Quelle histoire! Interviewer interviewed

The boot was on the other foot, or rather, the microphone in another’s hand when a French TV documentary crew met the Dique Trippers.

Lunch with Roland Theron (right) and his cameraman Nicolas under our awning.

Roland Theron of Les Nouveaux Explorateurs is making a documentary on interesting and unusual Australian houses.

He felt his documentary would not be complete without a glimpse into the life of a ‘grey nomad’.

After shooting a piece on living underground in Coober Pedy, he was due to fly back to France via Alice Springs and Perth.

Prevelly Beach near Margaret River.

Marie Cortez, a former work colleague of mine, and part of the local French network, knew we were in WA and put him in touch with us.

We met at our van at Prevelly Beach, near Margaret River. Roland and his cameraman Nicolas kindly brought the makings for lunch.

In my last job I did video interviews with business leaders for posting on the web, so it felt a bit strange to have a camera pointed at me for a change.

Wildflowers, part of the coastal heath at Prevelly Beach.

Cooking up a story

In actual fact the star of the show was Carol, who not only answered the big questions, but was also closely videoed cooking lunch, in this case a tasty cheese omelette.

The best I could do was supply a bottle of local shiraz. Roland seemed unimpressed by the screw top instead of cork stopper, but I think he found the wine OK.

To sum up, we found Roland and Nicolas (who pointed his camera at every nook and cranny of our van, including the untidy bits) most engaging and charming, and we all had an enjoyable lunch.

Gardens at Walcliffe House on the Margaret River.

We finished off the day exploring a nearby mansion, Walcliffe House and its beautiful gardens on the Margaret River, where funds were being raised for the local fire service.

You can check out the people Roland interviewed at this site.

Out of the frying pan and into the fridge!

It’s amazing what a difference a few hundred kilometres can make.

After leaving Geraldton, the heat and continuous sunshine, we decided to bypass Perth, stay awhile at Margaret River and explore WA’s south western region before heading back to Perth.

Gale force winds knocked down this large tree, which narrowly missed an onsite van across from us.

We couldn’t believe the winds, the rainsqualls and the cold that greeted us! At night, where once we would sleep with barely a sheet over us, we found ourselves under blankets, doona and quilt. Outside it was colder than a witch's tit.

The wind was so strong it brought down a large tree that narrowly missed an on-site van.

Our Indian summer was well and truly over.

Having said that we bravely did get in some long walks, and found the coastal heath spectacular, with its purple, yellow, white and pink wildflowers.

We also managed to sneak in a game of golf.

Cruel Cape Leeuwin

A long-felt ambition has been to visit Cape Leeuwin, the extreme south west point of WA, where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean.

Hamelin Beach, en route to Augusta and Cape Leeuwin.

The place is named after the Dutch ship Leeuwin (Lioness) that rounded the cape in 1622.

It’s also where the great navigator Matthew Flinders commenced his circumnavigation of Terra Australis (Australia) in the Investigator on 7 December, 1801.

Cape Leeuwin lighthouse.

So down we went. It was blowing a gale when we arrived 50 kilometres later at the Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse, with continuous cold rainsqualls.

Carol wrapped herself in a blanket but took only 10 steps before returning to the car, collecting a refund of her entry fee on the way.

Forbidding Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean.

I don’t blame her. Spectacular though it may be, the Western Australian coast can be hostile and unforgiving.

Drenched and cold, I could see from the lighthouse (opened in 1896) the rocks, reefs and angry sea that made its construction essential.

After a perfunctory drive around the sleepy hamlet of Augusta, we headed back to Margaret River.

Where there’s a wine, there’s a way

Of course, we also managed to do a bit of wine tasting – how could we visit Margaret River and not do so!

I have to mention there’s currently a glut of wine making it immensely affordable.

At the Vasse Felix winery.

The problem I have with wine tasting is that I always feel compelled to buy a bottle of whatever I’ve liked (which is all of it), and usually come away loaded up with more than we really need or can stow.

Despite prodding from Carol on site to abandon this practice, our van toilet is now sharing space with a carton of shiraz, while bottles of semillon blanc, port and other delightful nectars have been forced into nooks and crevices that we never knew existed.

A Quick visit

Believe it or not, one of Carol’s distant relatives lives just five minutes drive from our van park at Prevelly Beach.

I refer to Gabrielle Adams, sister of well-known Brisbane based TV cameraman Paul Adams who is married to Carol’s niece Madonna.

Gabrielle, Molly, Carol and Kelsey (plus pet rats Olympia and Smash).

