Moving into Western Australia

Aug 29 blog Katherine to Kununurra




As we leave Katherine we pass Katherine Railway station. Bushie calls it ‘a bit of bitumen in the middle of nowhere’, and that’s what it looks like. Mind you a lot of things look like that here, it is so vast.

Kit and I are travelling with 2 bananas she purchased at Coles in Darwin. Wise move. They are few and far between up here. A waiter at the Knotts Crossing Motel where we stayed last night overheard us talking about the dearth of said fruit and brought us two on a plate. What a sorry sight they were, small and hard, more green than yellow. After a decent interval we thanked him but said no thanks. He was very sweet, a pom from Colchester who has no desire to return to England except on holiday. I know the feeling. The other cute and obliging waiter was French. Ooh la la.With threats of $5000.00 fines and expulsion from the bus if we had any fruit on board, we approached the border of Western Australia. The Kimberly area is disease-free apparently and wishes to remain so. At the last comfort stop before the border, we dutifully chewed the apples we had filched from the Knotts Crossing motel’s breakfast buffet, thereby escaping bag searches and disinfectant.

Western Australia covers one third of Australia. Here are some more facts about its size downloaded from a website entitled ‘Work and Play in Western Australia’

By European standards Western Australia is simply huge. It is larger than Western Europe and nearly four times the size of Texas. If you overlay a map of Western Australia on a map of Europe, Perth is level with Barcelona and Broome is roughly north of Newcastle. Now if you add in the extra 1100 kilometres from Broome to the Northern Territory border and the 500 kilometre hop between Perth and Albany - you are somewhere between Iceland and North Africa!

With over 2.5 million square kilometres, but only 1.8 million people living in the whole of Western Australia (1.3 million of which live in Perth), per capita of population - it’s about as spacious as you can get on planet earth!

The longer we drive though it the more I come to appreciate how spacious the state is, and in the north west part with its unrelenting heat (35 degrees Celsius rising to an average 45 degrees in Summer) the better I understand how dangerous it is should one become stranded. The trees are spindly so offer little shade, distances between townships enormous and traffic sparse.

Speaking of trees, we’ve been seeing a lot of Boabs, very like the Baobab trees I knew in South Africa. But these are the same type found in Madagascar. It is not known how they arrived in this part of the world, whether seeds floated in with birds or on boats, but the local indigenous people have their own creation story about them or as Bushie calls it, ‘coration’ story. Here it is:

The Creational Beings associated with the Rainbow Serpent made the boabs so wonderful with beautiful blossoms and luscious leaves that the trees couldn’t stop bragging about themselves. They talked on and on about how beautiful they were until all the other trees became sick of it. They asked the Creational Beings to do something about it. The Creational Beings reached down, ripped the boabs out of the ground, turned them upside down and put them back in the holes. Hence their description as upside down trees. They look like wine bottles to me. They grow to a certain height then stop, thereafter getting wider with age. A bit like us really.

Another intriguing tree in these parts is the Kapok. It is spindly with yellow blossoms on the end of its branches. The seed pod contains the material known as kapok which was used to stuff mattresses and pillows in days gone by, the kind I came across in hospitals when I was a student nurse.

En route to the Ord river where we were due to take a cruise later in the day, Bushie took a call on his Satellite phone. Like he said ‘Sat’ phone calls are not good news. There had been a drowning in the place where the cruise vessel was moored. It became a police matter thereby preventing our boat from picking us up. No matter, a few phone calls secured us an afternoon with the charming Scotty of Triple J tours with his old bus and brand new boat.

Scotty seemed to be well educated and was definitely easy on the eye. As one of our party said when the ladies were clicking away at Scotty posing with some crocodile eggs that had been plundered by dingos, sea eagles or other crocs, ‘it’s an excuse to photograph Scotty!’

Lake Argyle was our cruising site rather than the Ord River. It is Australia’s largest body of fresh water covering over 900 square kms at normal full supply level. Scotty said it was several times larger than Sydney Harbour and I believe him. We cruised the serene crystal waters for 2 hours and only covered a small part of it. The crocs in Lake Argyle are ‘freshies’ not friendly exactly but not as dangerous as the salties. We saw about three of them, rather small.

Bird life was present, with many examples of darts, black birds sitting on branches drying out their wings. I’ve never seen these before. Plovers, herons and pelicans were other varieties.

The area near the dam is so large and unpopulated, the Australians, Indonesians, French and Americans play war games there annually. Army engineers have built bridges that go nowhere and if planes fall out of the sky or a stray bomb goes off, no one will get hurt, apart from the pilots if they don’t eject.

Our hotel for the next two nights is the Lakeside Resort at Kununurra. Graced with a lakeside position, sunset views and a lovely swimming pool we a

re in for a comfortable stay.