Indian Winter

As I was driving south, across the flat plains from Coral Bay towards Carnarvon, a sticky drizzle began not far out of town, and gradually picked up. It kept going all afternoon, and then on into the evening and night.

It was dark, and I began to wonder where I’d end up sleeping, because I noticed that all that water had turned any potential bush campsites, and their access tracks, into inaccessible red mush.

Every few minutes I’d overtake another long road train at a dizzying speed, or pass one going in the opposite direction. When this happened I’d be blasted by a hydro-bomb of air and water, the road trains’ dangerous and powerful wetfarts buffeting my little babyhatch all over the road. I had to hang on tight, it was tiring.

At times like these you begin to think about the meaning of life, and why it is that you’re doing what you’re doing.

It reminded me of an interview I did in Budapest once, which was published in the Hungarian Journal of Contemporary Existential Crises, Spring 1986 Edition (Lenin’s Birthday Bumper Issue). The journalist was a gruff, patronising middle-aged man in a brown suit, who introduced himself to me as Comrade Plyz Splāŋ Timi Ymyhia. The transcript is as follows:

Plyz: Yu’ve tṟavelled all over ze vorld, can yu plyz splāŋ timi vy yu do it?

Me: What?

Plyz: Vy do yu keep tṟavelling zo much?

Me: Er, I dunno.

Plyz: Vat?

Me: I dunno mate.

Plyz: Vat? Yu spend all zat time und money travelling all over ze hole place and yu don’t even know vy yu do it?

Me: Like I said mate, I dunno, I just sorta like it.

Plyz: Vat?

Me: Jeez mate, don’t ya get it? It’s not rocket science. I just like it. It’s sorta fun.

Plyz: Vat? Bah! Typikal! Vell, allow me to be bṟuuuutally honest viz yu, vich iz not somezing yu polite English-types are used to. I propose zat yu, yu bourgeois Vestern dṟifter, are zo lost in your life, viz all your money and your zings, zat yu cannot just zit schtill vor five minutes, let alone vor a hole autumn, kalmly pickling peppers und garlic to have ṟeady for ze vinter lángos. It’s zo zo typikal of yu zelvish Vestern Bourgoisie, need to be schtimulated all ze time, itz never enuff, on und on und on yu go.

Me: Huh?

Plyz: Vat?

So I did actually meet a Czech journalist once, in real life, in a seedy bar in Prague in the early 90s. (Most bars in Prague were seedy in the early 90s). We sat on high stools and, at his insistence, drank shots of slivovice, one after the other.

He was very interested in my journeying, and I told him how much I’ve always loved travel. He did too, but lamented the fact that he couldn’t afford to do all that much of it.

One of the things I love most about travel is the randomness of it all, how you find yourself flung into unpredictable and unexpected situations and places, and sometimes you just have to fly by the seat of your pants, make it up as you go along. The randomness really keeps you on your toes. It always works out, but sometimes you don’t know exactly how it’ll work out.

Of course I also adore the people I meet, the landscapes, and immersing myself in incredible cultures. That all goes without saying. Even though I just said it.

Anyway my Czech friend guzzled down his slivovice as if he was dying of thirst in the desert, and the shot glasses were filled with life-saving water. He became more and more energetic after each one.

I, on the other hand, got totally wasted in about 20 minutes, to the point where I struggled to stay on my stool, or to say anything that was vaguely comprehensible, let alone interesting.

I remember that he said he wanted to interview me about my travels for his newspaper, and that he’d contact me the next day. I also remember that the next morning I felt like a roadtrain had smashed into my head, bearing four gigantic industrial-sized carpet vacuum cleaners on its four trailers, each of which had sucked dry every single last sub-atomic particle of moisture from my head, throat and body.

I remember absolutely nothing else - how I got back to my guesthouse, how I got back in, how I got to bed. And he didn’t contact me the next day either. Surprise surprise.

It always works out

Note the elaborate tent securing mechanism and sophisticated shirt folding technique

Hamelin Pool

I first heard about Hamelin Pool when I was reading well-known American author Bill Bryson’s book “Down Under” to Miranda and Iain, whilst hiking the Larapinta Trail with them over three weeks in April. On that trip I pretty much read the whole book out loud to them, and another 2 whole books myself. We were so flat out hiking during that trip.

The Hamelin Pool Nature Reserve, in Malgana country, is home to the most abundant and diverse range of stromatolites in the world.

Now I know all of you are aware of exactly what stromatolites are, so I apologise, but this next bit is only for those one or two of you that may have forgotten.