We called in to see Gabrielle, Molly and Kelsey (and their pet rats Olympia and Smash) -- unfortunately partner Tim Quick was away in Perth.

Over a cup of tea Gabrielle told how they had to evacuate their home two weeks ago when a bushfire threatened the area.

Burned out coastal heathland near Gabrielle's home.

The fire came quite close, but their home was saved.

And here we are in the midst of wind, rain and chill, hoping and praying for fine weather.

But, as my mother used to say, if wishers were horses beggars would ride!

It’s time to work our way down to Albany and then back to Perth regardless of the weather.

Monkey Mia and maritime misadventures

Travel the harsh and inhospitable Western Australian north west coast and you cannot help but be sympathetic to the plight of English buccaneer explorer William Dampier.

When he put into Shark Bay (so named by him) in 1699 on the Roebuck, Dampier was desperate to find potable water.

Sunset at Carnarvon shot by Carol just before our departure for Monkey Mia.

After failing in many attempts to dig wells, he and his crew tried to capture an Aborigine among a group and force him to reveal his source of supply.

The Aborigines resisted, Dampier shot one, and one of his men was speared in the cheek.

Walking trail overlooking Monkey Mia. Dampier was bothered by flies, too.

Dampier decided to withdraw, and the Roebuck left ‘New Holland’ without finding water, and sailed off to Timor, ‘my men growing scorbutic for want of refreshments’.

At the Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort on the Peron Peninsula in Shark Bay, where we stayed three nights, the water situation is still as delicate as ever.

Carol's rainbow at Monkey Mia after an afternoon storm.

Only government-subsidised desalinated water is on tap for cooking and drinking. For showers and washing, you use salty groundwater.

Not that this detracts from the experience of visiting a World Heritage listed region, home to a huge and colourful range of marine life described by Dampier in his log.

Without the desalinated water, the resort would be a very different place, not that this would concern grey nomads like us with contingent supplies (of Victorian Bitter).

Dolphin promenade

Like the other visitors to Monkey Mia, we thrilled to the hand feeding of dolphins, which seemed as interested in us as we were in them. I should add that the dolphins are deliberately underfed so as not to cultivate reliance.

Park ranger with hungry dolphins awaiting their snack.

We also found ourselves finding relief from the 37-degree heat by swimming in the cool and crystal clear sea (ignoring the thousands of stingrays that inhabit the area).

Denham.

Monkey Mia and the nearby former pearling township of Denham are remote points of civilisation. Denham (pop. 1,500) is 410 kilometres north of Geraldton and 330 kilometres south of Carnarvon, with only red sand, spinifex, acacia and melaleuca bush in between.

Shark Bay, with the western boundary Dirk Hartog Island, is steeped in maritime history, as indeed is most of the Western Australian coast.

Most of us know about Dirk Hartog from our school history lessons. He landed on the island in 1616, 152 years before the voyage of Captain Cook, and nailed to a post a pewter plate carrying a description of his landing.

Incredibly, another Dutch explorer William de Vlamingh found the site 81 years later and replaced the pewter plate with one of his own.

Dutch courage

I find it amazing that we are not all speaking Dutch, given that so many 17th century explorers from Holland charted the Western Australian coast. For an excellent chronicle, I would encourage readers to visit this site.

Fast forward to 1941 and another history making incident, the sea battle between HMAS Sydney and the German raider HSK Kormoran 200 kilometres west of Shark Bay.

Lifeboat from the HSK Kormoran.

Readers will recall that the Sydney was sunk with the loss of all 645 crew. The crew of the damaged Kormoran scuttled her and around 300 survivors out of the original 383 found their way to the WA mainland, where they became prisoners of war.

Just before leaving Carnarvon for Monkey Mia, we found a lifeboat from the Kormoran and lots of memorabilia on display at a museum at historic One Mile Jetty.

One Mile Jetty tram ride.

If you think one can immerse oneself (so to speak) only so much in maritime history without drowning, think again. Geraldton, our next port of call, 410 kilometres south of Denham, offered a veritable cornucopia for this blue water tragic.

One Mile Jetty.

Shells and stromatolites

But before leaving the Peron Peninsula, I should mention two other places that excited our interest there.

One is Shell Beach, where in a unique phenomenon, trillions of tiny shells known as coquina have accumulated over thousands of years to form banks up to 10 metres deep.

Calcium carbonate from the shells has over time hardened and bound the banks such that they can be and are mined as building blocks for local structures.

Coquina shells.

