Around Australia Part 7

camels!
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Trip Around Australia Part 7

Friday 7 August

cossack
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We left Broome early, bracing ourselves for a very long stretch of desolate countryside with only 2 roadhouses in 620km. We had long supposed that one of those roadhouses “sandfire” was the most expensive fuel we would find – this was not the case.  We only got an icecream at the roadhouse but fuel was only $1.56  (I paid $1.77 in the Queensland outback.   The countryside slowly changed from Kimberly tropical plants and greenness to the familiar red dirt and spinifex that I love.  We finally stopped in a rest area that used to have toilets – we are about 80km from Port Hedland.  Apparently there has been too much vandalism and they removed the toilet!  Well it didn’t matter, we put up our van and toilet and settled in for the night.  Andrew is starting to get very excited about seeing someone other than me, and the prospect of seeing Beth and Daniel is giving him trouble sleeping.

crab
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Saturday 8 August

We were a little delayed leaving this morning but it shouldn’t matter too much.  We were about 1hr from Port Hedland and another 2hrs from Port Hedland to Point Samson.  We finally arrived at about 1.30.  We set the van up and then proceeded to remove the bikes from the car so that we could put the back seats down for the incoming family.  We put our winter clothes in a bag in the back of the car so that there was enough room for their clothes in the van.  Making room for three more people in a van set up for two for three months is a challenge but we did it.  The water hose we have is not long enough to reach the tap here so we set off earlier than planned for Karratha to get another hose and head for the airport.  Silly me forgot that it was Saturday and I was very lucky to find the hardware store open!  I was really quite surprised when they started telling me that I was lucky to catch them as they were closing at 4 and their competition had closed at 11.00!

It moved!!!!!!!
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We headed to Karratha airport where another surprise awaited me, I couldn’t find a parking spot!  The whole airport carpark was full of mining vehicles with large orange flags as well as flashing lights.  They were parked on the verges, in the no standing zones – everywhere.  I finally found one and we had ten minutes to wait for the plane to arrive.  Andrew was beside himself with excitement.  Finally they walked off the plane, across the concourse and through the arrival doors.  There was much hugging as you can imagine and we headed off to restock the food and back to the van for dinner!

Picture Gardens
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Sunday 9 August

After a sleep in for the newcomers we headed off for Cossack.  This is one of the first towns settled in this area and there are some gorgeously restored stone buildings.  We were lucky in that the Cossack art show was on and we strolled around the bond store and old post office looking at some great paintings.  My favourite was a painting of one of the gorges in Karajini national park.  (It had a price tag of $8900 – which is way outside my budget but boy it was wonderful!)  After touring around the show and putting our vote in for peoples choice we headed over to the wharf to eat our lunch.  We sat under a gazebo watching people fish from the wharf. Andrew scarfed his lunch down and was off to fish himself in very short order.  He tossed his lure into the ocean and started winding, only to find that he had come to the end of his line and it wouldn’t wind back in.  He called for help and off I went to try and untangle him.  I finally gave it up as a bad joke and asked him to just pull the lure out of the water and we would re string his line later.  Just my luck the kid pulls the lure in and he has a blue swimmer crab on the end of it!  He was beside himself “I caught a crab, I caught a crab.  Just one throw of my line and I caught a crab”  Now I know I lived up here for quite some time, but the fishing was all done by Mitch and I had never handled a live crab.  I didn’t know if it was a legal size, nor was I really sure how we would get it back to the van – no eski!  You don’t expect kids to catch anything in the middle of the day.  Well, I was reassured by one of the other fishermen that it was legal, which had Andrew all aglow that he would be having crab with dinner tonight!  Hmm, now to get him back to the van I had Andrew empty his tackle box and the crab fit JUST into the bottom.  Andrew still had the rod in one hand and the lure was still connected to the crab in the tackle box.  No way was he going to touch the crab.  We got it back to the van (Bess was disappointed to cut our time in Cossack but she knows we will be back – we have two weeks) and we put it in the fridge to put it to sleep. (there was no way it was going to fit in the freezer!)  We managed to get a couple of photos of Andrew holding his crab – one even where the crab spat water out and Andrew looked suitably horrified!  We then headed to Honeymoon Cove for a swim.  This is a small beach just outside the caravan park – and opposite the hangar Mitch used to work in.  We took our books and had a wonderful swim – proved ourselves to be tourists!  No one locally swims at this time of year!  Dinner time arrived and I intrepidly cooked the crab as well as our planned meat and veg. Andrew decided that he really did like crab for dinner!

harding dam wall
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Monday 10 August