Stromatolites are like living fossils, one of the oldest life forms on the planet. Hamelin Pool stromatolites look like this:

3.5 billion years ago the earth was an even more toxic place than it is now. The atmosphere was packed full of dangerous gases, there was little oxygen around, all sorts of crusty tectonic plate movements were going on, volcanoes were erupting left right and centre, and stromatolites were as common as Krolikowskis are in the Polish phone book, ie. they were absolutely everywhere. Because, you see, stromatolites are very clever, they don’t need oxygen.

I did a little New Agey sketch to show you what it used to be like in the bad old days:

The earth on 20th Feb 3,500,000,000 BCE (about 7pm). That day is my sister Mish’s birthday btw, but the drawing is based on a photo taken a couple of years before she was born. Those flat thingys at the shoreline are stromatolites.

Stromatolites are living fossils that have been created by tiny little plant-like creatures called cyanobacteria, who use photosynthesis to create oxygen from carbon dioxide.

Every day, when the sun shines, their cute little wormy-bits stand vertical, and wave around, like arms during the slow love song at a stadium concert. While they’re waving, the arms are also busy synthesising their little photos, creating cute little bubbles of oxygen as they do it, while tiny shell fragments and other calcium bits and pieces in the saturated salty water settle on them.

At night, the little arms need to sleep off the Love Beans from the gig, (if they can possibly get to sleep that is), and so they lie horizontal, trapping the calcium bits, and slowly forming layers of a type of rock, which is the stromatolite.

Stromatolites grow at about half a millimetre a year, which is about the same speed as parliament acts to change things in our society that urgently need reform.

So what happened in this gripping billion-year old drama was that the cyanobacteria stromatolites, benevolent creatures that they are, oxygenated our whole atmosphere, which was incredibly generous of them, because it led to a burst of new life forms that eventually included us, but also included many creatures like sea snails that, unfortunately for the stromatolites, ended up eating almost all of them up. That’s gratitude for ya.

The thing that’s incredible about Hamelin Pool is that the water there is almost the most salty water in the world, it’s twice as salty as the average sea water.

That’s because there’s a shelf of seagrass and sand across the mouth of the bay, called the Faure Sill, that only allows water to flow in at high tide, but doesn’t allow much of it to get out again.

The water gets trapped in the bay, and because the climate is generally always hot and dry, much of the seawater evaporates, leaving salt, and the bay waters are therefore extremely saline. This means that very few marine animals can survive, so there’s nothing to eat the stromatolites. It’s just like magic! Talk about 4 million gulls lining up in a row.

This dreary shot is as close as you can currently get to the stromatolites, because Cyclone Seroja smashed up the boardwalk in 2021, and they’ve fenced it off to protect the delicate internationally-mega-important living fossil superstars from damage

There used to be a telegraph station at Hamelin Pool too, there’s a cute little museum there, and a very informative cute little old lady called Ann (little in height only), who did a tour, which she said I could join for free, even though everyone else paid.

She was so nice to me, maybe she felt sorry for me because she saw my little tent (most old people seem to be), or because I was looking a little destitute, and my shirt collar was red-dirty. She told us all about stromatolites, and all about the telegraph station and wool storage days of the place. I couldn’t help butt notice this pic:

I recall Bill Bryson mentioning this pic in his book as well, and I want to be like him so I’d better mention it too.

Actually, what the hell, I may as well be brutally honest and admit that I don’t just want to be like him but I’m desperate to be better than him. So because I don’t think Bill explained in his book the whole context of the pic, I made sure I asked Ann all about it.

So the dude was a telegraph linesman/repair guy, and he was on his way to a wedding in Carnarvon or Geraldton with his wife, but unexpectedly needed to do a repair job on the telegraph line on the way. The thing is, he was all dressed up for the wedding, so in order to keep his Sunday best clean, he stripped off and climbed up to do the repair work.

Ann said he folded his clothes very neatly on the grass before he went up. I don’t know how she knows that specific detail, I suspect it could be a little tidbit fantasy that she’s got going on about the whole episode. Her eyes were gleaming when she talked about it. I mean, she didn’t even know if it was Carnarvon or Geraldton, but she knew about the folding thing? It all smells a bit fishy to me (which I guess is not too surprising for the area).

The thing is, the linesman took his undies off too, or whatever undergarments long johns y-fronts oh!-backs he was wearing at the time. Why did he take them off too? Ann didn’t have a word to say about it, and shit I totally forgot to ask her.

Bill Bryson says the linesman had to swim across the river first, in order to get to the pole. That makes sense. Damn! I didn’t know that.

But Bill didn’t know about the wife or the wedding, did he? But I did.

So, overall, I guess I’ve got no choice.

On balance, I think, unfortunately, I’m gonna have to very reluctantly call it a tie.

