by Lorna Hendry
Oscar was so underwhelmed that we had to drag him away from the playground to make him stand in line with all the other children and admire the dolphins.
‘But we’ve seen heaps of dolphins and this is the first playground for ages. It’s got swings.’
Chapter Ten
We arrived in Exmouth in June, right at the end of the whale shark season. Whale sharks migrate up the west coast and pass through Ningaloo Reef between April and July every year, presumably to feed in the nutrient-rich waters associated with the coral spawning that happens in early March. Weirdly, very little is known about where they go after that. An entire ecotourism industry has sprung up around them, based mainly out of Coral Bay and Exmouth. Fast boats, spotter planes and crews of dreadlocked young people head out early every morning with boatloads of tourists in search of sharks. The Canadian man who was renting our house had told me that swimming with whale sharks on Ningaloo Reef was the best thing he had ever done in his life.
The only problem was that I wasn’t very good in the sea. I could swim laps in the safety of a 50-metre pool, but when I looked underwater in the ocean I panicked about what was lurking in the dark depths and in the murky water behind me. I would spin around in circles, desperately trying to keep tabs on everything around me, and end up out of breath and sick with anxiety. So far on this trip, I had only snorkelled if James was beside me. I had pretended to be comfortable about it because I didn’t want to scare the boys. They had never seen Jaws. There was no need for them to inherit my fear.
James wasn’t with me that day. We had both wanted to go but the thought of trying to entertain the kids on a small dive boat for a whole day was too horrible. We would have had to take turns at getting in the water and, with some of the boats only reporting a single sighting in a day, it could have been a very expensive and frustrating day out.
Only one boat at a time was allowed to approach a whale shark. When the call came in from the spotter planes that there was one in the area, our driver raced to get us to it first. Ten of us lined up on the platform in wetsuits and snorkel gear, ready to leap in when our boat stopped in front of the shark.
‘Go, go, go!’ shouted the guide. ‘It’s a big one. It’s coming towards us now. Make sure you can see where it is and get out of its way.’
I flopped into the water and stuck my head under to have a look. In my excitement, I had forgotten to put my mask on. I panicked and tried to scream but I had also forgotten to put my snorkel in my mouth. After coughing up some seawater and adjusting my gear, I put my face back under and saw a massive whale shark coming towards me. It was only a few metres away and I had to kick furiously to get out of its path. It was cruising quite slowly, completely oblivious to the people splashing beside it. I could see every single one of its markings. It looked like a living dot painting in turquoise and white ochre. Hundreds of little fish were escorting it on its journey through the ocean. Just once, its distinctive shape registered in a primitive part of my brain – oh my god, that’s a shark – but for the most part it was a peaceful and awesome experience.
‘Did you see the shark?’ one of the other swimmers asked me when we were all back on the boat. I wondered if he thought I was stupid. It had been the size of a bus. ‘No, I mean the shark shark. The bronze whaler that was circling us further down.’
At that moment I thought that my first swim with a whale shark would be my last, but then I remembered James was staying at the caravan park with the kids so that I could have this experience. I’d done my research. No-one had ever been taken by a shark in this part of the world. I steeled myself to jump back into the sea nine times that day and swam beside six more whale sharks. I didn’t stop being frightened, but I decided that it was better to be scared than miss out.
The last time I jumped, only five other people went in. The shark was moving fast and I couldn’t keep up with it or the rest of the swimmers. When I surfaced, the boat had drifted away and I was completely alone in the water. I raised my arm and waved, as we had been instructed, to signal that I wanted the boat to pick me up. I tried to stay calm as it approached, but my legs were scissoring frantically below me, just like that famous image from Jaws, and I started to panic. By the time I climbed on board, I was shaking and sweating and I felt sick. But I had no regrets. I went to sleep that night dreaming of shouts of ‘Go, go, go!’ and massive beasts that moved gracefully through the water.
