A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On and on we went battling against a headwind and wishing we could get to where we were going in a shorter space of time. Sometimes we would fill up with fuel at a roadhouse, glance at the map, and see that we would just have to sit in the cab with nothing outside the windows worth looking at until we filled up again.
When driving these vast distances between the hours of, say, nine in the morning and five in the evening we seldom came across any sign of wildlife. It wasn’t uncommon to go a whole week without seeing anything. Yes, I hear you say, but Australia’s animals are mostly nocturnal. But before turning in well after dark every night I looked around with the torch for a pair of eyes but I still didn’t see any. Then, at some hour in the middle of the night, I get to go outside to pee and I look around with the torch again – bugger all except grey nomads with enlarged prostates. I know kangaroos and wallabies are out there because we see them dead on the road every day. In God knows how many thousands of kilometres we’ve seen probably ten emus and less than a hundred marsupials. There have been crocodiles and cockatoos but other than that we’ve seen two cats, two snakes, a few goannas and a dead fox. Where’s all this wildlife that all the tourist brochures tell us inhabits these areas? Of course there are lots of nasty, stingy bity insecty things out there but generally speaking they’re small things like the Red Back Spider or the Hepatitis Bee and we don’t get to feast our eyes on them.
EXMOUTH
Exmouth, the gateway to the Ningaloo Reef, was our next destination and from fifty kilometres outside of town we could see the damage that grazing had done to the land. Back from the road some fifty metres was a fence. There had been recent rains and everything outside the fence was healthy and green looking while all inside it was desert. Sheeps hooves, to hard for Australia’s thin soils, had worn away the topsoil which had been blown away, probably out to sea, by the wind. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen such destruction on our trip but it was a good illustration of the way unsuitable, imported agricultural practices and rampant greed is killing the land. What struck me in all these places where the soil had gone was that it is legal to do what you want with leased land or, for that matter, your own.
You can completely ruin the land on a pastoral lease and render it non productive for ever to come and nobody will even tell you off. But what of the land itself? Don’t we care about it? What about our kids who can’t farm that land ever again because the guys before them stuffed it up and didn’t have to make restitution? Land in many parts of the globe, has been farmed for thousands of years and is still producing, still feeding large civilisations. If the people in those parts had the same attitude to their soils as we have they would no longer be able to live off them. We can no longer live off a large percentage of our continent as did the previous inhabitants and we’ve only been here for a couple of hundred years. Given another two hundred years it’s difficult believe that we could still produce enough food to feed our miniscule population. I don’t see that Australia’s soils being poor and thin, rainfall sparse and so on, are any excuse for buggering up the land. What it all means is that, for the health of the land, Australian farmers should remove their blinkers, divorce themselves from their unsuitable European agricultural ancestries, and adopt different methods; be prepared to learn from other cultures such as Israel or China where land is reclaimed from desert and rendered productive.
It was around five thirty in the afternoon when Clare calculated that we wouldn’t be able to reach Exmouth that day so we began to look for somewhere to stop for the night. We had just passed the RAAF Learmonth base and airport when we began to come across tracks on our right leading down to the shores of the Gulf of Exmouth. We pulled into one of them and walked the half a kilometre down to the shore to see if Erasmus would be able to get down there without becoming bogged. It seemed fine so we climbed back into the cab and started down the track. Clare looked at the map again and found that the area was marked as The Exmouth Gulf Landing Zone. We didn’t know what it meant and didn’t want any military jets from RAAF Learmonth across the road waking us up so I stopped the van and went up on the roof to look for a landing strip. The ground was flat and treeless and I couldn’t see any runways so we drove on down and parked on the beach.
It wasn’t the best beach we’d seen but we were the only people there and there was no rubbish in the bushes. We went for a walk around the rock pools and took a few photos and headed back to Erasmus for dinner. I was still a bit concerned about us being parked in a landing zone. The North West Cape spying station was close by and I thought we were bound to be showing up on some radar scanner somewhere so I gathered together all the maps and information we had on the area and studied them as Clare got the evening meal. In a rather obscure and out-of-date tourist brochure under the heading Fishing Regulations I found the words “.…Exmouth Gulf Landing Zone applies to the landing of rock lobsters.” That was all. I poured over the maps searching the small print for a rock lobster launching pad but there was nothing. I lay awake half the night worried that one was going to hit our roof and in the morning scoured the ground outside but none had landed. We had toast and jam instead.
As we rolled into Exmouth we saw on our right, the visitors centre. And, having found that visitors centres are sometimes a good way of meeting people who are also looking for free campsites that visitors centre staff won’t tell you about, we stopped. Visitors centre staff have to plug the town’s caravan parks and will tell you nothing when it comes to free camping. However, in this visitors centre car park was an old forty seater Denning bus with a white skinned, ginger bearded hippy in his mid thirties leaning against it smoking a joint. I could tell he wasn’t the type to stay in caravan parks so I engaged him in conversation on the subject of free camping. Although he spoke quickly I understood every other word he said. It was “fuck.”
His name was Dennis and the old Denning bus was the permanent home of he and his equally white skinned, ginger haired hippy girlfriend. They not only knew all the free camping spots for miles around but knew the West Australian Caravan and Camping Act backwards.
“Technically yer not camping if yer in a motor home. Yer in fuckin’ transit. That’s what you got to tell the fuckin’ Gestapo when they knock on yer door”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah…..an’ yewze can buy a can of beer and open it when you hear them comin’. Open the door with the can in yer hand an tell ‘im yer fuckin’ too pissed to drive”
“Does that help?”
“Too fuckin’ right it does mate. They can’t do nothin’ cause if they move yewze on an’ you have an accident the onus is on them see?”
“Oh, thanks”
“Too easy big fella”
I made to walk away and he called me back.
“We spend the days ‘ere in the visitors centre car park cause there’s good TV reception ‘ere in town see? And there’s fuck all they can do about it ‘cause it’s a public place until they close up at five. An’ they got the toilets an that and there’s a tap over there to fill yer water tanks up with see?”
“Oh, I see. Thanks”
“Yeah….yeah. If yewze feel like a barbie any time pop in. We’ll be ‘ere every day an’ if it’s too hot we’ll be over there in the sports oval car park under them trees. If yewze give us a day’s notice I’ll put the pots out an’ we’ll have mud crabs”
“Sounds good”
“Fuckin’ scrumptious big fella.”
I thanked him and went into the visitors centre where Clare was looking through the brochures.
“We’ve just been invited to a barbecue.”
“Have we, where?”
“Outside”
“Outside where?”
“In the car park”
“What?...........when?”
“Whenever we feel like it”
“Who’s invited us?”
“Dennis and his girlfriend”
“Who’s Dennis?”
“That guy with the old bus”
“What! He’s invited us to a barbecue in the visitors centre car park? That’s taking a bit of a liberty isn’t it?”
“Yeah but it’ll be fuckin’ scrumptious an there’s fuck all they can do about it”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind, I’ll tell you about it later.”
I was glad to have met Dennis because we stayed in and around Exmouth at places he told me about for four nights before being told to move on by the ranger on the fifth. Meanwhile, in the visitors centre with Clare we asked about booking a trip on a flat bottomed boat out to the Ningaloo Reef. The girl behind the desk said that conditions were too windy and according to the long range weather forecast would be for three days hence. All the caravan parks were full to overflowing and we estimated that there must have been about two thousand tourists in caravans alone in this tiny town. Sorry, I didn’t mean the occupants of the caravan parks were alone. They were mostly in pairs. Downtown Exmouth though was all but deserted. There were about fifteen tiny shops including a couple of supermarkets and there was nothing to do there anyway. Exmouth seemed to exist for the Ningaloo Reef alone.
I asked the girl behind the desk of the visitors centre what tourists did in Exmouth when it was too windy to go to the beach or for a trip in a glass bottomed boat. She looked up at my grey hair. “Most of our tourists tend to be, um, a little on the elderly side” she said as if this explained everything. “Yes” I said, “I understand that but my question was what they do when it’s too windy?” “Well, I think they just sit down and take it easy.” I’d heard that Exmouth is famous for winds that can last for a fortnight so I asked her what people did if the wind went on for a fortnight. “Oh, they don’t actually do anything much even if it isn’t windy” she said. “Some of them sit in a caravan park for two or three months without going outside except to the supermarket.” We thanked her and left. On the way across the car park back to Erasmus we met two emus. They turned out to be Exmouth residents and we saw a lot more of them in town over the next few days. There were notices on the way into town from both directions asking tourists not to feed them.