The other is Hamelin Pool, where we were able to observe rocky clumps of living fossils known as stromatolites. These 3,000-year-old colonies of micro organisms are related to the oldest and simplest forms of life that existed 3.5 billion years ago.

Coquina shell block mine at Hamelin Pool.

Back then, blue-green bacteria, the first living organisms to colonise earth, flourished in shallow waters, trapping floating sediments to build soft stromatolite clumps that began releasing oxygen, producing the environment for the evolution of air breathing life forms.

We found this glimpse at primeval life particularly fascinating, given that 2009 is the 200th anniversary year of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his publication The Origin of Species.

Stromatolites. Note the 100-year-old wool wagon tracks.

Wickedness and courage

Now to Geraldton (pop. 30,000) where we enjoyed a great game of golf, met new friends, attended the annual blessing of the crayfish fleet and, you guessed it, visited the Western Australian Museum and its riveting history of Dutch exploration of the coast.



Blessing of the Geraldton crayfish fleet.









Geraldton, viewed from the HMAS Sydney Memorial site.


Readers may recall the tragic story of the Batavia and its merchant commander Francisco Pelsaert.

Just to recapitulate, in 1629 the VOC (Dutch East India Company) ship Batavia, with 322 people on board, was wrecked on Morning Reef, one of the Houtman Abrolhos Islands 40 nautical miles off the coast of Geraldton.

Replica of the Batavia longboat, built by TAFE students.

In an amazing navigational feat, Pelsaert and skipper Adriaan Jacobz, with 46 other survivors including two women and a baby, sailed the ship’s 10.7-metre open longboat 1,500 nautical miles to Batavia (Jakarta) in 29 days, without loss of life, to get help.

I quote from a plaque: “For those remaining on the islands, what followed was a horrific story of mutiny, murder, rape and retribution. By the time Pelsaert returned (72 days after arriving in Batavia) 124 shipwreck survivors had died at the hands of Jeronimus Cornelisz, a senior company officer and his followers.”

These people had been drowned, stabbed, strangled or bludgeoned to death, the women forced into concubinage.

Canon retrieved from the Batavia wreck.

The hero of the story is Wiebbe Hayes, whom Cornelisz had isolated with 20 others on another island hoping they would die. However, Hayes and his companions found water and food, and organised the defence of his men and others who escaped the bloodshed, repelling attacks from Cornelisz and eventually capturing him.

On his return Pelsaert rounded up the mutineers, and Cornelisz and others were summarily hanged, Cornelisz after having his hands chopped off with mallet and chisel.

Memorial to Wiebbe Hayes, hero of the Batavia mutiny, on the Geraldton esplanade.

The museum provides a detailed account of the tragedy, and carries a large number of items retrieved from the wreck, including all the elements of a masonry portico meant for the Dutch East India Company castle in Batavia.

The hewn blocks, stowed as ballast in the Batavia, have been mounted on a scaffold at the museum and what an impressive portico it is, as our picture shows.

There is much more to the Batavia story, of course, and many more stories of heroism from the litany of Dutch shipwrecks on the Western Australian coast, but interested readers can follow up themselves on the net.

Portico meant for the VOC Castle in Batavia, mounted in the Western Australian Museum.

And finally…

I’ll mention just one more story that fascinated me. The VOC ship Zeewijk commanded by Jan Steyns, with a crew of 212 and 315,836 guilders in storage was wrecked in 1728 on a Houtman Abrolhos reef when en route from Holland to Batavia via the Cape of Good Hope.

Ten drowned attempting to launch a boat. Eventually the crew set up camp and began salvaging gear from the wreck. Soon after a longboat and 11 seamen set out for Batavia to seek help but were never seen again.

After living off seals and birds on the island, which eventually began to diminish in number, the survivors decided to build a boat from the wreckage and local timber.

After four months’ incredible craftsmanship, the 20-metre keelboat Sloepie was launched. It enabled 82 survivors (six having died en route) to reach Batavia just nine months after the Zeewijk foundered.

I felt this good news story would make a terrific movie.

Needless to say, Carol had to drag me kicking and screaming from the museum as I would have set up camp there if I could.

Teeing off at the 10th at the Spalding Park Golf Club in Geraldton -- one activity that could drag me from the museum.

From the Pilbara to the Gascoyne

You know you’re in remote Western Australia when you come across a sign that reads: RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) emergency landing strip.

The highway widens and after a kilometre or so narrows again.

You realise you’ve just driven on the emergency landing strip.

Above right: At Ned's Camp, Cape Range National Park. Below right, emu and chick on the road to Exmouth.