At Ningaloo Station we camped behind a sand dune, 20 metres from the water. Although we saw a large group of vans in a fishing camp as we drove in, there were only two other camps on the long stretch of beach near us. The sea was perfectly still, protected from waves by the reef just offshore. After a very quick set-up, behind a sand dune to protect us from the sea breeze, we stripped off for a swim. James and the boys jumped in first and just as I was getting ready to follow them I saw three large dark shapes in the water heading towards them. For a horrible moment I panicked, frozen to the spot and unable to call out, but when a dark brown snout broke the surface of the water I realised with relief that they were turtles. James swam towards them to get a closer look but they were surprisingly fast and raced away as soon as he got close. Later, resting at the top of a sand dune, we watched a metre-long reef shark cruising slowly through the shallow water.
For the next week, time drifted past slowly and we got sandier, smellier and more serene. We spent a whole day drift-snorkelling over the reef that was just a few metres from the shore. The current pulled us along over the top of coral formations that were home to thousands of brightly coloured fish. Dylan was still a little nervous in deep water so I stayed close to him, and realised that calming his fears about sharks and other sea creatures helped reduce my own Jaws-related anxiety. Oscar didn’t seem to know what fear was and James sometimes had to swim out to bring him back closer to the beach. Often we would look up and realise we had drifted so far along the coastline that it was a very long walk back to the spot where we had dumped our towels and drinks.
One afternoon James and the boys made bows and arrows out of reeds, fishing line and sticks. Oscar – barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of torn shorts, a quiver of arrows attached to a belt and a bow slung over his shoulder – announced he was off to hunt the wild goats we had seen grazing on the dunes earlier that day.
‘Sure’, said James, not even looking up. ‘Bring back dinner.’
An hour later, it occurred to us that this might have been a bit rash. We stood on the top of the closest dune and scanned the horizon. Eventually we saw him about a kilometre away, stalking a couple of uninterested goats. He waved at us and kept going.
‘He’ll come back when he’s hungry’, said James.
Food was becoming a problem. As the fridge emptied it had to work harder to stay cool. We were completely out of fresh fruit and vegetables and had gone through most of the meat. We were eating fish that James was catching, and working our way through our canned and dried food stores.
Fresh water was also an issue. We had arrived at Ningaloo with 80 litres in the tank underneath the trailer and another 10 litres in bottles and casks. Even though we were using seawater to wash dishes and relying on daily swims to keep ourselves clean, we couldn’t get by on less than 20 litres a day. Curious about what the people in the fishing camp did for water, we drove round to ask.
We stopped at the camp of the first person who smiled and waved, and introduced ourselves. Tony was in his sixties, tanned and skinny like most of the fishermen we had seen in Western Australia, and wearing the standard uniform of old, baggy shorts and thongs. He laughed when we asked our question.
‘There’s heaps of fresh water around here. I’ve got my own bore. I dug it myself. You go and get some containers and I’ll take you up there.’
We drove back to our camp and collected our jerry cans and water bottles and then followed Tony’s car. He drove back along the main track for a few kilometres before turning off along a rough path behind the dunes. He stopped in a long fla
t valley, surrounded by sandhills on all sides, climbed down from his car and pushed aside a heavy rock to reveal a hole about 20 centimetres wide. A white plastic bucket with the bottom cut out of it stopped the walls from falling in and in the bottom, about half a metre down, was a pool of water.
‘Is it fresh?’ asked James.
‘Most beautiful water you’ll ever taste’, said Tony as he scooped some out with an old soup ladle.
James bent down and tasted it. ‘It’s sweet’, he said, surprised.
Tony grinned. ‘Yep. And there’s lots of it.’
He went to the back of his car and came back with a small shower pump, which he connected to the cigarette lighter socket of his dashboard and turned on. He put one end of the hose in the water and the other in one of our jerry cans. Water poured out in a slow, steady stream.
‘Takes a while’, he said, leaning on the bonnet of his car.
Half an hour later we had 60 litres of water and permission to come back if we needed more. Tony put the rock carefully back on top of his bore. Looking around, we noticed lots of unusually large rocks in this small sandy valley. They were all bores that had been dug with the most basic of implements. Tony had used his soup ladle.
