The wrap up

We’ve done it!  We’ve driven more or less all the way around the Australian continent, had an amazing time, met some super people, seen a lot of extraordinary sights and have enjoyed every minute.

I suppose it’s almost compulsory to add in the facts and figures, so here goes:

• Distance travelled - 24,035 kilometres (14,945 miles)
• Fuel used - 2,595 litres (685 gallons)
• Average fuel consumption - 10.79 litres per 100 kilometres (26.17 miles per gallon)
• Breakdowns - Nothing serious.  Stone guards on both rear wheels were shaken off by corrugations, second battery failed and was replaced, and power assisted brakes failed temporarily
• Tyres - No punctures, although we’ve worn about 3 mm of rubber, mainly on rough tracks in the Limmen National Park and on the Gibb River Road.

Oh yes, Kim took some photos - 11,500 of them!

That’s it.  Time for a rest.  I’m probably too old now for any more long trips, but I’ve not yet given up on the shorter runs. 

Watch this space.  In the meantime it’s goodbye from me, goodbye from Kim and goodbye from Vin Rouge.

The Last Leg

The Mitchell Highway from Orange to Sydney via Bathhurst and the Blue Mountains could do with some serious maintenance.  Bumpy, patched and rough, it chicaned through undulating and pretty countryside, passed through small towns, arable farmland and orchards.  We bumped along, stopped in Narromine to look at the statue dedicated to the cricketer Glen McGrath and again in Bilpin, to buy some locally grown apples.

We climbed up one side of the Great Dividing Range, passed through low cloud and the morning chill to descend into the flatter land that took us around the northern suburbs of that great urban sprawl known as Sydney.  We spotted the stately Warratah, the official floral emblem of NSW blooming alongside the road.  Naturally Kim had to stop and take photos and of course with no power assisted brakes, stopping took a lot of heavy footwork on the pedal.

For the first time in weeks we stepped into a real house!  Jillian, who lived next door to us in Brisbane a couple of years ago, had moved to Sydney and we enjoyed catching up with her news over a pleasant and relaxed lunch.  Then it was on to Peter and Katherine, our very good friends from Hong Kong days where we would enjoy not only a traditional G&T or several, but the pleasures of sleeping in a genuine bed.  Luxury! 

Thanks to a loan of Peter’s pressure washer it was time for Vin Rouge to have a thorough wash down and remove the insect cemetery from the front of the vehicle.  It must have made poor old Vin Rouge feel better because the power assisted brakes started to work again shortly after setting off north.  Katherine is a potter.  Her work is well known and she was exhibiting at Artisans in the Gardens.  Judging by the crowds, it was a popular exhibition.  So while Katherine talked to visitors about pottery, we wandered around the Botanic Gardens, stopping to watch the harbour whilst enjoying ice creams.  It made a pleasant change to be tourist for a while.

And of course, Kim found some flowers.

We spent a lovely evening in Tamworth with Lisa, a friend of Kim’s from way back.  Next day we decided to make it back to Brisbane in one hop, arriving as day became night.  We’d stopped to help a chap who’s vehicle had spun off the road but apart from that had a fast run all the way.

Now it’s over.  It’s been an amazing adventure.

To Nullarbor and Beyond!

The Eyre Highway, or Nullarbor does go on for a very long way.  Even at the checkpoints there seems to be a lot further to go.  At Kimba, which according to its signpost is ‘Halfway across Australia’ Vin Rouge was almost, but not quite squashed by a big galah!

We crossed the border into South Australia where time gets just plain silly.  In three days we changed time zones three times, moving not in solid hours, such as any normal country, but firstly 45 minutes, then another, and then 30 minutes.  Kim complained that she was suffering ‘Land Rover lag’ using this as an excuse to sleep in late.  One difficulty associated with the Nullarbor is the head wind.  Yes, we had it all the way across, not only a head wind but sometimes a head gale.  At times Vin Rouge, which is as aerodynamic as a brick, really struggled to make any headway above 70kph. 

At last we were through, 1,300 fairly tedious kilometres in three days.  The town of Ceduna, although well inside the South Australia border, is where the quarantine station is located.  Its purpose is to ensure that fruit flies on fresh fruit and vegetables are not brought into fruit growing areas and we were thoroughly checked to ensure compliance.  Carrying on to the small town of Winnulla, we camped overnight close to some giant grain silos.  The whole area is one vast wheat field, crops as far as the eye can see.  It’s farming on a grand scale.  The crops are harvested, stored in massive grain hoppers and silos, transferred to mile-long trains then transported to the docks for export in bulk tankers.

