It's the 20th of May and we are rollin' again

Rolin' rollin' rollin' Rolin' rollin' rollin' Rolin' rollin' rollin' Rolin' rollin' rollin' Keep rollin' rollin' rollin' Though the roads are hilly and rollin’ Keep the doggy rollin'

Rawhide Don't try to understand them Just watch and wonder at em

Soon they will circumnavigate this country wide!

Ravensthorpe is now behind us! And Bingley and I move now to being tourists again not working travellers! What a hard job it was but what a joy to do it and my god I learned a lot. It is odd in this life that we often take a long time to discover that we don’t know what we don’t know – but when we do the joy of discovery is endless. I was given a lovely send off and they were so kind and took me out for a meal but in quick order we set off for Albany. I swear we were given a guard of honour heading off – first there were kookaburras lining the power lines watch us benignly as we made off up the main street and then once past the town limit there was a guard of honour of corellas and galahs. I had even had a crow haw haw hawing at me while I hooked up the caravan! It was such a treat.

In Ravensthorpe we were in the middle of a wheat belt as the mouse problem that I had to deal with at the caravan park can attest to. The wheat fields continued to Albany. Wheat fields opened out after large stretches of bush as we made our way across this rugged Southern Coast of ours. It was only as I got closer to Albany that I began to occasionally see cattle and sheep on the farms, which I have to confess was pleasing as the shawn dryness of the harvested fields was becoming a tad monotonous! I had never been to Albany before and was looking forward to exploring areas unfamiliar.

To my mind the best way to explore is on foot and off we set the next morning. Tourists that had come through the park in Ravensthorpe had warned me that Albany is a cold and miserable place, but it had put on a good display for us on our first day there. It is a town about the size of Bendigo and had everything there which was a relief after some of the petty privations that I had endured in Ravensthorpe (poor me!). I met up with a First Nation chap who took me on a majestic exploration of the coast. What a treat it was! There are 2 natural harbours in Albany – the Princess Royal and Whalers Cove. We stopped on a peninsula and walked into this granite area and the evidence of ancient activity was everywhere. Research has shown that this granite area was a ‘farming region’ where they farmed reptiles for eating by setting up stone keeps for the reptiles to shelter under or to sun themselves on where they could easily catch them. They had carved out ‘gnamas’ which are small holes in the granite on the downward slope to catch fresh water. These were absolutely fascinating as you could also see where they had intricately chipped around the edges of these gnamas so they could lay a lid of stone snuggly over it so the water would not foul!

The vegetation surrounding the area had a myriad of uses but the 2 that stick in my mind was the so-called Peppermint Tree. Which was a eucalypt and when you crushed the leaves you do indeed get a Peppermint smell. He swore that it was a great cure for sinus congestion, and I do declare that I did detect a slight clearing of the nasal passages! The other was a tuber from a native orchard. Larry, the First Nation fellow told me that how they study the land is to look at the animal population and how they forage for food and tradition has it that it was a little bandicoot that taught the populus to do this trick. He gently raised this luscious moss that he told me takes 100 years to grow one centimetre and is a wonderful natural mulch. He then gentle dug down with his fingertips to expose this delicate tuber. He broke off about 4 cm of it and then covered it back up again telling me that it would grow out 2 more tubers from the broken end. Then he gave it to me to eat! It was gorgeous – crunchy and would not be out of place in a contemporary salad. He told me that they can cook it to as a potato substitute – mind you they would need a hell of a lot of the tubers for that for they are very slender, but as I said delicious!

We then trekked over to Whalers Cove. I was amazed to hear that whaling had only ended in 1978. Then I had to stop and think – yes, I can clearly remember the controversy about whaling and the fight to ban it and suddenly I felt quite old – for I am sure that like me many of my contemporaries do not think of 1978 as being all that long ago! It was here that I saw a disintegrating old shelter that the whale spotters would squat in. (You could see that they had purloined the ancient reptile traps for the slabs of stone in the shelter which were stuck together with lime). This would have been a miserable job, sitting up there right in the direct line of the winds whipping off the Southern Ocean all by yourself with only a little fire for company staring at the water in front of you looking for signs of whales. This was perched above a natural stone platform at ocean level that would once have seen the whaling boats sitting on it. When the whale was spotted a rifle was shot for notification purposes! And then the dozing whalers would scramble to the boats and away they would go in pursuit of their quarry. Looking out the cove in the direction of the ocean I know if I had been one of them, I would have done it with extraordinary trepidation for it looks terribly forbidding and I hate to think off the lost souls that have succumbed to that environment.

When the whale had been captured, they bought it back and rendered the oil from the whale in big copper pots that were set up on the shore over firers and you can see the evidence in the rocks of the chains where the whales were dragged up! The First Nation fellow told me that it was one industry where white and black were treated equally for their knowledge of the land and the surrounding waters was so useful to the whalers. There was also an added perk apparently the whales were only ever wanted for their oil in Australia so the First Nations people could take the meat to feed their families and we found lots of stone cutting tools just lying there on the shore that they would have used! Right at the end of this beach there was a strip of basalt rock that you could see had been clearly quarried over an enormous amount of time for all the tools that they needed to navigate their environment.

Speaking of lost souls as I looked out at the gateway to the Southern Ocean, I thought of the lost souls of MH17 somewhere out there. And Albany now has that as part of its recent history for it is into Whalers Cove that the ships that were out searching for the aircraft and the souls that were lost with it came into to refuel.

Yesterday we said goodbye to Albany and pointed in the direction of Margaret River. Google maps had told me it was only 287 Ks and I was thinking that it would be a bit of a doddle but no! This road took you over the Sterling ranges and towing a caravan it was a slow exercise. We were surrounded by majestic bushland that every so often would open out into verdant valleys that would have cattle or sheep grazing upon them. As we reached the top of the incline, I am sure that the Southern Ocean had got word that we were on our way and sunshine disappeared to black clouds and rain belted down as if the clouds had been thrown up there by the ocean itself – it would clear and then as we made our way slowly up as we reached the zenith again it would break out. The undulations were relentless and steep which slowed us down and then there were the bloody road works. There was a stretch were every 5ks or so we would encounter a set of traffic lights. We would have to stop and there was a sullen looking individual determinably looking at the ground (one with startling pink hair glinting in the sun!) lest they have to engage with a driver, and we would wait and wait with nothing seemingly coming from the other direction until a vehicle showed up that would accompany us through the road works! AHH I thought it would drive me mad as the daylight was dwindling. But eventually I could feel us descending the other side and my ears started popping but also the sky opened out into a pale blue with majestic fluffy clouds picking up the gentle pinks of the setting sun and I knew we were not far then from Margaret River. It was after dark when we got here and I was not sorry to stop – and I am excited for the exploring that lies ahead