A few days later the weather turned nasty. A storm came in late one afternoon and the night was full of wind and rain. Our supplies were almost exhausted and James was worried that if it got too wet the road out might be too boggy to get through. The next morning we packed up and made a run for it. The track was slippy in places, but soon we were back on the bitumen, heading for Karratha.
I’d been warned that sites for tourists were hard to find. Western Australia’s mining boom had attracted workers from all over the country. So much labour was needed that the wages on offer were amazingly high, but the towns weren’t equipped to house all the people who came to cash in. Many of the short-term workers had to stay in caravan parks.
I dragged out the soggy, sandy guidebooks from beneath my seat and, as soon as we had mobile coverage, began ringing around. There were no powered sites anywhere from Dampier to Roeburne, in Point Sampson or in Karratha. Eventually we managed to find an unpowered site outside the caretaker’s residence at the caravan park in the Karratha Industrial Estate.
We set up on a patch of grass, which we shared with four taciturn middle-aged mine workers who slept in their cars every night. They cooked their evening meal on a small brick barbecue then balanced their plates on their knees, watching game shows on a tiny television. The television was mounted on the shelf of an alcove, above a bar fridge where they stored their food. It cost them $400 a week each, they told us. They didn’t seem to mind too much. If they didn’t blow too much cash on beer, they predicted that they could earn six times more in a year than was possible in their hometowns. They were gone by five every morning. They left quietly, not bothering with breakfast, just waking up and driving off in their cars without even getting out.
We spent the next morning restocking the fridge, spending a shocking amount in a supermarket that had to be the most expensive in the country. The savings we had made by not spending any money for over a week were wiped out with one trolley-load of groceries. More money went on getting a tyre fixed, but in Karratha, where every tradesman was swamped with work, James couldn’t find anyone to do such a mundane job as fixing our compressor and he had to try to do it himself.
One of the places I wanted to see was Hearson Cove. Like Broome’s Roebuck Bay, the exposed mudflats on the night of a full moon created the illusion of a staircase of moonlight. We’d missed that by just a few days, but I had read that it was a good swimming beach so we packed a lunch and went for a drive.
Hearson Cove was very close to one of the Burrup Peninsula’s ancient rock engraving sites. For thousands of years, people recorded stories and legends by carving pictures on the dark-red boulders that formed gorges and caves all along the coast. The significance of these sites was just being recognised. The day before we arrived, the rock art had been placed on the World Heritage list. We stopped there for a while to wander through the rocks, and soon lost count of the engravings we had found. Every rock face told a story.
When we got to the beach it was obvious there had been a party, probably on the night of the full moon. Empty beer bottles and twisted cans lay half-buried in the sand and we could see the remains of bonfires. Cigarette butts were strewn down the beach and plastic chip packets were caught on twigs in the scrub. Beside one fire pit I saw a pile of discarded condoms. A few dirty nappies lay nearby, their contents pecked at by scavenging seagulls. Everything was covered in sand and there were no bins anywhere. I made a half-hearted attempt to pick up the cans but they were heavy with wet sand and I had nowhere to put them.
I turned my back on the beach and found myself gazing at the mess of pipelines, chimneys and towers of the liquid natural gas refinery, just a few kilometres away. The view placed the filth behind me in perspective. What would be the point in looking after one small beach when, everywhere you looked, people seemed to be doing their best to destroy everything that had been held sacred.
