HAMELIN POOL and STEEP POINT

25^th May, 2012

On the road again heading north – still wondering what the wild animals find to eat let alone sheep and cattle.  Kangaroo roadkill is becoming commonplace and once in a while the remains of an emu.  Traffic is light – the majority being road trains and caravanners.  We turn off the highway and head west.  Thirty kilometres later we are turning into the driveway to Hamelin Station – a working sheep station that has unpowered campsites and one of the cleanest amenities blocks we have so far encountered.  We set up camp, unhitch Mitzi and drive to Hamelin Pool where the old 1884 Telegraph Station now houses a small museum.  A short walk from the Telegraph Station brings us to the Shell Quarry where early settlers cut blocks from the metres deep compressed shells to make walls for buildings.

Wok in the Shell Quarry

The quarry is still used today to replace blocks that have deteriorated in some of the heritage buildings in the area.  About 500 metres from the quarry are the Hamelin Pool Stromatolites.  These stromatolites are examples of the oldest and simplest form of life dating back 3.5 billion years and there is a 200 metre boardwalk that takes visitors out over them.

Hamelin Pool boardwalk over the stromatolites

Interpretive boards explain why these rocky looking lumps in the water are considered to be responsible for creating our current atmosphere and in so doing paved the way for more complex life.

Display boards over the stromatolites

The stromatolites here are different in shape to the ones we saw at Lake Thetis near Cervantes

The stromatolites at Hamelin Pool

so obviously they come in all shapes and sizes.  They all have one thing in common though – they like very salty water and love to blow bubbles filled with oxygen.  Oh!  Did we tell you about the flies?  No?  It’s a wonder we haven’t mentioned them more often as the bush flies have been driving us nuts.  Sometimes they don’t seem to be around at all and then whammo …. they come from everywhere.  So we have finally succumbed and bought ourselves the latest in trendy headwear which is so elegantly modelled by Wok.

Wok models the latest in trendy headwear

It may look ridiculous but we don’t care what we look like as long as it keeps those pesky little critters from crawling into our eyes, mouths, noses and ears.  The next morning we set off early in Mitzi.  Today will be the first time that we have taken her four wheel driving.  Twelve kilometres from Hamelin Station we turn off the bitumen onto

Useless Loop Road

- a good name for a road that goes nowhere.  The first 100 kms is a mixture of gravel and loose dirt and the last 50 kms is sand.  We stop once to drop the tyre pressure down

Wok deflates the tyres on Mitzi

and when we hit the sand stop again and deflate the tyres to 20psi.  This seems to be a good pressure and Mitzi has no trouble traversing the sandy track

The track

and climbing up and down sand dunes.

Up and down the sand dunes

We bounce, lurch, plough and slide along.  Sometimes we go straight – sometimes we don’t.

Ahh .... at last the ocean!

It takes us three hours to reach our destination - the last 50 kms on the sand track taking twice the amount of time as on the dirt.  

Our destination is in sight

And where are we?  We are at Steep Point – the westernmost point of the Australian mainland.

Well we made it ....

Owing to its isolation Steep Point is not a well known or well visited Australian geographical site.  There isn’t much out here.  It’s barren and wind-scarred.  No tourist café, souvenir shop or guy selling T shirts.  Just a small rock cairn and a faded wooden sign.  

The sign, the cairn and Wok

From here we can see the southern end of Dirk Hartog Island - West Australia’s largest island.  In 1616 (152 years before Captain Cook landed on Australia’s eastern shore) dutchman Dirk Hartog came ashore on the northern tip of the island and nailed a pewter plate to a post to record the event.  Eighty one years later his countryman William de Vlamingh visited the site and replaced the pewter plate with one of his own.  He returned the original to Holland and it now resides in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.  Vlamingh’s plate was removed over a century later by Louis de Freycinet in 1818 and taken to Paris but in 1947 France returned the plate to Australia and it is now on display in the WA Maritime Museum.  Another famous person to land on the island was British navigator William Dampier.  In 1699 he collected specimens of Australian plants – the collection is still preserved at Oxford University.  This slim windswept island has certainly seen its fair share of explorers over the years and is now a designated national park.  The only people we have seen along the way have been a handful of fishermen and one other vehicle doing the one day tourist trip like us.  Steep Point is owned by Carrarang Station but the Department of Environment and Conservation manage the access to this part of their land and a fee is payable if you want to camp or day trip.  The fishing here is reported as being one of the world’s most successful land based game fishing locations – at least that is what the brochure says and we did see fishermen out there.  The only other sign of life we saw was a small gecko

If I stay really, really still they won't see me ....

that appeared to have taken up residence in the rock cairn.  Of course on this sort of a trek one has to be self sufficient and take food and water as well as have enough fuel to do the return trip.  As we still have over half a tank of fuel left we should make it back OK and we have a nice picnic lunch (with the gecko) at the westernmost point before hopping into Mitzi and hitting the sand again.  What we hadn’t thought about was tidal changes along the beach we’d had to drive along

Thank goodness the tide is going out ...

but we were happy to see that high tide had been and gone and we had no worries in getting back to the main track.  We did manage to scare a large kangaroo that was quite happily sitting in the middle of the track until we came along.

Better get a move on there Mr Kangaroo ...

He hopped along in front of us for quite some distance before deciding that a quick exit into the bush was in his best interests.  By the time we got back to camp it was late afternoon and we appreciated those nice clean showers.  Well we can now cross that one off our bucket list.  Driving Mitzi to the westernmost point of the Australian mainland was quite an experience.  You could probably reach Steep Point by boat much more easily than we did by land, but that’s not the point, is it?