There wasn’t much to do until the wind died down so we looked for a place to lie low while I wrote the rubbish you’re reading now and wish you hadn’t paid good money for. We drove south down the peninsula that Exmouth sits at the head of. It seems not to have a name on the map. There was a national park down there called Cape Range National Park and it’s most likely the most boring and featureless national park around but for the fact that it has some pretty beaches which are good for snorkelling when the wind dies down. It didn’t for three days. The waters were of exceptional clarity and when eventually I got to go snorkelling off the beach it was like floating in air as there seemed to be nothing between the corals and me. The Pacific’s a bloody good ocean.
For all the hype in the advertising material Ningaloo Reef isn’t anywhere near as pretty or prolific as the Great Barrier Reef but still worth seeing. When we finally took a trip on a glass bottomed boat everyone was whispering about other reefs they’d seen which were better than this one. What Ningaloo has going for it though is whale sharks and by the time you’ve spent a day in Exmouth you’re fed up with hearing about them. Whale sharks, the largest fish in the sea, come to Ningaloo at the time of year when the corals spawn because coral sperm is high on the list of whale shark delicacies. I don’t know if they eat anything else with it like coral sperm a la krill or whatever. They probably take it just as it cums.
When this annual event occurs, divers and snorkellers from around the world get to float around in the spermy waters with the whale sharks for a while and I’ve no doubt that it is one of the most unforgettable experiences available on the planet. The photographs we saw of divers and whale sharks enjoying each others company put me in mind of astronauts making space walks around space shuttles. Whale sharks are huge and the Ningaloo Reef is the only place in the world anybody can be guaranteed a sighting and a swim with one.
Whale shark time lasts only from March to June but so much is made of it that the humpback whales and manta rays that are hanging around in the wonderfully warm winter months play second fiddle. Then, from November to January, the hawksbill, green and loggerhead turtles come up on the beaches to nest. The area truly is a kind of paradise but one that exists out of general sight under water. The three days we spent in a national park campground waiting for the wind to abate weren’t particularly pleasant as Erasmus is high and gets buffeted by the wind. The total absence of trees too, saw to it that there was nowhere to escape the wind. Sea eagles and other birds that would normally prefer to nest in trees weren’t put off though. They nested atop telegraph poles and half way up the communication station antennae that abound on the peninsula. There were antennae all over the place with birds nests in them.
The area contains the North West Cape listening stations where we Australians listen to the radio traffic of our neighbours and pass on what we’ve heard to the Americans. I use the Royal “we” when I refer to Australians because I am one with a citizenship paper to prove it. As you have probably gathered I was born elsewhere. While at the Cape Range National Park campsite I was asked by a fellow camper if I had been “naturalised”. “No”, I replied, “it’s just the way my trousers hang.”
The national park campground we stayed in had two toilets in which were posted identical notices
“PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR.”
The kangaroos:
drink the toilet water
knock over the toilet water bucket
thankyou.
The campground was run by a man, Ron Volunteer, and is wife Mary who kept the tiny fourteen site caravan park spotless. I asked what they were paid by the national park for their services but was told that all they got was a free campsite which they occupied for three months and then moved down to the south of the State where they did the same thing for the same reward for another two months. They loved it. As Ron showed us to our parking spot I suddenly realised that his surname wasn’t volunteer. That was just what his name tag said. Volunteering was what he was doing.
Name tags can be confusing though. I once lived in the lovely little hamlet of Ferny Creek in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges in a street with the unlikely name of Seabreeze Avenue. We’d only been in our new house for two days when a light plane crash-landed into a carport a couple of hundred metres up the street from us. We were having dinner at the time and didn’t know that the aftermath of the event was being shown live on the news. We did though, see a long line of cars driving up the road and couldn’t make out what was going on. The previous occupants of the house were named Ward and by coincidence the people with the now famous flattened carport were also named Ward. Unbeknown to us the Wards up the road were being interviewed on TV as we were having dinner. Outside on the road our letter box still bore the names of the previous occupants, Sonja & Harry Ward.
There was a knock on the door. It was a glass door and outside stood a very large, smiling middle aged lady who, I guessed, was from a newspaper or a radio station. I opened the door and smiled back. It was one of those houses you stepped down into and, as she was outside the door, she was on higher ground than me.
She had multiple chins and as I looked up I felt like an insect being stared at by a giantess over the top of a white sliced loaf. At any rate she sported a bust of heroic proportions and wore a tight fitting, thin navy blue sweater. Covering her left nipple, at my eye level, was a navy blue badge with a horizontal white band through it bearing, in bold type, the word PRESS. I couldn’t resist it. I looked up at her face, then down at the badge and, with the index finger of my right hand I did as instructed - pressed. She tried to slap me in the face but I ducked and quickly slammed the door shut. No words were exchanged. I closed the door and she stormed off. I walked back into the dining room where my wife and daughters looked at me expectantly with raised eyebrows. “Well?” my wife said. “Someone with the wrong address” I said.
On the flat bottomed boat (you remember the flat bottomed boat don’t you? It was only ten paragraphs ago) we met a couple in their fifties who were doing Australia on Harley Davidsons. I felt quite envious of them; it seemed much cooler than what we were doing. They had come all the way from east coast Qeensland across the top of the continent and were hoping to get around the rest of it in the remaining six weeks of their allotted vacation time. There are drawbacks with everything however and one of theirs was petrol consumption. They could only travel two hundred and eighty five kilometres before having to go onto their reserve fuel tanks and when they were riding into headwinds they had to sometimes travel at speeds as low as sixty five to seventy kph to conserve fuel. We’d come across stretches of road where there were more than two hundred and eighty five kilometres between service stations. They were staying mostly at motels and couldn’t stand the mundane breakfasts so they tried to get on the road early to be able to arrive at a roadhouse for that first meal of the day. The problem they stuck with that approach though was that if they hit the road too soon after dawn there was always a chance of hitting a kangaroo as they were still active at that time. Similarly, they couldn’t ride after dark for the same reasons. The more we talked about it the more it became apparent that Clare and I had chosen a good way to travel. They were limited to specific places to stay and hours of travel whereas we could stop anywhere we liked the view. Our breakfasts too, were far better than any roadhouse could possibly turn out.
Why is it that some Australian restaurants have these silly hours in the day when they’ll only serve lunch or whatever? In other countries the entire menu is available all day. So many times we’ve been refused coffee at coffee shops half an hour before they’re advertised closing times because they’d already cleaned the coffee machine. And why can’t I have the breakfast bacon and eggs at two in the afternoon? I owned a restaurant in Turkey once and there it would have been unthinkable to have put time limits on when we served particular dishes.
We left Exmouth early one evening for Coral Bay one hundred and fifty kilometres south. We cleared Exmouth by thirty kilometres and decided we’d stay in the rock lobster landing zone again. We chose a track that Dennis had told me about that led down to a hard shingly beach well out of site of the road. It was idyllic and we walked along the beach until well after dusk turning over stones in rock pools and looking for the best place to swim the next day. The place was so nice we put Coral Bay on hold convinced that, at last, we’d found a good place to stay for a week where we wouldn’t see a soul. In bed that night we decided to return to Exmouth in the morning and stock well up on food and generator petrol and fill our tanks with water so as to last down on the beach for as long as possible.
At seven in the morning there was a knock on the door. I opened the window next to where I was sleeping. It was a ranger from the West Australian Caravan and Camping Gestapo that Dennis had warned me about. He told me that we were contravening the West Australian Caravan and Camping Act and that if we wanted to free camp we could only do so fifty kilometres from towns. He said that if we were still there at twelve o’clock he would have no option but to fine us a hundred dollars. I hadn’t said a word up to this point but when he began reading the riot act I drew in breath and when he was in full flight I belched as loud as I could and farted. I apologised and told him that I thought I had food poisoning and he then backed off of the hundred dollar fine option and, instead, asked me to move on as soon as I was well enough. I can’t actually claim this devious ruse as my own – Dennis told me about it.