No self respecting Land Rover owner passes near to Wilmington without stopping at the Toy Museum.  True to form we dropped by to be greeted by David Christie and his son Adrian who informed us that a blue Land Rover towing a large boat had been through a few hours earlier and all was well.  The driver had left a message in case we called by.  Somehow both the car and the trailer had been fixed and he’d completed more than 700 kilometres without problem.  That news made our day.  Adrian showed us his latest project, a hybrid of various LR parts.  Although not quite complete, Mike had a drive and found it a lot of fun - very fast, amazing cornering and brakes that would stop a road train.

Over the border, into New South Wales and yet another time zone.  Broken Hill, known for its silver mine was our stopover point.  We weren’t too taken with the place.  It’s dominated by a massive slag heap and although there’s a few attractive buildings, they’re almost lost amongst the mass of ‘practical but ugly’ constructions.  However, at Bells Milk Bar, a throwback to the 1950’s, we had enormous milk shakes and enjoyed the nostalgic surroundings. 

Pro Hart is a well known Australian artist who started his working life as a miner before making a name for himself as a painter.  His work, some of it graphic, other work conceptual and yet more critical of mining avarice, we found challenging but moving.  He’d even painted one of his Rolls Royce cars in commemoration of Australia and the millennium.  We wondered; shouldn’t that have been a Holden?

Now Vin Rouge has been on its best behaviour for weeks.  With only a couple of minor issues through the remote and rough tracks we’ve been driving, the car has decided that it’s time to go home.  It probably heard us talking about it and so the vacuum pump (needed for power assisted braking) failed.  I can hear it thinking ‘let’s get home asap, no need to slow down’.  As it would take a couple of days to get a new pump flown in at extortionate cost, we elected to drive back to Brisbane and ship in a new pump from the UK at a quarter of the cost.  However, it’s Sydney first to catch up with some friends before the last leg north to Brisbane and home.

A Big Hole

Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie are about 50 kilometres apart so why does our esteemed navigator take us over 600 kilometres from one to the other?  The answer seems to lie in some rather skinny cast iron figures.  Anthony Gormley (of Angel of the North fame if you’re in the UK) apparently took laser scans of over 50 local inhabitants from the nearby town of Menzies and planted the castings in the salt lake known as Lake Ballard.  Now if I was one of those depicted, I’m not sure that I’d be too flattered, but you can make up your own mind!

Oh well, at least the sunset was something special

Kalgoorlie is famed for a hole in the ground, locally known as the Superpit.  It certainly lives up to its name.  A kilometre wide, close on 3 kilometres long and half a kilometre deep.  Huge trucks, each hauling out 200 tons of ore operate 24/7, and that ore is processed to extract gold.  Apparently a piece about the size of a golf ball is retrieved from about seven trucks of ore.  It must be profitable judging by the number of trucks we saw working.

The buckets are pretty impressive too.  Here’s one of the smaller variety.

Mike hit the throttle fairly quickly (in case Kim decided she wanted some gold jewellery!) and we rapidly made the 200kms to Norseman, a pleasant little town named after a prospector’s horse that kicked up a gold nugget in 1894.  It also put us at the beginning of the Eyre Highway, otherwise more generally known as The Nullarbor, or colloquially ‘Nullarboring’.  It’s 700 kilometres to the South Australian border, then another 470 kilometres to Ceduna where it technically ends, although there’s still another 400 kilometres to travel before we get to Port Lincoln at the southern promontory of the Eyre Peninsula.

The Nullarbor is one of those iconic Australian drives.  It’s long and straight.  In fact, part of it is the longest stretch of dead straight road in Australia.

It also boasts the world’s longest golf course.  Each of the eighteen holes is located at a stop along the way.  Special certificates are issued to those who complete the entire course.  The journey should us three days.  If we tried the golf, with our handicap it’d be Christmas before we competed the route!  Instead, at the end of day one, we were able to camp overnight at the Wedgetail Roadhouse at Cocklebiddy.  It’s not a large place!