The Pilbara hides its beauty well. It would be easy to drive the main highway and see nothing but scrub and red earth for hours and wonder if there was any water or life to be found. But my guidebook promised that Millstream Chichester National Park, just 150 kilometres from Karratha, had a large shady campground by a river. For ages it was hard to believe we were going in the right direction. The road was dusty and all we could see around and in front of us was scrappy scrub and bare hills. Yet quite suddenly, after driving through a gap in the hills, we found the campground. As promised, it was on the bank of a wide brown river, shaded by huge river gums. At dusk, the sky filled with the frantic white fluttering of thousands of corellas returning to roost. Their raucous squawking was deafening and we had to communicate with hand signals for nearly an hour as they called to each other, shrieking and fighting and bickering. A steady stream of ragged, dusty, stained feathers fluttered down from the trees, interspersed regularly with drops of guano that fell as steadily as rain. Most of the poo ended up in the river, forming a greasy film and accounting for the sweet smell of decay that rose from the water.
At least it was a designated ‘No Generators’ site. We had spent too many nights trying to sleep through the rumbling of generators. As well as the noise, which shattered the peace as effectively as a lawnmower cranking up on a lazy Sunday afternoon, the diesel fumes were often overpowering. Generators were also the sign of a campground where people disappeared into their vans to cook dinner inside and watch television. There was a terrible loneliness in being the only ones still outside in the dark, listening to the muffled sounds of game shows and current affairs programs leaking out from the curtained windows around us. We preferred the places where everyone stood around a communal fire, jostling for position to drop a rusty old metal plate on the coals to cook sausages and swapping stories about their travels.
On our way out of Millstream, on our way to Karijini National Park, we passed the access road to Wittenoom. A large blue sign with a skull and crossbones on it warned about exposure to the blue asbestos that had been mined there fifty years ago: ‘Inhaled asbestos dust may cause cancer.’ James was curious and made a case for going to have a look at the abandoned town. We took a vote on it. He lost three to one.
At Karijini, Western Australia’s second largest national park, we were excited to find that we would be amongst the first people to camp at the new eco-resort. It was owned by the local Indigenous people and managed by a private ecotourism company and the main building was so new that it was still being painted. I loved the idea that, deep in the heart of mining country, a space had been created by the people who had lived in this land for thousands of years to share it with visitors.
The suburb where we lived in Melbourne was once home to the largest Indigenous community in Victoria. Many of the families had been displaced from their homes when they were razed to build highrise housing
commission estates, but there were still health and legal services, childcare and community centres. Despite all this, I did not personally know one Indigenous person. The kids’ primary school was full of children from all over the world – more than twenty nationalities were represented in a school with fewer than 150 pupils – but, to my knowledge, there were no Indigenous students. I understood how a long history of division could result in a society where one group of people never interacted with another, but for some reason I thought that outside the cities and towns things would be different. So far that hadn’t been the case. We seemed to be carrying an impenetrable bubble of Anglo-Australia with us as we travelled.
At the reception area, a very white woman sized us up, her nose wrinkling as she inspected our scruffy, dusty clothes. When we asked if we could book a campsite for two nights, she sniffed. ‘You’ll be lucky. We’re fully booked out from Monday.’
‘I think it’s only Thursday’, I said, although I wasn’t absolutely sure.
She reluctantly admitted she did have a spare site and indeed, when we drove into the campground, there were at least ten to choose from. We picked one beside a tree with a sturdy branch that was begging to be turned into a rope swing.
As I organised a meal of sausages and salad and James put up the swing, the sun dropped behind the red hills to the west, leaving behind a completely clear sky and the first twinkling of thousands of stars. The day had been so warm that on our way into Karijini we had swum at Hamersley Gorge, where the dark red rocks betrayed the presence of iron ore more obviously than anywhere else we had been in the Pilbara. We had lazed around on the warm rocks and eaten lunch in our bathers with our legs dangling in the cool green water, but when the sun set that night the temperature dropped twenty degrees in a matter of minutes. Within half an hour we went from shorts and t-shirts to a full load of all the warm clothing we owned. James dug out beanies, scarves and fleecy jumpers from the bags in the back of the car while I shivered beside the brand-new communal electric barbecue. We were cooking and eating our meal alone again, but this time it was because everyone else had sensibly eaten when it was still warm and were now safely hiding in their tents or vans. The park had a ‘no campfire’ rule, so it wasn’t possible to do any kind of socialising in this bitter cold.