Another slow start to the day but by about 10.30 we decided to head into Wickham for a walk and talk about old times.  We parked at the shopping centre and had a quick walk through, I showed Andrew the bank I used to work in, and I saw one of the girls I used to work with.  She had since married and had a couple of kids, shifted from wickham – port hedland, to Karratha and back to her old job in Wickham.  I went into the newsagency which had only just opened his doors about 6 months before we left and the same guy was still there.  Apparently the stockmarket crash did nothing for his retirement plans.  He commented that town had changed for the worse – more unsociable people had moved in and Rio Tinto really didn’t care about the town at all.  We walked from there to our old house, then up to the walk in picture garden (an outdoor picture theatre) the kids made plans to go on Friday night.  We headed back down to the playground and the pool (which was closed for winter) then down to their old school.  You cant go in during school, nor when school is out so we will have to phone the school and see if we can come in either early or late so the kids can reminisce for a while. We headed back to the car, drove past the library and high school, back down to where friends used to live and then headed home for a late lunch.  The afternoon we spent idly reading and talking.  The freezer had frozen over a little due to the door not quite closing properly and I couldn’t get anything out for dinner so off to Moby’s I went for fish and chips.  Hmmm, Red Emperor………..

harding dam
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Tuesday 11 August

It was a very slow start today, the weather was quite cool, only about 25 degrees and quite cloudy so we just hung around the van reading and talking.  Had some lunch and finally stirred ourselves to head out to the Roebourne information centre, which is located in the old Roebourne Gaol.  There are many fascinating items in the Gaol relating not only to the jail but the history of the area as well.  We tried to book a tour of Cossack and the port, but the current driver is unwell and we will have to ring next week to see if there is a tour going.  That means Mitch will be able to come with us!  Back to the van we went and we caught up on our respective Journals, and uni work.  Andrew is enjoying the playground here and spends quite a bit of time up there.

Wed 12 August 

Another morning spent at the playground, doing uni work, reading, washing.  After lunch we headed off to the Burrup Peninsular to see the visitor centre for the LNG plant.  We learned lots about how the off shore rigs work, and the process for shipment.  There were displays, an interactive wall and a video.  There was a “Detective” sheet for Andrew to do and he methodically went around the display looking for the answers to the questions about the centre.  As a reward he got a bubble pen set and a fling thing – commonly known as a pop out Frisbee.  On the way back we managed to time it so we could see a train cross the road.  Andrew had heard us talking about the long trains of 250 carriages, and to finally see one for himself, he found it fascinating.  He tried to count all the carriages but as the train is moving at 80km/hr it is a difficult thing to do.  We think there were about 234 carriages give or take a few.  Daniel has been doing most of the driving and is enjoying the difference in traffic flow.

Thursday 13 August

We packed our lunches and headed out for Harding Dam.  This is the water catchment that supplies the east pilbara with water.  There is usually only enough water for the winter months and when the water runs too low the water is switched to bore water that comes from Millstream.  All the water is piped to the towns by an ground steel pipes.  (In the summer months that means that the water coming out of the tap is about 35 degrees!)  Daniel was driving, you head out to the highway, through Roebourne and ont 26km of dirt road.  Daniel has done some dirt road driving but nothing like the length and condition of this road.  He enjoyed it but found he got tired easily – so I drove the last 10km into the dam.  We drove up the dam face and onto the dam wall.  The contrasts of red rock, green spinifex and the water is just beautiful.  We then drove over to the spillway and lookout.  The view is just superb -  you can see forever.  The sky is just blue as far as you can see, no clouds, no buildings to interrupt the skyline, just blue to the horizon.  On the ground is the red dirt, spinifex grass, the small saltbush shrub, the odd ghost gum and the red rocks of the hills. It is such a contrast.  We had our lunch beside the Harding river.  Andrew played in the playground and the rest of us watched as a colony of ants discovered a poor wounded caterpillar.  I tried to save the caterpillar by flicking it out of the ants way, but no luck – they kept finding him!  After lunch we headed back to Wickham.  Our tour of the school was planned for this afternoon after the kids got out at 2.30.  (school in WA is from 8.30 – 2.30, there is plenty of time for afterschool activities.)  We were a touch early back – Daniel had driven all the way back this time and it didn’t take as long as I thought it would with him driving over the dirt road.  So we started at the Community Library.  We wandered around, I picked up the local newspaper, Beth found the time capsule that had been made when she was at the school to mark 25 years of the school.  She is determined to be here in 2022 when they will open the time capsule on the 50^th anniversary!  We then headed over to the School and let the office know we had arrived.  The receptionist was lovely and was very chatty about which teachers are still here (none – there was a mass exodus last year – including Beth’s year 5 teacher Leanne Clark)  However the school registrar poked her head out while we were talking and sure enough I remembered Narelle Graham.  Her daughter Lana had been a year behind Beth and one in front of Daniel.  She could tell me of a few people who I would know that were still here.  We left the office and wandered around the school.  Not a lot had changed.  The Music and French rooms had become the staff rooms, the admin building had a small extension, but on the whole, the kids couldn’t get over the sameness of the school.  The canteen was the same, the undercover area was the same, their classrooms were still there.  They have painted new murals on the walls of the school and one of them Beth remembered being painted and she thought that the story was to be painted on the wall as well – but it never was.  We headed back to camp.