The wind howled through the tree (I think there’s only one!) and so we took solace, and warmth, in the roadhouse, ate an enormous and very good dinner, drank a drop of perfectly acceptable Shiraz and slept like logs, despite the wind.  The only other Land Rover we saw all day had broken down.  The owner had bought it a couple of days earlier and was towing a large boat from Perth to Sydney, and having flown over to collect his purchases, had no spares and few tools with him.  He was in a bit of a pickle.  A wheel on the trailer was wrecked and so was the spare.  On top of that, something was squealing with his vehicle.  A mechanic told him that it was the viscous fan, and had that been true, we could have replaced it because we had a spare.  However, the problem was a small bearing on the fan belt tensioner, a part that we did not have.  He was hoping to find a truck with space to take everything to Sydney, or at least to a town with a repair shop, and had been waiting three days.  We couldn’t do very much for him but did spend an pleasant few hours explaining to a first-timer some of the joys of Land Rover ownership.

Day two and we’ve completed 850 kilometres, ending up at the Nullarbor Roadhouse.  The sun has gone, stars are gathering for their nightly display and the temperature is plummeting.  So it’s out with the hot water bottle and an early night.  Tomorrow we’ve some 350 kilometres to do before we reach the quarantine station at Ceduna where the vehicle will be checked for fresh fruit and vegetables.  We could be on tinned rations for a couple of days. 

A Little Bit North and a Little Bit East

Pemberton, another of those small Australian towns that grew rapidly due to a rush to extract the natural assets and then equally rapidly declined. At one time Pemberton was quite a large railway hub used for transporting timber to the coast. Not much is left, a couple of locomotives and some rolling stock rusting gently into oblivion, some serviceable track and signs where the track has been reclaimed by the forest. One stretch remains usable and a tram car runs twice daily for ten kilometres through picturesque forest, crossing a few rivers, skirting some farms and crossing a road or two. 

Whilst on the tram we learned that most of the timber exported went to England where it was used for building railways. Forest was cleared both sides of the railway track to prevent fires and therefore much of the re-growth we saw was no older than about seventy years. As a lesson in nature’s ability to recover from man’s excesses, it was impressive. We even had a kangaroo to show us the way.

We thought the Northcliffe Understory Art Trail a clever idea - artworks representing aspects of nature set amongst the trees. Maybe we’re art philistines, but we came away with the feeling that most of the ‘art’ was rather contrived. However, we did find a series of five installations by Kati Thamo fascinating and rather charming. Each depicted a children’s story and was set out in such a way as to make it look as though someone could be reading the story to children sitting close by. Maybe that happens!

Travelling onwards we passed through Denmark, notable only for its overpriced fuel, to Albany. The ANZAC memorial is impressive, almost overwhelming in its scale and is positioned to overlook King George’s Sound where the first fleet set sail for war in 1916. It’s also the place where the first dawn service took place, a ceremony that now takes place annually, not only in Australia but in other countries too.

Having some years ago visited the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which depicted the catching and processing of whales in the nineteenth century. We were interested to see that one of the last whaling stations, Albany, finally closed as late as 1978. We found it fascinating that closure was forced not really because of activities by pressure groups but because demand for whale products declined, mainly because developments in plastics and fuel oil rendered them obsolete, and the cost of catching the beasts soared. Now before the greenies start demanding retribution for writing this, let me add that every part of the whale was used. In the early part of the twentieth century, there were simply no viable alternatives for the fine oils and other products obtained. Certainly it was a horrible process and it’s satisfying that whale hunting is now largely in the past. But a whole new set of much more difficult issues are now with us. Whale products were natural and degraded naturally. Plastics don’t. Perhaps there’s some lessons to be learned here.

Heading sort of north east, we passed through the Stirling Range National Park where Kim further indulged her passion for flowers, especially orchids. I’ve lost count of how many varieties of wild flowers we’ve seen. Certainly it’s in the hundreds. Even so, it’s probably only a small part of what’s growing in WA. We’ve been amazed at the sheer variety and quantity of flowering trees, bushes, shrubs and plants. Some are tiny, little more than a single stem with a minute flower at the top. Others are large bushes smothered in colour. Here’s a couple of Kim’s favourites, the unusually named Donkey Orchid and the Spider Orchid.

Now Mike is getting a bit ‘flowered out’ and would like to see something different, so we headed north to a spot on the map called Hyden. There’s not much there apart from a really strange natural phenomena known as Wave Rock. Formed over millions of years by rain and wind, the shape does resemble a large wave, such as surfing enthusiasts might appreciate – as demonstrated by Kim.

And there I’ll leave it. We’re heading north towards the goldfields.