under our feet but was really easy to walk on compared to most sandy beaches. We walked a fair way around, just enjoying the view and sound of the waves then headed back to the car, checking out Flinders Memorial on the way which commemorates Matthew Flinders sheltering in Lucky Bay when he circumnavigated Australia. We are doing that too; circumnavigating Australia but I think we are doing it a lot easier than Flinders would have, don’t you?
I tried to upload the BLOG post and photos again tonight but although it stayed connected for longer than last night when it only lasted about 8-10 minutes on dial-up, I couldn’t get anything published on Blogger. We think it is the age of the phone lines in the motel that has done renovations and put phones with extra data points but no doubt has not gone as far as rewiring the phone lines. Traveller beware! We made sure we booked motel rooms with phones knowing we could use dial-up since our Vodafone is completely unusable now and got caught out on this one. Our current motel in Kalgoorlie-Boulder is far more modern and has a 24 hour fast ADSL internet kiosk in the foyer as well as data points in the rooms. The dial-up seems to work fine here. Hooray! Two nights here then back to Perth for four before we get on the train.