Our little piece of paradise no longer seemed as appealing as it had the night before so we had breakfast and moved on to Coral Bay. It was in the last week of August and before we arrived in the area there had been rainfall. Now the wild flowers for which West Australia is famous began to emerge from their winter slumber. Already there was colour along the roadsides, the first real colour I’d seen for weeks. Brilliant blues, pinks and yellows contrasted garishly with the red earth beneath them. Sometimes even nature has no dress sense. In some places there were carpets of white everlasting flowers the size of whale sharks. It made such a difference to be travelling through colour again. I was suddenly awakened and fresh as a meerkat on heat.
Coral Bay was a fabulous little spot. There was hardly anything there save for a few houses, a caravan holiday gulag and a few shops but it was much more tasteful than Exmouth. The main street was all of a hundred metres long with buildings that looked as though they’d been designed by somebody. It ended at the beach and there was grass on the nature strips. It was green lawn grass which we hadn’t seen in a while and there were healthy looking palm trees. Here the beach too was far better than at Exmouth with one of those perfect, typically Australian postcard bays of white sand, clear calm water that lets you see the sunlight underneath the boats and backed by an ozone saturated sky. Best of all evolution and geology had conspired to place it out of the prevailing winds that can make this sometimes paradisaical coast difficult to enjoy. It was good to be able to lie on a beach without getting sand blasted.
Unless you want to work on your sun tan or take a glass bottomed boat trip there’s not much point in hanging around Coral Bay, lovely though it is. We left the same day. The following day we crossed the tropic of Capricorn and, although it’s just a line on a map for those of us that don’t understand these things, the weather became cooler. The weather forecasts were showing that Perth and places further south were having gale force winds, cold temperatures and lots of rain so we began to look for places to stay for extended periods rather than gravitate down the map. I’d been in shorts for months and my knees were getting used to each other. I’m sure they didn’t want to go back to seeing each other just once a day – twice if I’d had curry.
Somewhere along the way Clare bought a new address book. Her old one had lasted for almost four decades and some of the addresses were looking tired. One night she sat down to transfer the information from the old book to the new. At least fifty percent of the people in the old book were dead and another ten were prime candidates. It gave us pause and we had a whisky. After that things seemed less depressing, so we had another one.
Looking at the map the following day Carnarvon seemed like a convenient place to hole up for a while if we could find a good, out-of-the-way camping spot. On the outskirts of the town the dry deserty country punctuated by wild flowers stopped. In its place were market gardens and fruit orchards. There were mangos and bananas and paw paws and lots of other of the fruity niceties that we liked. From the map Clare thought that it was all watered from the nearby Gascoyne River but when we crossed over it there was hardy a whale sharks gall bladder full to be seen down in the river bed. We found, through reading the tourist information leaflets that there was indeed water in it but it was underneath the river bed. There was a lot of it down there too, enough to make Carnarvon a principle fruit and vegetable producing area. When the rains come the mighty Gascoyne does run but most of the water filters through to the aquifer that lies underneath. I don’t know anything about aquifers and they’re probably made of porous rocks but perhaps they’re big holes full of blind fishes that you could snorkel around with.
It was a Sunday and it had been two weeks since we’d had a decent cappuccino but Carnarvon wasn’t going to help with our withdrawal symptoms. It was the emptiest town we’d seen on the whole trip. It was a good time to look around the place which was agreeable and well serviced and had quite a good looking esplanade with the standard palm trees and seats. In the main street was another Exeloo which I just had to try when there was nobody else around. This one worked perfectly apart from the automatic soap dispenser which finally went into action while Clare was in there after me. She said that she had been in there a full two minutes when it suddenly gurgled and coughed up a blob of pink gungy stuff into the wash basin.
One of Carnarvon’s premier tourist attractions is their one mile long jetty. We didn’t go out onto it because there was a charge but we read the information under a rotunda at the landward end of it. It was yet another tragic history of whites mistreating blacks. We had come across so many of these official, tourist bureau stories that seemed aimed at adding local colour by including a little of the local Aboriginal history. Nowadays it’s obvious that, well intentioned or not; guilt feelings or not, it’s become fashionable. Every tourist town these days must display a few paragraphs about the previous owners of the land and how they were mistreated. Tasmania’s the only exception to this practice where the bad stories are all about white English prisoners being treated badly by nasty ex patriot white English jailers.
In isolation these stories sound horrific but can be the more easily digested that way. They can be explained away to most people’s satisfaction if they tell themselves that the people in that place long ago were a particularly bad bunch etc. Cumulatively, they bespeake of something far more gross. It is as though white communities, isolated from each other by vast distances, were in communication with each other, learning from each other, about how to dispose of or ill treat blacks. It’s only by travelling around the country that you come to realise the broadness of scale it was all on because you hear the same thing time and again until it sinks in. These weren’t isolated incidents at all but a manifestation of a certain across the board superior, homophobic, unthinking, uncaring and greedy mentality.
Carnarvon’s story wasn’t too different from the rest. In this case “hospitals” were set up on islands close to the coast at Canarvon and Aborigines suspected (but not necessarily diagnosed) with communicable diseases such as measles were rounded up from distant parts and imprisoned there. Some seven hundred Aborigines were captured and sent there against their will. They had no idea where they were going or why. No doubt some of them were, and had been, enemies for decades like Croats and Serbs but to our forebears they were all the same. The lack of respect for these people as human beings is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that over two hundred of them are buried there somewhere in unmarked graves.
In the Post Office car park where we sat wondering what to do next and Clare suddenly remembered that a Tasmanian couple we met in Dampier had told us about a good place to stay. It was seventy clicks north of Carnarvon, which meant we’d already passed it, so we turned Erasmus around and retraced our steps real quick like a rat up a drainpipe. I don’t now if the place actually has a name but we called it blowhole alley. It had what I imagine is Australia’s biggest blowhole although Kim Beasley runs a close second.
It ran along the beach for three kilometres with camping sites spaced, in some cases, a hundred metres apart. After booking in with Rod, who a sign indicated was the “honourary,” ranger we cruised along the line looking for washing lines with small knickers or G strings. We’d learnt not to park near washing lines with big knickers on them. They were usually old people who gave us pots of jam and talked about the weather or knitting or about Australia being taken over by Asians. In a campsite in the Northern Territory one of them told me that she had a neighbour, an old Italian woman who had been in Australia for twenty odd years and still hadn’t learned the English language. She said
“it’s all very well letting them come here but they should at least have to learn the language.”
I said “you mean that anyone going to a new country should learn to speak the language of the natives when they arrive there then?”
“Yes” she said. “And if they’re not prepared to then they shouldn’t be allowed to come here.”
“So what Aboriginal languages do you speak then?”
“That doesn’t count. We’re Australians. No, I mean real languages not that bloody mumbo jumbo”
During our conversation she was standing with her back to a line full of big knickers. It was as a result of this conversation that I formed several theories about knicker size and its relationship to age and racial attitudes. These will be explored in more detail in a future publication which presently goes under the working title Big Arses, Small Brains & Bloody Wogs.
On we cruised down the line of caravans and campervans most with wonderfully inventive an original names that must taken seconds to come up with. We passed Guunnadoo2 and Home and Away, Out of Here, The Old Boy’s a Joy and Rollin’ Along. On we went past Free and Easy, Free Wally, Our Turn Now and About Truckin’ Time. “Hang on a minute” I said. “Did you see that?” “What?” “The name on that van?” I wanted to meet these people. Unfortunately though, they’d pulled their anchors and gone by the time I cycled down to introduce myself to them the next morning.
We found a good place to stop. It was well away from the crowd who we could socialise with on our own terms and it was right next to the beach. There was a sand dune to protect us from the prevailing wind but we still had great views of the Indian Ocean and a small island joined to the land by a narrow causeway. This was an exceptional place and, up to that point, the best we’d stayed at. The small island was home to thousands of seabirds that didn’t get along with each other. When they weren’t behaving like Palestinians and Israelis they were procreating and laying eggs, I suppose because it was spring. At any rate we walked among them, camera in hand, and they didn’t take the slightest notice of us. It was like……like…….. if you walked down a street in Hebron on a Saturday night with a bomb in you’re hand shouting “I’m gonna let this thing off and it’s full of radio active head lice.” They were all to busy hating each other to take any notice of you.