Shark Bay

Shark Bay is a large area of marine reserve that Hamelin Pool sits within, and because of its extremely salty waters, not many animals can survive in it. But hell’s bells and cockle shells, one cute little animal thrives there, and that’s the Fragum Cockle. There’s one or two of them around the place.

In fact there’s so many cockle shells there, and they’ve been visiting for so many years, that the shellf goes down hundreds of metres underground, and the deeper you go down, the more compact it gets.

The thing is, it’s the perfect building material - it’s strong, but it’s light too. So, of course, the early settlers mined it.

I also checked out a couple of historic buildings in Denham that were made of shell bricks.

Some days the builder got his young kids to help

I took this just after I just got up in the morning

Peeews reflecting on the meaning of life, as they air out before the next sitting

I was shell-shocked at how beautiful it was in there

The congregation waiting patiently outside before the service, observing Covid-safe antisocial distancing

By the way, while I was sitting outside the church in my car, these 2 dudes nonchalantly strolled past, heading towards the Shark Bay supermarket.

I didn’t want to stare but it was hard not to, I mean, it must be really hard for them when they go into town, the sideways glances they get, the comments, the mumbled jokes that they hear but can’t understand. All just because they look a bit different and don’t wear shoes.

It was cold and windy at the Hamelin Pool campground at night, being right on the coast and all, and I went into a little old woolshed that was being used as a camp kitchen, to cook my dinner and get shelter. Soon a bunch of 4 couples rolled in, armed to the teeth with various cartons and bottles of grog, they were all family members of various permutations, who also couldn’t bear that incessant biting wind.

They were all really nice, and also pretty tipsy already, I wondered how it was gonna pan out after all that extra ammunition had been fired.

But first they just wanted to fire questions at the guy stupid enough to be travelling around in a tiny 2WD, a lightweight hiking tent and a bicycle. Once they realised I wasn’t a lunatic they offered me a beer or two, and we chatted for ages. They actually told me later on that they all thought the owner of that tent must be some fanatic weirdo, travelling like that. Amazing how easily you can judge a book by its flimsy cover.

One couple, Markie and Dianne, are both WA ex-cops who have worked in indigenous communities a lot. They, like me, are horrified at indigenous incarceration rates in Australia, and threw their hands in the air when I asked them what they thought could be done about it.

Brace yourself for some very hard-to-swallow inconvenient truths about our great nation, the lucky country.

Indigenous Australians make up 3.2% of the Australian population, but constitute 29% of the national prison population (and 84% of the NT prison population).

48% of juveniles in detention nationwide are indigenous.

If you’re indigenous, you’re 10 times more likely to be jailed, and 11 times more likely to be refused bail by a judge, than if you’re not. In WA, indigenous youth are 30 times more likely to be arrested than non-indigenous youth.

Since 2004 indigenous incarceration rates have increased by 88%, compared to a 29% increase for non-indigenous Australians.

In the 30 years since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, there have been a further 500 indigenous deaths in custody. Five hundred people! The number of police, prison or detention staff who have been either convicted or held directly accountable for any of these deaths is, wait for it, a big fat zero. Not one.

Both the ex-cops agreed that mentoring programs for young indigenous people are a crucial part of getting out of the completely life-shattering mess that the current system creates, along with a total change to the arrest-and-imprison model, and proper cultural training for police and incorrectional services staff. A lot of resources are needed to turn it around, solid well-researched programs with long-term guaranteed funding.

Markie told me the devastatingly gut wrenching story of once going into a community to arrest a 16 year old boy, who was visibly shaking with fear at the prospect of going to jail for the first time in his life. His mother’s words of consolation to her son at the time were “it’s ok, it’ll be ok, everyone goes to jail, everyone gets there eventually.”

It’s unspeakably sad that it’s come to this.

These are our kids.

This situation is, for me, Australia’s deepest and darkest national shame.

And unfortunately we’ve got a few to choose from.

These birds heard the whole thing. They’d cry too, if they understood.

Australia’s most westerly mainland point

Yeah, tbh the most westerly point mission was a bit of an anti-climax, because I couldn’t actually get to it, Steep Point, unless I wanted to drive 240km return on a corrugated road, and then do a 60km return hike through soft beach sand to stand on the actual spot.

Nah, I’m good thanks.

When I saw the name of the road to get there I knew I’d made the right choice - it was called Useless Loop.

I did see that westerly spot though, across the water:

To the speccy sou’west

So it’s not long to Perth now, and the pleasures of cityness, catching up with friends, and staying with dear Scotty in his Buddhist monastery just out of the big(ish) smoke. I’m still heading south, I’m gonna do some hiking along the wild windy coast, and it’s still winter. Where’s that good ole global heating when you need it?❤️