G’ day all,
It’s the end of term 3 for Nancy and we’d thought we’d pop off a short note before we go to Bali for rest and relaxation for a couple of weeks.
Spring is here and the countryside is filling up with thousands of different types of wild flowers. In fact wild flower festivals, tours, hikes, walks and presentations are popular in many areas of SW WA. It is a burgeoning tourist attraction in some locales. As a matter of fact, tomorrow (Sunday) we are hoping to go on a wild flower hike to the Stirling Range with some friends, weather permitting if course.
It’s been life as usual for the last couple months with a few notable highlights. The humpback and southern right whales have been just off Albany coast in record numbers; one newspaper report indicated that over 700 separate whales have been spotted along the south coast this year!! In keeping with the aquatic mammal theme, Nancy and I have tried to spot our fair share. There’s a viewpoint just off the town beach where we saw some in King George Sound several times. 30 were in the Sound one week. It was so cool to just drive up to the viewpoint, get out of the car and watch them cruising by, playing, breaching etc. A cow and her calf were just 20-30 metres offshore and some humpbacks were jumping out of the water a little farther out. We also took a boat tour out in the sound and watched several whales leaping and swimming close-up. One of them swam within metres of the boat.
Along with 4 friends, we rented a nice beach house at Bremner Bay, about 1 1/1 hours west of Albany, several weeks previously. There we drank beer, ate good food, played guitar, walked along some gorgeous beaches but most importantly we went whale watching. That day was fantastic! We saw at least 12 whales just off the beach that day. They played (and foreplayed we think) just outside the surf break. It was quite awe inspiring and humbling. When one humpback breeched, it managed to get its entire body out of the water. How it accomplished to get all that mass out of the H2O is beyond me. Nevertheless, it was a great weekend with good friends and great wildlife.
We went out to Whale World one weekend. It is the old whaling station here in Albany – closed in 1976. They have done an excellent job showing how the station worked and what whaling really entailed. They have an old whaling ship that you can wander around – they’ve got a narrative playing so you can hear what happened when a whale was spotted at sea. A tour guide takes you around and explains the flensing process (cutting the blubber off) and the melting of the whale into oil. They had movies and displays in the huge oil storage tanks and lots of photos of whaling. They also had some skeletons of various whales on display. It was very interesting! One of the teacher’s at Nancy’s school grew up out at the whaling station. She said it was a great place to be a kid – except for the horrible stench of boiling whale oil. The water in front of the station roiled with sharks lured in by the dead whales and parts, but the kids still swam at the beach. The sharks were so well fed, they never bothered with people!
We, along with Robyn and Phil (friends of Nancy with whom she taught in Goulburn in 1992), went to the gold rush town of Kalgoorlie with the WA Teachers’ Exchange group. After leaving Albany we drove to Wave Rock and met up with Nancy’s friends who drove from Perth. We all stayed at a resort cabin, toured Wave Rock the next day and then pushed on to Kalgoorlie
Kalgoorlie is a typical gold rush town except you have to drive to the middle of nowhere to get there and it has a distinct Aussie outback flavour (flat and red). While it’s not as rough anymore thanks to the bitumen highway and the influx of tourists, it was a rough, tough town - all men seeking a fortune and nary a female in sight. Thus the creation of Kalgoorlie’s once thriving bordello trade. There were once 3,000 women imported (read as you see fit) to service 7,000 men with very little access to water or privacy. Three of the brothels are still legally operating. As a matter of fact, we toured one (reputedly the “best” of the three). Our tour guide was an ex-working girl and the experience was quite........interesting. It took a few minutes for everybody to become comfortable but soon we were all asking very pointed and personal questions. Many of her responses were... how do I put this....frank and colourful!
While in Kalgoorlie we also visited a gold miners’ museum. It is a deep mine shaft that was mined out and somebody had the foresight to invest the money and convert it to a great gold mine museum. In addition to seeing the old buildings and equipment Nancy also made a fortune panning for gold. We went underground to tour the old mine shaft. Our guide was a great fellow who, while half deaf from working underground, was very sharp and witty many a tale on the tip of his tongue. The bottom line was mining underground was a tough, dirty, physical, demanding and sometimes fatal job but the pay was good if you progressed the 2 meters per day allotted you. He kept referring to the great pay over and over. It was $400 a day back in the ‘60s if I recall correctly so the pubs and brothels did a booming business in Kalgoorlie.
While a lot of the money made by the Aussie blokes benefitted the pubs, playing Two-up was the gambling activity of choice for folks from other cultures. It is still played today but not so long ago it was played illegally in a ring just outside of town. It’s a simple coin betting game with a ring master, a coin spinner who flipped (or spun) two coins in the air and bets were based on heads or tails. A lot of money exchanged hands on payday to the point where it became an unwritten rule that the two-up ring was closed on payday in hopes some of the cash would reach the families. We had a go at it using monopoly money and it was a hoot.
We had the opportunity to visit an aboriginal primary school to meet the staff and some of the children in the classroom environment. I think 94 kids were enrolled but, being a Friday (the day after payday), there were only 45 or so in attendance. Some of the classes had little reading presentations prepared to show us and seemed quite curious about Canada. They warmed up to us very quickly though, especially those of us with a digital camera. All the teachers got quite a thrill with the visit.
After the primary school we went one of the two Western Australian headquarters and hangar for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. They have a number of turboprop planes and medical staff whose primary mission is to provide medical aid and support to the more remote regions of WA. Many of the stations (farms) have their own landing strip and in a last case basis sections of bitumen roads (i.e. the Nularbor highway) can be closed to allow planes to land.
Just before leaving town we stopped off at the SuperPit which is the world’s 3rd largest open pit gold mine. The pit is absolutely huge with enormous pieces of equipment looking like dinkie toys way down at the bottom. I’m unsure as to what they will do with the hole once it has been fully excavated. We were counting and it took 4 buckets full from a huge loader to fill a 250 ton truck. From all that, there’d only be a few grams of gold. There are 30 of those trucks working 24 hours a day!
We drove home via the Tin Horse Highway near Kulin. It was a bit out of our way, but worth it. The farmers along a 20 km stretch of highway have built horses out of all kinds of metal scraps. The horses range from astronauts, to tennis players, to a zebra out under the trees. There were about 40 of them and I think we got photos of all of them – it was a slow drive!
Oh, Nancy made the local radio here. She (and her school) took part in the Great walk – an Australian attempt to break the Canadian world record of having the most people walking simultaneously – and the ABC radio came out to interview her – the traitor! Her picture is on their website at: http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2008/09/01/2352406.htm?site=southcoast
She was attacked ("swooped" in Nancy nomenclature) by a magpie a few days ago but despite the peck on the noggin - which drew blood - all indications suggest that she will be OK and fit to fly to Bali. When magpies have eggs in the nest they can be quite territorial and are threatened by red heads. Nancy suggests that I was not properly sympathetic to her plight but that is bull. Just ask the magpie!
Cheers from down under.
Boyd and Nancy
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