Category: Western Australia

Eighty Mile Beach. A vision splendid. Which is odd because there was nothing to see. To the west is the Indian Ocean and on the evening of the 20th August it was as still as a fish tank, with scarcely a whisper of a breeze to ruffle it’s surface. To the east, a sand dune no more than three to four metres tall, topped with low lying scrub stretches away and out of sight in both directions. In between is a beach which at low tide must be close to a kilometre across and at its steepest an incline of not more than one percent. In the sky there truly was not a cloud. So as you can see there was nothing to see and yet we could not look away as the sun slowly made its way down toward the horizon creating a vast palette of changing colours on the canvas of beach, sea and sky. Continue reading “Day 46-47 Eighty Mile Beach. A vision splendid” →

It was not without a tinge of sadness that we pulled out of Broome. Our seven nights there just seemed to drift by so quickly and we were settling into something of a routine. Perhaps it was because we had enjoyed Broome so much that we only managed to make it 123 km south before pulling up stumps on that driving caper. We hung a right off the Great Northern Highway for a quick jaunt on the dirt road into Barn Hill Station. Continue reading “Day 43-45 Barn Hill… Photographic Bewilderment” →

Had you been sailing the West Australian coast a hundred or so years back and prior to any settlements, it’s not really clear why you would have picked Roebuck Bay to establish a town. Unlike Sydney or other major coastal cities there is no great harbour, just a peninsula where the vast outback meets the vast Indian Ocean. Scarcely a sand dune separates the two. Broome obviously came to be because of the money in pearl shell. Broome continues to be because of the money in tourists. The tourists come because the colours are exquisite, the Indian Ocean is warm, the history is rich and the pearls are pearly white. Continue reading “Day 38-41 Colours of Broome” →