Nestled in the armpit of the island where it joined the land was a small lagoon where the water was calm and shallow and warmer than the surrounding sea. It was perfect for snorkelling and the colourful fish that lived there were white sliced bread junkies. People bearing handfuls of white sliced bread would walk down the beach to the edge of the lagoon and the fish, mirroring the attitudes of the birds on the island, would behave like Palestinians and Israelis violently pushing and shoving to make sure they got the lion’s share.
Most spectacular were the blowholes and the huge, explosive gushes of white water that relentlessly rent the skies as the gigantic breakers hit the rocks. The noise the main blowhole made when it breathed out was truly scary. It showered misty rain up into the nether regions of the atmosphere somewhere producing, as it did so, ethereal flashes of rainbow colours that disappeared and then sprang to life again twenty metres downwind. I heard a woman exclaim “shit it’s gorgeous.” For the whole of six days we spent in the place the sea continuously produced these stunning light and sound shows. Clare likened it to a permanent fireworks display. The rocky shoreline in places sloped upward to the low cliffs at the water’s edge and the waves that broke on the cliffs threw great gushes of sea water up over them onto the rocks behind. So much water came over the cliffs that it formed permanently running salt water rivers as it made its way back to the sea.
At the back of the blowhole on a low hill that was the highest hill for probably hundreds of kilometres around, was a lighthouse which we cycled up to one day. It wasn’t a very high lighthouse and it was surrounded by a cyclone wire mesh fence. Inside was a cherry picker on the back of a big truck and a man dressed in a yellow top and blue trousers. Looking up to the parapet I saw another man dressed the in the same garb. I put both hands to my mouth and yelled “come down you silly boy. Does you’re mother now you’re up there?”
The man on the ground came over to the fence. If I’d have had a peanut I’d have pushed it through. He assured me that the man’s mother did know what he was up to and this wasn’t the first lighthouse parapet he’d been up on. They were the first lighthouse repair persons I’d ever met though and I thought they were probably from Carnarvon. I asked if they repaired lighthouses on a regular basis. They did. They were all the way from Queensland and repairing lighthouses was what they did full time. I’ve mentioned lighthouses a lot in this paragraph but I can’t think of anything else to call them. Usually I can think of an alternative word so as not to be repetitive but lighthouse, I must confess, has me stuffed. And another thing – what word rhymes with the word orange? I wrote a limerick once that had the word orange in it and I couldn’t finish it because there was no other word in the English language that rhymed with it.
I thought the people who repaired the towering, white painted, incandescently glowing, regular flashing device used by sailors had driven their cherry picker and lighthouse repair kit all the way from Queensland but they told me they’d flown to Perth and there had hired the cherry picker. “Must be costing a fortune” I said. “Probably is” he said. “But where are you going to find people with the skills in this neck of the woods?” It was a good point. I looked around in all directions but the grey nomad colony huddled together down by the beach was the only sign of life and even that was barely flickering.
The man in the yellow top told me that he and his crew of three were just a few of the many hands that made light work around Australia and that there were well over five hundred lighthouses around our coastline. Keeping them all functioning, he said, kept a small industry going. Many of them are on islands. To get the repair guys and their gear out to these islands they had a ship that carried an army DUKW amphibious vehicle that they lowered into the water and charged the beaches with.
From up there I could make out a track and I asked where it led to. The people working on the pulsating strobe on a stick available for use by those of the maritime persuasion didn’t know. Rod, the honourary ranger told me it went to Quobba Station which was rather miniscule by Australian standards. It only occupied one hundred and seventy thousand acres. We cycled down there a couple of days later. They had a caravan park of sorts and a small shop that sold essentials like bread, milk and fishing gear. The owners were away and a relief lady served us. I asked how many kilometres of coastline the station had. “Over eighty” she replied. “But that’s nothing; some of them have hundreds of kilometres of it.” I said I thought it was a shame that one pastoral lessee could tie up eighty kilometres of coast when there were so few places around the northern half of Australia between Townsville and Perth where the public could access the water. She told me that anybody could access the water to fish. “That’s the law” she said. Perhaps she was right? Nevertheless, there were no roads on Quobba Station where we could have got to the sea. The lessee wasn’t going to put them in for the public to drive through his leased land and it’s for sure that the government won’t either. Such a shame, we have more useable (permanently unfrozen) coastline than any country in the world, a population smaller than some overseas cities, and parking spots near beaches, where rangers won’t fine you for staying, are almost impossible to find.
At night where we were parked there were crabs walking around that didn’t mind being peed on. I was amazed. One night I struggled out of bed and around the back of Erasmus and peed on something that moved. It made me jump. It was about the size of a saucer and it moved away from me quickly but only for a couple of paces and then stood its ground. I went back inside and grabbed the torch. There were about ten crabs around Erasmus all completely dry and some fifty metres from the water. I felt sorry for them and peed on as many as I could. They seemed to like it and made no effort to move away having been blessed with a golden shower from on high in the middle of a crab desert.
I told Clare about it at breakfast. She didn’t say much but that night when she went out at around seven in the evening she too found crabs around the van. She came back in looking for the torch and I went outside with her. On the track down to the water was an army of crabs marching towards the land. I selected one and Clare shone the light on it while I focused the camera. I popped off about half a dozen shots and then thought about the situation from the crab’s perspective. It probably didn’t have much perspective left. It must have been shitting itself every time the flash went off because, as further investigation showed, this species of crab didn’t have any eyelids to close. I felt sorry for it and hoped it wasn’t one of those crabs I’d peed on the previous night. I picked it up and threw it in the water.
On the way back up the track I couldn’t help thinking about the poor thing and what it was going to tell its mates.
“Did you hear what happened to Mother last night?”
“No, what?”
“A UFO experience of the third kind”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, she was on her way up to the car park to see if there were any of those fish finger scraps left from the tourists.”
“Birds Eye or Watties?”
“That’s got fuck all to do with it”
“Sorry”
“Where was I? Yeah. And this thing came down from the sky and there was a brilliant light that lit up the whole beach and it kept flashing at her.
“Well, rock n roll!”
“Yeah, and then she found herself teleported back into the water”
“Well, it’s funny you should say that because there’s a lot of unusual things going on around here lately. I think it’s aliens. You know Chantelle?”
“Wot. Big Chantelle, the sandy with the duff claw?”
“Yeah………………………………………”
“Well, go on then”
“Oh yeah, sorry. Well Chantelle was up in the car park the night before last. The walk up there nearly killed her. All dried out she was”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah”
“For God’s sake will you stop saying fucking yeah all the time?”
“Mmmm, sorry”
“Well, she was on her last legs Chantelle was, and suddenly this dirty great jet of water hit her. It really made her eyes sting cause, as you know, she’s a sand crab and they got no eyelids.”
‘Mmm”
“Well, the thing is she’s gone all religious now she has, said it was a life changing experience she did”
“Yeah….mmmm. Just shows you doesn’t it.
“Yeah.”
On our third day at the beach a sign appeared in the toilet in the morning. It said KNOW PLAXIC BAGS IN THE TOILET. THANKYOU. It was accompanied by a picture of someone’s head in a noose. Clare told me about it so I went and took a look. After breakfast I went up to the toilet again with the camera but the sign had gone and was replaced with another saying PLEASE NO PLATIC BAGS THANKYOU. The next day when I went in there somebody had put one of those little Vs between the T and the I and put the omitted S above. It now read PLEASE NO PLATSIC BAGS THANKYOU.
Carnarvon had the best fruit and vegetables we’d seen and eaten in Australia. Clare thought it was to do with the Gascoyne flood plains; the silt washed down over the millennia by the Gascoyne River. I thought it was to do with the underground aquifer water. We asked the ranger, Honourable Rod. “Where’d you buy ‘em?” He said. “Dewsons Supermarket” Says I. “That’s the reason” says he. “If you’d bought ‘em in Woolworths they’da been crap.”
Dewsons, the local Carnarvon based supermarket, according to Rod, buy direct from the growers in the immediate area. Woolworths, on the other hand, do buy Carnarvon produce sometimes but only from a wholesaler way down south in Perth. When this happens the goods travel from Carnarvon down to Perth, wait a day or more in cold storage, where Woolworths buy them, and then are driven back again to Carnarvon and further north.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On and on we went battling against a headwind and wishing we could get to where we were going in a shorter space of time. Sometimes we would fill up with fuel at a roadhouse, glance at the map, and see that we would just have to sit in the cab with nothing outside the windows worth looking at until we filled up again.
