Leaving Broome through the laid-back al fresco airport a short flight took us the full length of the beautiful west coast, we could see salt lakes inland and red rocks separating the lakes and isolated forests from the Indian ocean. Arriving in Perth to 30°c would normally be enervating in itself but coming from the Kimberley the air felt clean and cool.
After zipping around New Zealand and Australia in a variety of cars we found a really good deal for a campervan in Perth and decided to swallow our pride and try one out. We had booked a small campervan through Hippie Campers but when we arrived we found we had been upgraded to a bigger Apollo camper. This meant much more space and comfort but as I have an allergy towards campervans and caravans anyway, probably due to years of being smiled and waved at by old couples whizzing past in their big posh vans whilst we were hitching for a lift, it was at the cost of feeling like a total wally when driving along. Sadly the upgrade was scant recompense for the extremely poor customer service we received from Apollo when collecting the ‘twatmobile’. If I was still working for Flight Centre I would be switch selling everyone to Britz after this experience, not that I ever managed to sell a campervan to anyone anyway!
A guy who ran the Norfolk and Norwich festival for many years before moving over to Perth to run the annual Western Australia festival said that the first thing he learnt from the move was that there are two 6 o’clocks in the day. But what he was trying to teach the Australians was that there are two 12 o’clocks as well. We could see what he meant immediately on driving out of Perth. At 5pm on a Saturday the streets were empty and all the shops were shut, except the drive through bottle shops (another disadvantage with the big campervans is that you cannot partake of such a service, the roof is too high to get through them!) but of course we were woken at 5am on a Sunday by a platoon of mountain bikes screeching past our van which we had parked just by a nature reserve.
We headed east towards the Nullarbor plain, stopping first at the quaint town of York on the way to Wave Rock, which is a rock, in the shape of a wave, in the middle of nowhere. It is very impressive however and it is possible to walk around it and all over the top of it. From the top we could see around for miles of the ‘Wheatbelt’. There was a slight tinge of smoke in the air and the sky was hazy, leaving everything covered in a golden glaze of the sun. It was more reminiscent of Africa than Australia.
One aspect that is very Australian about this area is the sheer number of flies that attach themselves to every square inch of your body as soon as you step outside. Without even a hint of shyness they will try to insinuate themselves into your nostrils, ears and eyes, and not a few of them end up being an involuntary aperitif. They are a nuisance all across Australia but are perhaps worst here in Western Australia, is famous for the ‘W.A. Wave’. This is the slow motion waving of the hand across the face that everybody makes approximately every 12 seconds when in the vicinity of the flies.
From Wave Rock we continued east out to Kalgoorlie, the famous gold mining town. The road follows the Golden Pipeline all the way which unfortunately is not pumping liquid gold to Perth (it’s not that lucrative anymore) but was built to provide a water supply to the mine towns. Kalgoorlie is infamous across Australia for being like a part of the Wild West where the clocks stopped in the 1970’s. This reputation is supported by each pubs or bar boasting that they have the nicest ‘skimpies’ (topless barmaids) and by the local brothel offering guided tours. With this in mind we were really pleasantly surprised with Kalgoorlie. There are these vestiges to the past but there is also a glimpse of the future as well, provided by the view from the lookout into the SuperPit, the massive goldmine created by a guy called Alan Bond buying out all the small prospects and combining them into one. The view from the top is as impressive as viewing any ancient structure such as the Pyramids or Taj Mahal, the questions you ask about how they built those structures are just as applicable here as the giant vehicles that look like toy trucks from this distance move the earth around in the bottom of the mine. Apart from the mine the bustling, vibrant town displayed a lot more signs of life than the other towns we had driven through on the way. Western Australia is one of the stronger states financially and this is mostly due to the mining and natural resource industries here which drive the economy. The demand for skilled labour is so high that many workers are on ‘fly-in’ contracts where they get flown in from Queensland or New South Wales or elsewhere for a couple of weeks work and then flown back for a week off. Many locals complain that this is taking too much money out of the local economy but it seems to me that there is no other solution to satisfy the demand.
A darker side to the Australian outback which we have noticed every since arriving in South Australia and I am yet to mention is the presence everywhere of bullet holes. Stop at any rest stop or roadhouse in the outback and take a closer look at shelters, picnic benches, bins, toilet huts or signs and you will notice bullet holes, mostly of a fairly intimidating circumference. I still can’t work out who is wasting all their bullets in this manner and why the custom is so widespread. And I can’t help looking around nervously every time we stop for a tuna sandwich along the way.
Something very impressive about the Australian outback is the opportunity to observe the night sky of the southern hemisphere. Most people are aware that there are far more stars in the southern hemisphere sky than in the north and we have been taking every opportunity to view them whilst down here. The problem is the conditions must be perfect to make it worthwhile, that is a clear night sky, as far from any light pollution as possible which includes the moon as well as towns and other surface sources of light. In New Zealand we often struggled to satisfy the first requirement, although we did have some glorious views from Cape Reinga and close to Kaikoura, and in Australia it has been hard to satisfy both at the same time – e.g. when in the red centre we were either too close to lights (Alice Springs) or we had cloudy skies (Coober Pedy) and up in the Kimberley the moon was often too bright. Out between Perth and Kalgoorlie however we were able to watch the night sky reveal an ocean of stars. As far as I know the only constellation that can be seen from both hemispheres is Orion, and to my very untrained eye that seems to be the case. I have heard people claim to have seen Ursa Major (The Plough or The Big Dipper) but I have not spotted it. Of course here the most famous constellation is that of the Southern Cross, which seems to be much more reliable than the Pole Star at pointing in the right direction!