I refer to a section of the North West Coastal Highway just beyond the Nanutarra Roadhouse, about 100km from the coast, 230km south west of Karratha and 100km before the turnoff to Exmouth.

Apart from the roadhouses, which can be more than 200km apart, it’s a wilderness. The landscape is semi arid, the soil red, we haven’t seen rain for more than three months and it’s hot.

The reassuring link with humanity is the highway, which is in remarkably good shape, in spite of the road
trains that thunder up and down carrying provisions and fuel to distant towns.

Onslow on slow

After leaving Point Samson near Karratha we decided to stay three nights at Onslow (pop 850), a sleepy coastal town with big tides that has a salt mine as its significant industry.

Right above and below: Onslow salt mine and conveyor to ship.

Roughly on the same latitude as Mackay in Queensland, Onslow is the southernmost Australian town bombed by Japanese aircraft during WWII. It was at the time a naval fuel depot.


Sunset at Onslow (picture by Carol).

Speaking of bombs, just 100km offshore, at Montebello Islands, the British conducted A-bomb tests in 1952. They subsequently moved the test ground to Maralinga in South Australia, but we won’t go there.

From Onslow you can view through binoculars monopod oil exploration rigs. These have grown in number since the discovery of oil on Barrow Island, south of Montebello, in 1964.

At Onslow we made new friends and reconnected with fellow vannies we met earlier at Point Samson. Dinnertime each night was a big social event, as our pictures show.

Dinner at the Diques' van.

For Carol it was an opportunity to demonstrate her culinary skills that I must say rated 10 out of 10 in the company.



One vannie we met there from Perth who recently lost his wife to cancer has decided to make his home in the park at Onslow. He likes the small community environment and participates in local activities.

Open air dinner after the word got around...



Guess who scuttled under our table?

It was then on to Exmouth (resident population 2,500) on North West Cape, 1,270 kilometres north of Perth.





Communications towers at Exmouth, with a caravan park in the foreground.

Snorkelling the reef

North West Cape was first sighted in 1618 by Dutch skipper Haevik Claeszoon van Hillegom in the vessel Zeewolf, became a pearling and pastoral settlement in 1850, a U.S. submarine base in 1942 and a massive U.S.-Australian communications base in 1962.

But for us, the big attraction was the Cape Range National Park on the western side of the peninsular, famous for the Ningaloo Reef, a fringe reef closer to beaches than any other reef in Australia.

En route to Exmouth.

After two nights at Exmouth our vannie friends Greg and Wendy from Kirrawee, and Tony and Maureen from Forster, persuaded us to join them at a Cape Range National Park beach site called Neds Camp, which has only 15 sites available for $10 a night payable to the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Carol at Turquoise Bay.

This we did, and found it exhilarating swimming and snorkelling nearby, especially at Turquoise Bay, a protected marine sanctuary where you can practically reach out and touch the tropical fish.

Even Carol spent more time splashing about in the sea than she has done in ages.

Lone windsurfer off Vlaming Point, North West Cape.

At Neds Camp the only facilities are two pit toilets. You supply your own water and power. It was there I used the caravan shower for the first time. In fact we were a bit too self indulgent with water and almost ran out after two days!

Our fellow vannies were a bit smarter and used a bore a bit further up the road for showering.

Our nightly 'happy hour’ attended by all the campers, was unforgettable.

Happy hour at Neds Camp.

We’re sure we’ve made some new lifelong friends.




Vlaming Point.

Windy way

The only negative was a gale force south easterly wind that rarely let up during our stay and in fact continued to harass us during a brief visit to Coral Bay (famous for whale sharks in the winter months), 150km south of Exmouth and again a further 240km south at Carnarvon, in the Gascoyne region.

Coral Bay.

Despite our friends’ protests, we decided to leave prematurely. The reason was that one of my molars had split down the middle after I bit on a hard toffee on the way to Exmouth. One side of the tooth remained in place but the other side was loose.

Downtown Carnarvon.

I was worried that infection might set in (where’s that flying doctor!). There was only one dentist in Exmouth who was booked out for a month, so we decided to make for Carnarvon (pop. 9,000).

As it turned out, there was no dentist there either, although we were told a dentist from Geraldton visited briefly each month.

There was nothing for it but to extract the offending shard myself, which I did by working it back and forth between finger and thumb for several minutes and giving it a yank.

Out it came and within 24 hours the gum had almost completely healed.

Sunset outside the Carnarvon Hotel.

So here we are in Carnarvon, a town famous for its fruit and vegetable farms and seafood, especially prawns and lobsters, waiting patiently for our mail, which has been despatched by daughter Julie.