When driving these vast distances between the hours of, say, nine in the morning and five in the evening we seldom came across any sign of wildlife. It wasn’t uncommon to go a whole week without seeing anything. Yes, I hear you say, but Australia’s animals are mostly nocturnal. But before turning in well after dark every night I looked around with the torch for a pair of eyes but I still didn’t see any. Then, at some hour in the middle of the night, I get to go outside to pee and I look around with the torch again – bugger all except grey nomads with enlarged prostates. I know kangaroos and wallabies are out there because we see them dead on the road every day. In God knows how many thousands of kilometres we’ve seen probably ten emus and less than a hundred marsupials. There have been crocodiles and cockatoos but other than that we’ve seen two cats, two snakes, a few goannas and a dead fox. Where’s all this wildlife that all the tourist brochures tell us inhabits these areas? Of course there are lots of nasty, stingy bity insecty things out there but generally speaking they’re small things like the Red Back Spider or the Hepatitis Bee and we don’t get to feast our eyes on them.
EXMOUTH
Exmouth, the gateway to the Ningaloo Reef, was our next destination and from fifty kilometres outside of town we could see the damage that grazing had done to the land. Back from the road some fifty metres was a fence. There had been recent rains and everything outside the fence was healthy and green looking while all inside it was desert. Sheeps hooves, to hard for Australia’s thin soils, had worn away the topsoil which had been blown away, probably out to sea, by the wind. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen such destruction on our trip but it was a good illustration of the way unsuitable, imported agricultural practices and rampant greed is killing the land. What struck me in all these places where the soil had gone was that it is legal to do what you want with leased land or, for that matter, your own.
You can completely ruin the land on a pastoral lease and render it non productive for ever to come and nobody will even tell you off. But what of the land itself? Don’t we care about it? What about our kids who can’t farm that land ever again because the guys before them stuffed it up and didn’t have to make restitution? Land in many parts of the globe, has been farmed for thousands of years and is still producing, still feeding large civilisations. If the people in those parts had the same attitude to their soils as we have they would no longer be able to live off them. We can no longer live off a large percentage of our continent as did the previous inhabitants and we’ve only been here for a couple of hundred years. Given another two hundred years it’s difficult believe that we could still produce enough food to feed our miniscule population. I don’t see that Australia’s soils being poor and thin, rainfall sparse and so on, are any excuse for buggering up the land. What it all means is that, for the health of the land, Australian farmers should remove their blinkers, divorce themselves from their unsuitable European agricultural ancestries, and adopt different methods; be prepared to learn from other cultures such as Israel or China where land is reclaimed from desert and rendered productive.
It was around five thirty in the afternoon when Clare calculated that we wouldn’t be able to reach Exmouth that day so we began to look for somewhere to stop for the night. We had just passed the RAAF Learmonth base and airport when we began to come across tracks on our right leading down to the shores of the Gulf of Exmouth. We pulled into one of them and walked the half a kilometre down to the shore to see if Erasmus would be able to get down there without becoming bogged. It seemed fine so we climbed back into the cab and started down the track. Clare looked at the map again and found that the area was marked as The Exmouth Gulf Landing Zone. We didn’t know what it meant and didn’t want any military jets from RAAF Learmonth across the road waking us up so I stopped the van and went up on the roof to look for a landing strip. The ground was flat and treeless and I couldn’t see any runways so we drove on down and parked on the beach.
It wasn’t the best beach we’d seen but we were the only people there and there was no rubbish in the bushes. We went for a walk around the rock pools and took a few photos and headed back to Erasmus for dinner. I was still a bit concerned about us being parked in a landing zone. The North West Cape spying station was close by and I thought we were bound to be showing up on some radar scanner somewhere so I gathered together all the maps and information we had on the area and studied them as Clare got the evening meal. In a rather obscure and out-of-date tourist brochure under the heading Fishing Regulations I found the words “.…Exmouth Gulf Landing Zone applies to the landing of rock lobsters.” That was all. I poured over the maps searching the small print for a rock lobster launching pad but there was nothing. I lay awake half the night worried that one was going to hit our roof and in the morning scoured the ground outside but none had landed. We had toast and jam instead.
As we rolled into Exmouth we saw on our right, the visitors centre. And, having found that visitors centres are sometimes a good way of meeting people who are also looking for free campsites that visitors centre staff won’t tell you about, we stopped. Visitors centre staff have to plug the town’s caravan parks and will tell you nothing when it comes to free camping. However, in this visitors centre car park was an old forty seater Denning bus with a white skinned, ginger bearded hippy in his mid thirties leaning against it smoking a joint. I could tell he wasn’t the type to stay in caravan parks so I engaged him in conversation on the subject of free camping. Although he spoke quickly I understood every other word he said. It was “fuck.”
His name was Dennis and the old Denning bus was the permanent home of he and his equally white skinned, ginger haired hippy girlfriend. They not only knew all the free camping spots for miles around but knew the West Australian Caravan and Camping Act backwards.
“Technically yer not camping if yer in a motor home. Yer in fuckin’ transit. That’s what you got to tell the fuckin’ Gestapo when they knock on yer door”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah…..an’ yewze can buy a can of beer and open it when you hear them comin’. Open the door with the can in yer hand an tell ‘im yer fuckin’ too pissed to drive”
“Does that help?”
“Too fuckin’ right it does mate. They can’t do nothin’ cause if they move yewze on an’ you have an accident the onus is on them see?”
“Oh, thanks”
“Too easy big fella”
I made to walk away and he called me back.
“We spend the days ‘ere in the visitors centre car park cause there’s good TV reception ‘ere in town see? And there’s fuck all they can do about it ‘cause it’s a public place until they close up at five. An’ they got the toilets an that and there’s a tap over there to fill yer water tanks up with see?”
“Oh, I see. Thanks”
“Yeah….yeah. If yewze feel like a barbie any time pop in. We’ll be ‘ere every day an’ if it’s too hot we’ll be over there in the sports oval car park under them trees. If yewze give us a day’s notice I’ll put the pots out an’ we’ll have mud crabs”
“Sounds good”
“Fuckin’ scrumptious big fella.”
I thanked him and went into the visitors centre where Clare was looking through the brochures.
“We’ve just been invited to a barbecue.”
“Have we, where?”
“Outside”
“Outside where?”
“In the car park”
“What?...........when?”
“Whenever we feel like it”
“Who’s invited us?”
“Dennis and his girlfriend”
“Who’s Dennis?”
“That guy with the old bus”
“What! He’s invited us to a barbecue in the visitors centre car park? That’s taking a bit of a liberty isn’t it?”
“Yeah but it’ll be fuckin’ scrumptious an there’s fuck all they can do about it”
“Pardon?”
“Never mind, I’ll tell you about it later.”
I was glad to have met Dennis because we stayed in and around Exmouth at places he told me about for four nights before being told to move on by the ranger on the fifth. Meanwhile, in the visitors centre with Clare we asked about booking a trip on a flat bottomed boat out to the Ningaloo Reef. The girl behind the desk said that conditions were too windy and according to the long range weather forecast would be for three days hence. All the caravan parks were full to overflowing and we estimated that there must have been about two thousand tourists in caravans alone in this tiny town. Sorry, I didn’t mean the occupants of the caravan parks were alone. They were mostly in pairs. Downtown Exmouth though was all but deserted. There were about fifteen tiny shops including a couple of supermarkets and there was nothing to do there anyway. Exmouth seemed to exist for the Ningaloo Reef alone.
I asked the girl behind the desk of the visitors centre what tourists did in Exmouth when it was too windy to go to the beach or for a trip in a glass bottomed boat. She looked up at my grey hair. “Most of our tourists tend to be, um, a little on the elderly side” she said as if this explained everything. “Yes” I said, “I understand that but my question was what they do when it’s too windy?” “Well, I think they just sit down and take it easy.” I’d heard that Exmouth is famous for winds that can last for a fortnight so I asked her what people did if the wind went on for a fortnight. “Oh, they don’t actually do anything much even if it isn’t windy” she said. “Some of them sit in a caravan park for two or three months without going outside except to the supermarket.” We thanked her and left. On the way across the car park back to Erasmus we met two emus. They turned out to be Exmouth residents and we saw a lot more of them in town over the next few days. There were notices on the way into town from both directions asking tourists not to feed them.
