HALLS CREEK to FITZROY CROSSING

Saturday, 15/9/09 - Thursday, 24/9/09

Left Kununurra at 8am for the approx 350 km drive to Halls Creek. On the way we stopped off at Turkey Creek - what a top spot!!

Everyone we've spoken to has told us to keep driving and not to stay at Halls Creek, but we don't like driving longer distances. Halls Creek has a bad reputation due to alcohol abuse but we found it a nice, neat and tidy town and didn't have any problems. The caravan park was basic but it had a nice pool (gee you need a pool out here!!) and a lovely old boxer dog called "Duchess" lived there.



Since the end of the gold rush, Halls Creek has existed as a service centre for the surrounding cattle stations and for the traffic passing through. That's still the case today.

The historical Halls Creek town site was abandoned due to lack of water and because of the re-routing of the main road (today's highway). The move to the new site, only 15km away, started in 1948 and was completed in 1954. You might recall some years back where 2 jackeroos left a property because of a dispute with the station manager, and their car broke down and they attempted to walk to town but died on the way; they were found out in the bush. Well, that was 50kms south of Halls Creek. It's very, very barren out here.



Today the ruins of the original town site are a tourist attraction (although there's not much to see). You used to be able to look around amongst the ruins, but no more. All the ruins are now covered and fenced off. That was necessary to preserve what's left, but it significantly reduced the appeal of the site.

The new town is also looking a bit tired. The signs proclaiming it to be "The Oasis of the Kimberley" don't really induce enthusiasm. However, there is a lovely green park for the kids to play and a tiny supermarket with a good butcher. The visitors centre is really nice and the staff are friendly.

We ventured into the Kimberley Hotel which was across the road from the caravan park and it was like walking into an english manor house, however, the sports bar out the back brought us back to earth!!

The population of Halls Creek fluctuates a lot. Apparently it is around 1300 but I imagine that number would include all the surrounding cattle stations and Aboriginal communities. The town itself is a lot smaller and the population is mostly Aboriginal.



Outside of the town is an interesting rock formation which is a wall of rock that they call China Wall.



Left Halls Creek after an early night and drove 320kms to Fitzroy Crossing. Fuel 174.9.


Arrived mid-afternoon and surprised to find nothing but a Resort - the Fitzroy River Lodge to be exact - with a caravan park. There's no town here - just a visitors' centre and a service station with a few aboriginal houses across the road. Fuel 150.5.
The resort is really nice with a pool, a tavern and restaurant, a great deal of land that I really don't know what they do with. It's hot, hot, hot so the first thing is a dip in the pool. Freezing! While in the pool we met a couple who were at Halls Creek - Mary and Michael, a Maltese couple now living in Melbourne, and also travelling around Australia in their A-Van.

Fitzroy Crossing, on the Fitzroy River, is in the middle of some of the best pastoral country in Australia.


The next morning, we decided to do a bit of an explore around the place. The map of Fitzroy Crossing doesn't give us much of a clue what to see, except that there is an Old Fitzroy Crossing, and the Old Town began where there was a suitable place to cross the river by a "ford" or crossing, just out of reach of the flood waters. The original causeway crossing the river can still be seen, so off we went.
The former post office still stands and has been turned into a backpackers hostel.
It's pretty secluded out there and until 1984 there were only 2 telephone lines! There was meant to be the original police station and footbridge crossing the river but we couldn't find it. We did, however, find the Old Fitzroy Crossing Inn and decided to move on in rather a hurry!

On the way to the Crossing, we noticed an old supermarket on the left but it's been burnt down. Someone with a sense of humour has painted COLES in red writing on the outside wall but the place is surrounded by a cyclone fence. The fire occurred in July and the supermarket has been moved to the inside netball court - too bad for the kids.


That night the police were called to the restaurant and bar in the resort because some aboriginal boys were playing up (too much beer but I don't get it - who serves these people!!)

The next morning we headed to the pool for a swim and met up with Mary and Michael and they told us that they were too frightened to drive too far from the resort, so we took them out to the crossing for a look and, as there were now 4 of us, decided to be brave and visit the Old Crossing Inn. In we went and we were the only white people there, except for the backpackers serving behind the bar.


