September 1-4 Halls Creek to Pardoo
After two days walking and driving in Purnululu National Park we packed up and headed further south to Halls Creek. That was really just a stop over to get the car and caravan serviced (sadly the latter didn’t happen). Then we turned west on the Great Northern Hwy through Fitzroy Crossing and stopped the night at Willare Roadhouse.
Travelling west from Halls Creek, a somewhat tedious trip of over 500 km, was made more interesting by seeing some special trees and banks of purple Mulla Mulla. I started seeing strange bottle-brush shaped trees, weird and ungainly. It triggered a memory from when we travelled the Gibb River road 4 years ago (that extreme-ish 4WD track runs roughly parallel with the Great Northern Hwy we were travelling on but 1-200km further north). I remember seeing these trees then and discovered they are the Corkybark Wattle (Acacia suberosa). It is restricted to a small area of the western Kimberley and reminds me a little of the Waddy Wood of central Australia in its spiky weirdness. We also saw lots of Boab trees, some humongous. Its origins are controversial so I’m not going to go there suffice it to say it is closely related to the one species in Africa but probably not to one of the 6 or 7 species endemic to Madagascar. It appears in the ancient Bradshaw rock art in the western Kimberley (these are very similar to African rock art) but the art is rejected by local Aborigines as ‘rubbish paintings’. Who knows? It’s intriguing. There’s a story with slight variations between Arabia, Madagascar, Africa and among northern Aborigines telling how the devil plucked the tree from the ground and replanted it upside down, leaving the roots in the air. You can understand how that story evolved.
Then it was on to Roebuck Plains Roadhouse for a couple of nights; this is near the intersection of the Great Northern Hwy and the Broome Road. We didn’t want to go into Broome but Lindsay wanted to visit the Ramsar-listed Broome Bird Observatory which is on the shores of Roebuck Bay. It was a hot hot day but he saw enough to make him happy-ish. We were now really in the territory of the massive long trucks, the road trains that ply this hwy 24-7. WA is a massive state and it has only 2 roads that link north , centre and south – the Great Northern (the longest hwy in Australia) and the coast road which branches off the Great Northern around Port Hedland.
We keep running into this group of tractors as we travel, they are raising money for RFDS. Firstly at Tobermory, then at Gemtree, Kununurra, along this stretch of road and yesterday (it is now 14 September and we’re at Onslow). And they are heading for Exmouth as are we tomorrow. But where were we …. heading south along the Great Northern. We pulled up stumps at Pardoo Roadhouse, another of the essential watering holes that service these mighty hwys.
The Great Northern turns south near Port Hedland and the coast road continues as you might guess along the coast. We branched off at Port Hedland too - for a bit of shopping at East Headland. We were aiming for the Burrup (Dampier) Peninsula skirting around the Great Sandy Desert which is quite a magical place but not on our list for this trip – so far! and plunged into one of my favourite places in Australia – the Pilbara. Incidentally the Pilbara is home to the largest shire in the world I believe yet has a population smaller than Tasmania.