There wasn’t much to do until the wind died down so we looked for a place to lie low while I wrote the rubbish you’re reading now and wish you hadn’t paid good money for. We drove south down the peninsula that Exmouth sits at the head of. It seems not to have a name on the map. There was a national park down there called Cape Range National Park and it’s most likely the most boring and featureless national park around but for the fact that it has some pretty beaches which are good for snorkelling when the wind dies down. It didn’t for three days. The waters were of exceptional clarity and when eventually I got to go snorkelling off the beach it was like floating in air as there seemed to be nothing between the corals and me. The Pacific’s a bloody good ocean.
For all the hype in the advertising material Ningaloo Reef isn’t anywhere near as pretty or prolific as the Great Barrier Reef but still worth seeing. When we finally took a trip on a glass bottomed boat everyone was whispering about other reefs they’d seen which were better than this one. What Ningaloo has going for it though is whale sharks and by the time you’ve spent a day in Exmouth you’re fed up with hearing about them. Whale sharks, the largest fish in the sea, come to Ningaloo at the time of year when the corals spawn because coral sperm is high on the list of whale shark delicacies. I don’t know if they eat anything else with it like coral sperm a la krill or whatever. They probably take it just as it cums.
When this annual event occurs, divers and snorkellers from around the world get to float around in the spermy waters with the whale sharks for a while and I’ve no doubt that it is one of the most unforgettable experiences available on the planet. The photographs we saw of divers and whale sharks enjoying each others company put me in mind of astronauts making space walks around space shuttles. Whale sharks are huge and the Ningaloo Reef is the only place in the world anybody can be guaranteed a sighting and a swim with one.
Whale shark time lasts only from March to June but so much is made of it that the humpback whales and manta rays that are hanging around in the wonderfully warm winter months play second fiddle. Then, from November to January, the hawksbill, green and loggerhead turtles come up on the beaches to nest. The area truly is a kind of paradise but one that exists out of general sight under water. The three days we spent in a national park campground waiting for the wind to abate weren’t particularly pleasant as Erasmus is high and gets buffeted by the wind. The total absence of trees too, saw to it that there was nowhere to escape the wind. Sea eagles and other birds that would normally prefer to nest in trees weren’t put off though. They nested atop telegraph poles and half way up the communication station antennae that abound on the peninsula. There were antennae all over the place with birds nests in them.
The area contains the North West Cape listening stations where we Australians listen to the radio traffic of our neighbours and pass on what we’ve heard to the Americans. I use the Royal “we” when I refer to Australians because I am one with a citizenship paper to prove it. As you have probably gathered I was born elsewhere. While at the Cape Range National Park campsite I was asked by a fellow camper if I had been “naturalised”. “No”, I replied, “it’s just the way my trousers hang.”
The national park campground we stayed in had two toilets in which were posted identical notices
“PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR.”
The kangaroos:
drink the toilet water
knock over the toilet water bucket
thankyou.
The campground was run by a man, Ron Volunteer, and is wife Mary who kept the tiny fourteen site caravan park spotless. I asked what they were paid by the national park for their services but was told that all they got was a free campsite which they occupied for three months and then moved down to the south of the State where they did the same thing for the same reward for another two months. They loved it. As Ron showed us to our parking spot I suddenly realised that his surname wasn’t volunteer. That was just what his name tag said. Volunteering was what he was doing.
Name tags can be confusing though. I once lived in the lovely little hamlet of Ferny Creek in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges in a street with the unlikely name of Seabreeze Avenue. We’d only been in our new house for two days when a light plane crash-landed into a carport a couple of hundred metres up the street from us. We were having dinner at the time and didn’t know that the aftermath of the event was being shown live on the news. We did though, see a long line of cars driving up the road and couldn’t make out what was going on. The previous occupants of the house were named Ward and by coincidence the people with the now famous flattened carport were also named Ward. Unbeknown to us the Wards up the road were being interviewed on TV as we were having dinner. Outside on the road our letter box still bore the names of the previous occupants, Sonja & Harry Ward.
There was a knock on the door. It was a glass door and outside stood a very large, smiling middle aged lady who, I guessed, was from a newspaper or a radio station. I opened the door and smiled back. It was one of those houses you stepped down into and, as she was outside the door, she was on higher ground than me.
She had multiple chins and as I looked up I felt like an insect being stared at by a giantess over the top of a white sliced loaf. At any rate she sported a bust of heroic proportions and wore a tight fitting, thin navy blue sweater. Covering her left nipple, at my eye level, was a navy blue badge with a horizontal white band through it bearing, in bold type, the word PRESS. I couldn’t resist it. I looked up at her face, then down at the badge and, with the index finger of my right hand I did as instructed - pressed. She tried to slap me in the face but I ducked and quickly slammed the door shut. No words were exchanged. I closed the door and she stormed off. I walked back into the dining room where my wife and daughters looked at me expectantly with raised eyebrows. “Well?” my wife said. “Someone with the wrong address” I said.
On the flat bottomed boat (you remember the flat bottomed boat don’t you? It was only ten paragraphs ago) we met a couple in their fifties who were doing Australia on Harley Davidsons. I felt quite envious of them; it seemed much cooler than what we were doing. They had come all the way from east coast Qeensland across the top of the continent and were hoping to get around the rest of it in the remaining six weeks of their allotted vacation time. There are drawbacks with everything however and one of theirs was petrol consumption. They could only travel two hundred and eighty five kilometres before having to go onto their reserve fuel tanks and when they were riding into headwinds they had to sometimes travel at speeds as low as sixty five to seventy kph to conserve fuel. We’d come across stretches of road where there were more than two hundred and eighty five kilometres between service stations. They were staying mostly at motels and couldn’t stand the mundane breakfasts so they tried to get on the road early to be able to arrive at a roadhouse for that first meal of the day. The problem they stuck with that approach though was that if they hit the road too soon after dawn there was always a chance of hitting a kangaroo as they were still active at that time. Similarly, they couldn’t ride after dark for the same reasons. The more we talked about it the more it became apparent that Clare and I had chosen a good way to travel. They were limited to specific places to stay and hours of travel whereas we could stop anywhere we liked the view. Our breakfasts too, were far better than any roadhouse could possibly turn out.
Why is it that some Australian restaurants have these silly hours in the day when they’ll only serve lunch or whatever? In other countries the entire menu is available all day. So many times we’ve been refused coffee at coffee shops half an hour before they’re advertised closing times because they’d already cleaned the coffee machine. And why can’t I have the breakfast bacon and eggs at two in the afternoon? I owned a restaurant in Turkey once and there it would have been unthinkable to have put time limits on when we served particular dishes.
We left Exmouth early one evening for Coral Bay one hundred and fifty kilometres south. We cleared Exmouth by thirty kilometres and decided we’d stay in the rock lobster landing zone again. We chose a track that Dennis had told me about that led down to a hard shingly beach well out of site of the road. It was idyllic and we walked along the beach until well after dusk turning over stones in rock pools and looking for the best place to swim the next day. The place was so nice we put Coral Bay on hold convinced that, at last, we’d found a good place to stay for a week where we wouldn’t see a soul. In bed that night we decided to return to Exmouth in the morning and stock well up on food and generator petrol and fill our tanks with water so as to last down on the beach for as long as possible.
At seven in the morning there was a knock on the door. I opened the window next to where I was sleeping. It was a ranger from the West Australian Caravan and Camping Gestapo that Dennis had warned me about. He told me that we were contravening the West Australian Caravan and Camping Act and that if we wanted to free camp we could only do so fifty kilometres from towns. He said that if we were still there at twelve o’clock he would have no option but to fine us a hundred dollars. I hadn’t said a word up to this point but when he began reading the riot act I drew in breath and when he was in full flight I belched as loud as I could and farted. I apologised and told him that I thought I had food poisoning and he then backed off of the hundred dollar fine option and, instead, asked me to move on as soon as I was well enough. I can’t actually claim this devious ruse as my own – Dennis told me about it.