We had a quick drink and Mary was a real hit - being from Malta, she has dark skin and an aboriginal man came over to shake her hand and asked her where she was from. A few photos and off we went.

Ken and I had dinner in the restaurant at the Resort - $28 for fish and chips - then an early night before our trip tomorrow to Geiki Gorge.

Geiki Gorge was absolutely beautiful. Here are the photos:







On the road again and Derby here we come!!
Love to all.

KUNUNURRA .... continued!

As I was saying before my Blog took off without me sending it!! .......

Friday, 4 September - Friday, 14 September

They call Kununurra the Gateway to the East and most use it as a base to explore the Kimberleys. It is 42 degrees - fuel 165.9 - bottled wine only and 2 maximum. You can buy a case of light beer before 2pm and after 2pm, heavy. Incidentally, please don't think that we're drinking our way around Australia!! I just like to ask when we hit these towns.

Just an hour north is the town of Wyndham which is a Port that is used for the live export of cattle. It is also a town with the reputation of having the largest salt water crocodiles in Australia. We went to a crocodile farm there which was one of the best I've ever seen.






The town itself wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the Port - there's just a couple of old houses, a pub (of course!), and a service station. The supermarket has closed down and the closest one is in Kununurra. The ruins of the house is where the magistrate used to live in Wyndham's "hay-day", and the tree is a Kapok tree. They are everywhere up here and for those "over-50" friends of mine will recall kapok pillows in our youth! I even had one that I used to call "pilpy" and dragged it with me wherever I went - until I turned 5 yrs old! Remember Mum??




On the road home, we drove up to a lookout which looks over the Port and you can see where 5 rivers come together and flow out into the sea. We also stopped at an Afghan Cemetery - note the large plot .... they were buried with their camel!!





In earlier years (and not too long ago, I might add) aboriginal men were used on cattle stations and paid in tobacco or food, and they were worked very hard for very little. A lot of them would run away and the local constabulary would use aboriginal trackers to find them and they were kept inside large boab trees like the one in the photo here until a few were rounded up then they were shackled and marched into the larger towns to face imprisonment. One of these trees was about 20 kms from Wyndham along the King River Road, so we went out to take a look. The road was extremely rough and the King River had very little water in it. The dirt road was as red as could be and mostly corrugated or broken up with large holes.
A good day .... back around 4 for a swim. It's so very hot.


There is a crossing across the Ord River called Ivanhoe Crossing and we took a turn at driving over the old road to Wyndham as a bit of an adventure. There are serious crocodiles in this area and the aboriginal kids were swimming and grabbing hold of the tow bars of the cars and getting towed across.
On the other side, the old road was gravel with deep ditches that are flood ways during the wet. It's very, very dry here and the country is covered in yellow grasses. When we returned to the town, we came across Celebrity Park which is full of trees planted by various celebrities, like John Farnham, Princess Diana, Princess Ann, Peter Brock, Fred Hollows, etc.

While I was walking around, I noticed that Ken was under the car checking something. I went back and the dust cover under the fan belt was hanging down on one side. We must have been dragging it since we left the old road at Ivanhoe Crossing! Ken not impressed (because it was me that made him do it) so back to the caravan park where he could do some makeshift repairs until we could get to the garage the next day (Monday). We have also detected a "clunk" in the steering when we turn to the left. What else may I ask!!

I'm starting to look a bit "feral", so while Ken took the car to have it fixed, I found a hairdressers, and $90 later, colour back to normal and a nice cut. The lady who cut my hair told me that her flat mate is a plumber and works for a contractor who looks after the aboriginal housing. She said that the locals just throw their rubbish on the ground (and we saw it all) and call it "white trash". During the wet season, they cannot cook their wallabies, etc. in the ground, so they put the dead animal into the oven .... skin and all. Of course, this ruins the oven to, so it becomes "white trash" and is pulled out and thrown into the yard. The money that is spent on these people is absolutely criminal. In Kununurra, they spend the day sitting around the town .... some go to the pub (they have their own bar that opens at 11am then closes at 12 noon) then when their bar closes, they sleep it off outside on the ground. We were told that domestic violence in Kununurra is a real problem. Keep serving the alcohol and they will never resolve it.