These views continued as we headed west along the coast, the breathtaking scenery of Normans beach and Cosy Corner, either side of Middleton beach in Albany and Ocean beach and Conspicuous Cliffs between Denmark and Walpole. Perhaps the most impressive of the beaches we visited after Esperance is Green Pools and Elephant Rocks that sit either side of a rocky headland just a few kilometres west of Denmark. The secluded bay of Green Pools being an exquisite place to swim and the giant elephantine rocks on the other side providing yet another stunning perspective of the ocean. It is hard to understand why the trip from Sydney to Cairns is the most popular route for foreign visitors to Australia when we have found far more spots of natural beauty in every other corner of the country, from South Australia and Victoria to the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
One aspect of driving around Australia that I haven’t mentioned, for fear of talking something up, is the total lack of driving skills amongst Australians. Whilst not necessarily aggressive or dangerous the general standard of driving is with total neglect. There can be absolutely no comparison made with New Zealand drivers who were virtually all very safe and considerate drivers on roads that required a lot of experience. Perhaps that is why driving in Victoria was worst, that the roads need no real experience so the drivers have no respect for the dangers of driving. Nobody ever seems to be concentrating on the road or other drivers. Driving the stretch between Geelong and Melbourne raised my blood pressure to boiling point, twice. I saw women applying their lipstick whilst going faster than the 110km/h speed limit, another woman switching across from the first lane to the sixth and back again to weave through the traffic whilst also turning round and shouting at her kids in the back and a businessman in suit and tie watching a film on a portable DVD as he was driving along. I have seen guys in ‘Utes driving with their heads out of the windows chatting to other drivers or pedestrians, not in the countryside but in the centre of Geelong, and guys up on the Bruce highway between Brisbane and Cairns sipping from bottles of beer as they barrel along. As anywhere else there are legions of people using mobile phones or smoking whilst driving but here they do it whilst tail-gating the bumper of the car in front. That is perhaps the worst habit here, sometimes you won’t see a car for hours but then you will see six in a row, with barely a metre between each one. Last but not least, although amazing to look at the road trains are probably the worst thing to encounter on the outback highways. There is always a collective sigh of relief every time you survive an encounter with one of the 50m behemoths, whether they are passing you going in the other direction or attempting a daring overtake you just have to get out of their way as quickly as possible.
The last leg of our three month grand tour of Australia started by passing through the dark and brooding forests between the southern coast and the Margaret River wine region. Whilst it was very enjoyable to drive through forests that reminded us of those in Central Europe, there was one aspect that was a million miles away from European forests. Recently a sprawling bushfire had ripped through the area around the township of Northcliffe, smouldering for the best part of the last fortnight and the previous day had breached the containment lines, prompting people to put their bushfire plans into action, which basically means taking everything important (photos, pets, passport, insurance documents, etc) in the back of the car and getting ready to evacuate at a moments notice. There were announcements every half an hour on the local ABC radio station and everyone, including us, was waiting with baited breath. Even from 30km or so away the forest and roads were shrouded in the smoke and the air was full of the faintly sweet tinge of burning gum trees. This smell was reminiscent of the general aroma of many Asian cities so we were sat there in the twatmobile saying “oh, that last kilometre smelt just like Colombo”.
Margaret River is one of the highlights of Western Australia for many visitors and often touted as being up there with the wine regions of South Australia however for us it was a bit of a disappointment. The beaches between Cape Leeuwin in the south and Cape Naturaliste in the north add an extra dimension but on the whole it just seemed to be a rather pretentious and superficial place with no real warmth of feeling, even the welcome we received at the Leuwin vineyard was nowhere near as warm and friendly as in those in the Barossa or Coonawarra, or even over in New Zealand. In fact it put us off so much we were no longer in the mood for wine tasting!
We returned to Perth via the beautiful little port town of Fremantle. This is one of the few places in Australia that I could quite easily settle down and live in. The town is almost uniformly buildings of two stories or less with a lot of well-preserved colonial architecture now housing boutiques and second-hand bookshops as well as a bustling weekend food market. The famous old Fremantle prison looms over the city from one side as a statue of former AC/DC singer Bon Scott looks down over the waterfront.
In contrast Perth felt like just another Australian state capital. Clean and organised with modern high-rise office blocks plonked amidst the pedestrianised shopping malls but with an absence of any real sense of character.
Anyone who has spent any time in the U.S will know what I mean when I mention how isolationist media can be, you can often sit for hours just waiting for any snippet of international news. The trend seems to be far worse here in Australia, and their relative lack of worthy news just adds insult to injury. Instead of hearing about the Greek debt crisis or the race for the Republican party nomination we spend most of the time listening to stories of cattle on the highways, snakes in the bathroom or gang shootings in Adelaide. Last week there was some real news however when former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a leadership challenge to current incumbent Julia Gillard. In the end Gillard won although to me it looks a bit short sighted, the public seem to hate her and are sympathetic towards Rudd after he was ousted in a similar fashion a couple of years ago. All this will do is play into the hands of the opposition. And for those who have been shocked and disgusted as usual by the antics of the Republican hopefuls in the U.S, wait till Tony Abbott comes to power in Australia! Luckily it is only Australia he will be leader of! Everything here is only about Australia and Australians and this extends across the whole economy. Customers are urged only to buy Australian goods, even if this means bananas for $15 a kilo or flights with Qantas at twice the fare of Emirates or Etihad. They lament job cuts and struggling farmers, but nobody questions why these actions have to be taken or asks the consumers what they think. The total lack of any wider point of view can be so infuriating I sometimes find myself swearing at the radio and it is impossible to imagine the strife Australia would be in if their mining and natural resources industries were to go into decline. As it is everything is still booming so perhaps it has not been the most economical time to visit, but it has surely been enjoyable.
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