Our little piece of paradise no longer seemed as appealing as it had the night before so we had breakfast and moved on to Coral Bay. It was in the last week of August and before we arrived in the area there had been rainfall. Now the wild flowers for which West Australia is famous began to emerge from their winter slumber. Already there was colour along the roadsides, the first real colour I’d seen for weeks. Brilliant blues, pinks and yellows contrasted garishly with the red earth beneath them. Sometimes even nature has no dress sense. In some places there were carpets of white everlasting flowers the size of whale sharks. It made such a difference to be travelling through colour again. I was suddenly awakened and fresh as a meerkat on heat.
Coral Bay was a fabulous little spot. There was hardly anything there save for a few houses, a caravan holiday gulag and a few shops but it was much more tasteful than Exmouth. The main street was all of a hundred metres long with buildings that looked as though they’d been designed by somebody. It ended at the beach and there was grass on the nature strips. It was green lawn grass which we hadn’t seen in a while and there were healthy looking palm trees. Here the beach too was far better than at Exmouth with one of those perfect, typically Australian postcard bays of white sand, clear calm water that lets you see the sunlight underneath the boats and backed by an ozone saturated sky. Best of all evolution and geology had conspired to place it out of the prevailing winds that can make this sometimes paradisaical coast difficult to enjoy. It was good to be able to lie on a beach without getting sand blasted.
Unless you want to work on your sun tan or take a glass bottomed boat trip there’s not much point in hanging around Coral Bay, lovely though it is. We left the same day. The following day we crossed the tropic of Capricorn and, although it’s just a line on a map for those of us that don’t understand these things, the weather became cooler. The weather forecasts were showing that Perth and places further south were having gale force winds, cold temperatures and lots of rain so we began to look for places to stay for extended periods rather than gravitate down the map. I’d been in shorts for months and my knees were getting used to each other. I’m sure they didn’t want to go back to seeing each other just once a day – twice if I’d had curry.
Somewhere along the way Clare bought a new address book. Her old one had lasted for almost four decades and some of the addresses were looking tired. One night she sat down to transfer the information from the old book to the new. At least fifty percent of the people in the old book were dead and another ten were prime candidates. It gave us pause and we had a whisky. After that things seemed less depressing, so we had another one.
Looking at the map the following day Carnarvon seemed like a convenient place to hole up for a while if we could find a good, out-of-the-way camping spot. On the outskirts of the town the dry deserty country punctuated by wild flowers stopped. In its place were market gardens and fruit orchards. There were mangos and bananas and paw paws and lots of other of the fruity niceties that we liked. From the map Clare thought that it was all watered from the nearby Gascoyne River but when we crossed over it there was hardy a whale sharks gall bladder full to be seen down in the river bed. We found, through reading the tourist information leaflets that there was indeed water in it but it was underneath the river bed. There was a lot of it down there too, enough to make Carnarvon a principle fruit and vegetable producing area. When the rains come the mighty Gascoyne does run but most of the water filters through to the aquifer that lies underneath. I don’t know anything about aquifers and they’re probably made of porous rocks but perhaps they’re big holes full of blind fishes that you could snorkel around with.
It was a Sunday and it had been two weeks since we’d had a decent cappuccino but Carnarvon wasn’t going to help with our withdrawal symptoms. It was the emptiest town we’d seen on the whole trip. It was a good time to look around the place which was agreeable and well serviced and had quite a good looking esplanade with the standard palm trees and seats. In the main street was another Exeloo which I just had to try when there was nobody else around. This one worked perfectly apart from the automatic soap dispenser which finally went into action while Clare was in there after me. She said that she had been in there a full two minutes when it suddenly gurgled and coughed up a blob of pink gungy stuff into the wash basin.
One of Carnarvon’s premier tourist attractions is their one mile long jetty. We didn’t go out onto it because there was a charge but we read the information under a rotunda at the landward end of it. It was yet another tragic history of whites mistreating blacks. We had come across so many of these official, tourist bureau stories that seemed aimed at adding local colour by including a little of the local Aboriginal history. Nowadays it’s obvious that, well intentioned or not; guilt feelings or not, it’s become fashionable. Every tourist town these days must display a few paragraphs about the previous owners of the land and how they were mistreated. Tasmania’s the only exception to this practice where the bad stories are all about white English prisoners being treated badly by nasty ex patriot white English jailers.
In isolation these stories sound horrific but can be the more easily digested that way. They can be explained away to most people’s satisfaction if they tell themselves that the people in that place long ago were a particularly bad bunch etc. Cumulatively, they bespeake of something far more gross. It is as though white communities, isolated from each other by vast distances, were in communication with each other, learning from each other, about how to dispose of or ill treat blacks. It’s only by travelling around the country that you come to realise the broadness of scale it was all on because you hear the same thing time and again until it sinks in. These weren’t isolated incidents at all but a manifestation of a certain across the board superior, homophobic, unthinking, uncaring and greedy mentality.
Carnarvon’s story wasn’t too different from the rest. In this case “hospitals” were set up on islands close to the coast at Canarvon and Aborigines suspected (but not necessarily diagnosed) with communicable diseases such as measles were rounded up from distant parts and imprisoned there. Some seven hundred Aborigines were captured and sent there against their will. They had no idea where they were going or why. No doubt some of them were, and had been, enemies for decades like Croats and Serbs but to our forebears they were all the same. The lack of respect for these people as human beings is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that over two hundred of them are buried there somewhere in unmarked graves.
In the Post Office car park where we sat wondering what to do next and Clare suddenly remembered that a Tasmanian couple we met in Dampier had told us about a good place to stay. It was seventy clicks north of Carnarvon, which meant we’d already passed it, so we turned Erasmus around and retraced our steps real quick like a rat up a drainpipe. I don’t now if the place actually has a name but we called it blowhole alley. It had what I imagine is Australia’s biggest blowhole although Kim Beasley runs a close second.
It ran along the beach for three kilometres with camping sites spaced, in some cases, a hundred metres apart. After booking in with Rod, who a sign indicated was the “honourary,” ranger we cruised along the line looking for washing lines with small knickers or G strings. We’d learnt not to park near washing lines with big knickers on them. They were usually old people who gave us pots of jam and talked about the weather or knitting or about Australia being taken over by Asians. In a campsite in the Northern Territory one of them told me that she had a neighbour, an old Italian woman who had been in Australia for twenty odd years and still hadn’t learned the English language. She said
“it’s all very well letting them come here but they should at least have to learn the language.”
I said “you mean that anyone going to a new country should learn to speak the language of the natives when they arrive there then?”
“Yes” she said. “And if they’re not prepared to then they shouldn’t be allowed to come here.”
“So what Aboriginal languages do you speak then?”
“That doesn’t count. We’re Australians. No, I mean real languages not that bloody mumbo jumbo”
During our conversation she was standing with her back to a line full of big knickers. It was as a result of this conversation that I formed several theories about knicker size and its relationship to age and racial attitudes. These will be explored in more detail in a future publication which presently goes under the working title Big Arses, Small Brains & Bloody Wogs.
On we cruised down the line of caravans and campervans most with wonderfully inventive an original names that must taken seconds to come up with. We passed Guunnadoo2 and Home and Away, Out of Here, The Old Boy’s a Joy and Rollin’ Along. On we went past Free and Easy, Free Wally, Our Turn Now and About Truckin’ Time. “Hang on a minute” I said. “Did you see that?” “What?” “The name on that van?” I wanted to meet these people. Unfortunately though, they’d pulled their anchors and gone by the time I cycled down to introduce myself to them the next morning.
We found a good place to stop. It was well away from the crowd who we could socialise with on our own terms and it was right next to the beach. There was a sand dune to protect us from the prevailing wind but we still had great views of the Indian Ocean and a small island joined to the land by a narrow causeway. This was an exceptional place and, up to that point, the best we’d stayed at. The small island was home to thousands of seabirds that didn’t get along with each other. When they weren’t behaving like Palestinians and Israelis they were procreating and laying eggs, I suppose because it was spring. At any rate we walked among them, camera in hand, and they didn’t take the slightest notice of us. It was like……like…….. if you walked down a street in Hebron on a Saturday night with a bomb in you’re hand shouting “I’m gonna let this thing off and it’s full of radio active head lice.” They were all to busy hating each other to take any notice of you.