The Kununurra Diamond shop is the place to be!! I reckon I went there everyday bar 2. The ladies there knew me by the time we left the town. They sell the pink Argyle diamond as well as the champagne and whites. The pinks that you can actually see without a microscope start at around $40,000 each. The ones that are smaller than a pin-head are around $800. I think I'll wait for Broome and buy a pearl!!!

Dust cover fixed under the car and the "clunk" has disappeared.

Pay-day out in these towns always mean lack of sleep for most of us. The dogs bark all night and the music blares. Then the yelling starts and the sirens wail. The aboriginal community is about 4 kms away but still the sound travels. If the noise disturbs sleep, the stars are magnificent and we often sit outside and just look above us - magic!



We wanted to get down to the Pentacost River and to a homestead called Home Valley, so we left early in the morning and headed down the Gibb River Road which is famous for its access to beautiful gorges up here. This area, in particular the El Questro Homestead, is where they filmed a lot of the movie "Australia".

We only drove 22 kms because the engine was very nearly shaken out of the car, so we decided to stop at Emma Gorge Resort for lunch.







As it was Ken's birthday, it was a bit of luxury in the bush, and we enjoyed immensely a nice bottle of icy cold sav blanc and a lovely meal which I would class 5-star. (Our mail is going to my sister's place in Goulburn, NSW, and she forwards it on to us at the next stop. So far it is working fine, and Ken received his birthday presents/cards by the due date.)

Emma Gorge Resort was really nice, but we had to tackle the return trip on that horror-road.


The Kimberleys are really beautiful with massive red cliffs alongside the roads. We travelled out to Lake Argyle which is over 1000 square kms and is classified as an inland sea.

We spent a day visiting the dam and the lake but while there, and while taking photos of the dam wall, I noticed water spurting horizontally out of the front grill of the car. We couldn't believe it - another problem with the car! Ken checked the water reservoir under the bonnet and it was empty, and we had 70 kms to drive to get back to Kununurra. One of the ladies in the visitors' centre kindly gave us a large water carrier so that we could take water with us.



On the way back to Kununurra, we stopped off at the Durack Homestead. This house was removed from the Durack land which was flooded for the Ord River Dam and rebuilt brick by brick at its present location. The Durack boys came to Australia as young men from Ireland in 1836 with their parents and made their home on a property near Goulburn, NSW. After marrying, they bought various properties around Australia, one of them settling out here on the Ord River with his new wife, Mary. They had 4 children, one of whom was Kimberly Durack, and he developed pastoral leases throughout the Kimberly region. In 1864 they drove 2000 cattle from Queensland across to the top end of Australia to the Ord River!



We drove back to Kununurra, stopping every now and again to check the water, and next morning, we had it all checked out by a mechanic and found that we'd cracked the right side of the radiator. Of course, one can't just fix one side of a radiator, so a new radiator had to be flown in from Perth. This means another few days in Kununurra. Oh well, at least we're in a nice park with a nice pool. Wednesday arrived and a new radiator, a celebratory drink at the Kununurra Country Club, an early night, and we're on the road again!!

There are hundreds of people travelling around Australia like we are, and it's quite common to run into the same people time after time. While we were at Corrobee Park, we met a great couple, Robyn and Alf, and here they are at Kununurra in the same caravan park as us. In addition, there are travellers who "work" from their caravans - hairdressers, knife sharpeners, auto electricians, signwriters, sewing, etc. Ken has had his hair cut by the same hairdresser 3 times now - in towns that are 300-400 kms apart! A hairdresser in a caravan park charges from $15-$20 for a man's cut and $20-$25 for a ladies' cut. Colour is around $50. I'm not game enough!

Oh .... almost forgot. Look what we found in our bathroom at Kununurra!!


Love to all.