Friday 14 August

This morning I got to have the first real child free time I have had in a while.  I left Andrew with Beth and Daniel and drove into Karratha to have the car serviced.  I had to have the car into the shop by 8am.  That meant leaving Point Samson at 7am – without waking the inhabitants of the van! I made it into Karratha with about 15 mins to spare but as I had forgotton to bring the piece of paper with the address – I spent all of that time looking for the workshop.  I hit a service station and got their yellow pages and after a while found where I had to go and how to get there.  When you book the car in you always wonder about how good the service is going to be.  I had tried to get the car serviced by Kmart Auto who we used when we lived here, because that way you get a nationwide warranty on work.  They are no longer here!  There are no other national brands here so I had to chose one at random.  I was reassured about my choice when I saw the police car up on the hoist!   I walked through the shopping precinct and had a leisurely Macdonalds breakfast (reading yesterday’s newspaper – todays doesn’t get here till after 10 but that’s OK I have no idea what is going on in the world anyway!) By this time it is all of 9am!  I wandered the shopping centre spending time just walking around each shop and enjoying not hearing – “Mum this is boring” or worse “I’m hungry!”.  By 10.30 I have visited every shop in the joint and figured it was morning tea time.  I needed a book to read at the café so I headed back to the bookshop and was standing in line to pay for it when my phone rings – Yup they had had a cancellation and managed to get my car done first and it was time to pick it up.  So I walked back to the repairer, and on the way passed the “new” cinemas that had been built since we were here. I thought the kids might enjoy a movie –but no the cinema has closed and the building is for sale!  So I collected the car and drove back to Sampson.  We had quiet afternoon and then after dinner we headed off to the Wickham Picture Gardens.  The picture gardens are like a drive through theatre except instead of bringing your car – you park the car and walk into a cyclone wire enclosed area with rows of canvas chairs set up in front of a movie screen.  The movie we saw was the Land of the Lost and although it was rated PG – I’m not so sure!  Too many sexual references for me to think it was suitable for 8 – 12 year olds!  Anyway we were there for the experience – not the movie itself.  We had remembered  our cardigans – (it does get cool at night) but the night air was also a bit damp so we were a little cooler than we had expected.  The admission price for the movies goes to the town association and there is a kiosk and the proceeds from there are split between the local catholic church and the primary school.  The school and the church take turns staffing the kiosk and it was the school’s turn tonight and guess who we bumped into?  The receptionist from school!  As she said – in a small town the same people pop up everywhere!

Saturday 15 August 

Saturday in Wickam at this time of year is TeeBall!  All the kids in town were involved, there is great parental support and great fun is had by all.  Both Beth and Dan played TeeBall when we lived here (I used to score) so we were all keen to go and watch the mornings games.  We arrived and were in time to see the last six innings of the match.  It was great to see that although there were not as many teams playing, the same enthusiasm and spirit existed.  It didn’t matter how good (or bad) you were – everyone was encouraging.  No one said a negative word about “bad” hits, dropped catches or overthrows.  It was such a positive atmosphere.  Again at TeeBall was the receptionist from school! After TeeBall it was off to Karratha.  Daniel is in need of a haircut and we can meander the shops.  Daniel still doing most of the driving – hopefully he can get the last of the hours he needs while he is here, and then polish up the tight manoevers with his instructor.  We arrived at Karratha and  wandered through the shops – we stuck our heads in to the Barber but there was about a two hour wait – so he decided his mop could wait.  We took our picnic lunch down to Cattral park.  We sat on green manicured lawn (rare!) and watched the ibis and other birds fly around the trees.  Cattral park is popular for weddings, with its lush green lawns and little bridges over a small artificial creek which leads to a small shallow lake.  By the banks of the “creek” the kids found a flowering cotton bush – they were fascinated.  It was still too early to pick Mitch up at the airport so we went back to the shops bought ourselves something to read and went to Macdonalds.  Andrew could play on the playground and we could sit and while the next hour or so away.  The Macdonalds was opened on my birthday in 1998 and it was the most remote in the world at the time and was one of the first to have an indoor,  airconditioned playground.  We were at the airport in time to pick up Mitch.  Where Andrew had been pacing the airport, unable to sit still when the big kids arrived, while waiting for Mitch he had his nose is a book.  The plane landed and he wanted to finish his page before he went to greet Dad!  Kids! Who can work them out!  It was great to see Mitch, it is obvious that I have missed him greatly, but better than that – HE CAN COOK!!!!!!!