Nestled in the armpit of the island where it joined the land was a small lagoon where the water was calm and shallow and warmer than the surrounding sea. It was perfect for snorkelling and the colourful fish that lived there were white sliced bread junkies. People bearing handfuls of white sliced bread would walk down the beach to the edge of the lagoon and the fish, mirroring the attitudes of the birds on the island, would behave like Palestinians and Israelis violently pushing and shoving to make sure they got the lion’s share.
Most spectacular were the blowholes and the huge, explosive gushes of white water that relentlessly rent the skies as the gigantic breakers hit the rocks. The noise the main blowhole made when it breathed out was truly scary. It showered misty rain up into the nether regions of the atmosphere somewhere producing, as it did so, ethereal flashes of rainbow colours that disappeared and then sprang to life again twenty metres downwind. I heard a woman exclaim “shit it’s gorgeous.” For the whole of six days we spent in the place the sea continuously produced these stunning light and sound shows. Clare likened it to a permanent fireworks display. The rocky shoreline in places sloped upward to the low cliffs at the water’s edge and the waves that broke on the cliffs threw great gushes of sea water up over them onto the rocks behind. So much water came over the cliffs that it formed permanently running salt water rivers as it made its way back to the sea.
At the back of the blowhole on a low hill that was the highest hill for probably hundreds of kilometres around, was a lighthouse which we cycled up to one day. It wasn’t a very high lighthouse and it was surrounded by a cyclone wire mesh fence. Inside was a cherry picker on the back of a big truck and a man dressed in a yellow top and blue trousers. Looking up to the parapet I saw another man dressed the in the same garb. I put both hands to my mouth and yelled “come down you silly boy. Does you’re mother now you’re up there?”
The man on the ground came over to the fence. If I’d have had a peanut I’d have pushed it through. He assured me that the man’s mother did know what he was up to and this wasn’t the first lighthouse parapet he’d been up on. They were the first lighthouse repair persons I’d ever met though and I thought they were probably from Carnarvon. I asked if they repaired lighthouses on a regular basis. They did. They were all the way from Queensland and repairing lighthouses was what they did full time. I’ve mentioned lighthouses a lot in this paragraph but I can’t think of anything else to call them. Usually I can think of an alternative word so as not to be repetitive but lighthouse, I must confess, has me stuffed. And another thing – what word rhymes with the word orange? I wrote a limerick once that had the word orange in it and I couldn’t finish it because there was no other word in the English language that rhymed with it.
I thought the people who repaired the towering, white painted, incandescently glowing, regular flashing device used by sailors had driven their cherry picker and lighthouse repair kit all the way from Queensland but they told me they’d flown to Perth and there had hired the cherry picker. “Must be costing a fortune” I said. “Probably is” he said. “But where are you going to find people with the skills in this neck of the woods?” It was a good point. I looked around in all directions but the grey nomad colony huddled together down by the beach was the only sign of life and even that was barely flickering.
The man in the yellow top told me that he and his crew of three were just a few of the many hands that made light work around Australia and that there were well over five hundred lighthouses around our coastline. Keeping them all functioning, he said, kept a small industry going. Many of them are on islands. To get the repair guys and their gear out to these islands they had a ship that carried an army DUKW amphibious vehicle that they lowered into the water and charged the beaches with.
From up there I could make out a track and I asked where it led to. The people working on the pulsating strobe on a stick available for use by those of the maritime persuasion didn’t know. Rod, the honourary ranger told me it went to Quobba Station which was rather miniscule by Australian standards. It only occupied one hundred and seventy thousand acres. We cycled down there a couple of days later. They had a caravan park of sorts and a small shop that sold essentials like bread, milk and fishing gear. The owners were away and a relief lady served us. I asked how many kilometres of coastline the station had. “Over eighty” she replied. “But that’s nothing; some of them have hundreds of kilometres of it.” I said I thought it was a shame that one pastoral lessee could tie up eighty kilometres of coast when there were so few places around the northern half of Australia between Townsville and Perth where the public could access the water. She told me that anybody could access the water to fish. “That’s the law” she said. Perhaps she was right? Nevertheless, there were no roads on Quobba Station where we could have got to the sea. The lessee wasn’t going to put them in for the public to drive through his leased land and it’s for sure that the government won’t either. Such a shame, we have more useable (permanently unfrozen) coastline than any country in the world, a population smaller than some overseas cities, and parking spots near beaches, where rangers won’t fine you for staying, are almost impossible to find.
At night where we were parked there were crabs walking around that didn’t mind being peed on. I was amazed. One night I struggled out of bed and around the back of Erasmus and peed on something that moved. It made me jump. It was about the size of a saucer and it moved away from me quickly but only for a couple of paces and then stood its ground. I went back inside and grabbed the torch. There were about ten crabs around Erasmus all completely dry and some fifty metres from the water. I felt sorry for them and peed on as many as I could. They seemed to like it and made no effort to move away having been blessed with a golden shower from on high in the middle of a crab desert.
I told Clare about it at breakfast. She didn’t say much but that night when she went out at around seven in the evening she too found crabs around the van. She came back in looking for the torch and I went outside with her. On the track down to the water was an army of crabs marching towards the land. I selected one and Clare shone the light on it while I focused the camera. I popped off about half a dozen shots and then thought about the situation from the crab’s perspective. It probably didn’t have much perspective left. It must have been shitting itself every time the flash went off because, as further investigation showed, this species of crab didn’t have any eyelids to close. I felt sorry for it and hoped it wasn’t one of those crabs I’d peed on the previous night. I picked it up and threw it in the water.
On the way back up the track I couldn’t help thinking about the poor thing and what it was going to tell its mates.
“Did you hear what happened to Mother last night?”
“No, what?”
“A UFO experience of the third kind”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah, she was on her way up to the car park to see if there were any of those fish finger scraps left from the tourists.”
“Birds Eye or Watties?”
“That’s got fuck all to do with it”
“Sorry”
“Where was I? Yeah. And this thing came down from the sky and there was a brilliant light that lit up the whole beach and it kept flashing at her.
“Well, rock n roll!”
“Yeah, and then she found herself teleported back into the water”
“Well, it’s funny you should say that because there’s a lot of unusual things going on around here lately. I think it’s aliens. You know Chantelle?”
“Wot. Big Chantelle, the sandy with the duff claw?”
“Yeah………………………………………”
“Well, go on then”
“Oh yeah, sorry. Well Chantelle was up in the car park the night before last. The walk up there nearly killed her. All dried out she was”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah”
“For God’s sake will you stop saying fucking yeah all the time?”
“Mmmm, sorry”
“Well, she was on her last legs Chantelle was, and suddenly this dirty great jet of water hit her. It really made her eyes sting cause, as you know, she’s a sand crab and they got no eyelids.”
‘Mmm”
“Well, the thing is she’s gone all religious now she has, said it was a life changing experience she did”
“Yeah….mmmm. Just shows you doesn’t it.
“Yeah.”
On our third day at the beach a sign appeared in the toilet in the morning. It said KNOW PLAXIC BAGS IN THE TOILET. THANKYOU. It was accompanied by a picture of someone’s head in a noose. Clare told me about it so I went and took a look. After breakfast I went up to the toilet again with the camera but the sign had gone and was replaced with another saying PLEASE NO PLATIC BAGS THANKYOU. The next day when I went in there somebody had put one of those little Vs between the T and the I and put the omitted S above. It now read PLEASE NO PLATSIC BAGS THANKYOU.
Carnarvon had the best fruit and vegetables we’d seen and eaten in Australia. Clare thought it was to do with the Gascoyne flood plains; the silt washed down over the millennia by the Gascoyne River. I thought it was to do with the underground aquifer water. We asked the ranger, Honourable Rod. “Where’d you buy ‘em?” He said. “Dewsons Supermarket” Says I. “That’s the reason” says he. “If you’d bought ‘em in Woolworths they’da been crap.”
Dewsons, the local Carnarvon based supermarket, according to Rod, buy direct from the growers in the immediate area. Woolworths, on the other hand, do buy Carnarvon produce sometimes but only from a wholesaler way down south in Perth. When this happens the goods travel from Carnarvon down to Perth, wait a day or more in cold storage, where Woolworths buy them, and then are driven back again to Carnarvon and further north.
