by Lorna Hendry
Oscar looked up at him. ‘But isn’t that what this trip is all about?’
He was absolutely right, so we drove for five hours to see a rock. It turned out to be a very nice rock and it really did look like a wave. We weren’t the only ones to drive a very long way to see it. Four young Japanese women had driven from Perth in a tiny hire car as well. They had thought they would be able to get there and back in a day. Their maps were deceptive: it was a 680-kilometre round trip. They spend the night huddled in their car, running the engine and the heater as the temperature dropped overnight.
Back on the coast, we discovered the small town of Denmark. It was a beautiful town, full of cafes, bookshops and antique dealers and surrounded by forests, wineries, cheese factories, honey producers and happy fat cows in green fields. I loved it. It was like a mixture of two of my favourite places: Fitzroy and Daylesford. We stocked up on second-hand books and refilled the fridge and kitchen box. But there was a reason for Denmark’s lushness: it never stopped raining. At the first caravan park we went to, the entire camping ground was underwater. At the next, we were kept awake by a droning noise that James was so convinced was the sound of motorbikes on a racetrack that he spent an hour driving around trying to find it. Back at the tent, we tracked the source to a colony of tiny green frogs living in a stormwater drain just metres from our camp. We only lasted one night before we booked into a bed and breakfast near Pemberton, giving ourselves three precious days out of the tent.
When the rain finally stopped, we visited the giant karri trees in the forest around Pemberton. Seventy years ago, the tallest trees had pegs hammered into their trunks so they could be climbed and used as fire lookouts. Tourists can climb them now, so James went up first, then came back down for Oscar. I tried too, but I was so scared I had to come back down before I even got halfway up. Loose wire fencing was looped around the tree, forming a kind of protective cage, but there was nothing to stop anyone falling down. On the ground, Dylan – who knew his own limits better than I did – watched with me as James and Oscar made it to the top and stood on a platform that was over 60 metres above the ground and swaying in the breeze. I was stunned by their bravery and had to remind myself that Oscar was only eight.
Afterwards we sat and ate our muesli bars and watched other people stand at the bottom and lose their nerve. A woman wearing knee-length stiletto boots and tight jeans, whom we had heard speaking in Spanish to her friends, tentatively climbed up the first few pegs before stopping and looking down nervously. James couldn’t resist: ‘No es posible para usted así.’
Margaret River lived up to its reputation as one of the best wine regions in the country, but the best bit for us was that the wineries had playgrounds for the kids. We alternated wine-tasting stops with visits to the chocolate factory and dairies, filling all the space in the car with bottles of wine and bags of treats.
At the Leeuwin–Naturaliste National Park, which runs in a thin, north-to-south strip along the coast from Cape Naturaliste to Cape Leeuwin and takes in surf beaches, limestone caves and the Boranup Forest, a sign warned: ‘This is an alcohol-free campground’. We thought it might have been a joke, but when the ranger drove up to collect our fees he assured us it was true. We pretended we were only asking out of curiosity, then sat around the campfire later and sipped our expensive red wine illegally from tin mugs.
Several hours after we had gone to bed a bus of teenage girls arrived on a school camp. They spent ages setting up their tents to a soundtrack of high-pitched squealing and giggling. Later that night James made two terrible discoveries. The first was that overindulging in chocolate, beer, cheese, venison and wine can lead to a debilitating case of stomach cramps and diarrhoea. The second was that one of the schoolgirls had apparently been so freaked out by the pit toilet that she had decided the safest approach was to stand on the seat and squat from there. Unfortunately, she mustn’t have had a torch. If she had, she might have noticed that the lid was down before she shat all over it.
In the town of Bunbury, which billed itself as ‘cosmopolitan’ but seemed more like one giant suburb, we headed straight for the familiar comfort of the BIG4 caravan park. As we drove through the quiet streets, the boys wondered if it might have two jumping pillows and perhaps even a games room. Maybe – they hardly dared dream it – there would even be a television. When we arrived, there was one jumping pillow but no children playing on it.
‘They’re probably all off doing stuff’, I said, trying to cheer them up.
I wasn’t holding out much hope. There were no other dusty camper trailers. Not even one motorhome with a couple of tiny bicycles clinging to the back. Instead, cul-de-sacs lined with permanent demountable homes and their trim garden beds circled patches of neatly mown grass that appeared to be the camping sites. We found our site and as we reversed the trailer onto it, a man came out of his front door and glared at us. We were setting up on his front lawn and he wasn’t happy about it.
The boys went exploring and came back to report that there were no kids, the jumping pillow wasn’t inflated, they couldn’t find a games room and all the little houses had concrete gnomes out the front.
I opened one of my tourist books and had a closer look. We had come to Bunbury to see the wild dolphins at the Dolphin Discovery Centre. We were trying to avoid having to go to Monkey Mia, the tiny town further north that was famous for its dolphins. But in the list of ‘Things to do in Bunbury’, the dolphin centre wasn’t the highlight. The must-see attraction was Gnomesville, ‘the magical home to over 3000 gnomes who have migrated there from all over Australia and around the world’.
James took the boys to explore the town while I took advantage of all the empty washing machines and dryers to clean everything we owned. A gardener came past and stopped for a chat. ‘Have youse been to Gnomesville?’ he asked.
‘No, not yet’, I confessed. ‘We might go tomorrow?’ I have always been a terrible liar.
He glared at me. ‘Don’t tell me yer one of those people that don’t like gnomes’, he hissed before slumping off in disgust.
The Dolphin Discovery Centre was as grey and sad as the weather. Its laminated posters and display panels about life cycles managed to make dolphins as dreary as a school project. When a dolphin did finally come into the official ‘interaction zone’, I hurried into the water in my undies to get close to it. It stayed just long enough to snatch a fish from the guide before disappearing back to sea. The boys were so cold that they wouldn’t wade in any further than their ankles and James had refused to get in the water at all.
As we left town, the sun broke through the clouds, warming us through the windscreen and glinting on the water. We rolled the windows down to catch the warm breeze and our spirits lifted. Behind us we imagined Bunbury still squatting miserably under a grey sky.
In Perth we stopped to pick up Nannette, who was joining us again for a few days, squished her into the back seat with the kids and drove 250 kilometres north to Perth’s favourite fishing and camping spot, Sandy Cape. This time we didn’t bother setting up the separate tent, we just put down an extra mattress for her between the two boys. Privacy had become a less pressing issue for us and five in a tent didn’t seem much different to four. The campground had no fresh water, no showers and the foulest pit toilets we had ever smelled, but the rest of the place was beautiful. James slung a rope over a tree branch and made the boys a swing. That night, for our first time in the west, we saw the sun set, like a ball of orange fire being extinguished as it slipped into the sea.
Over the next three days we explored the dunes and filled Nannette in on what we’d been up to in the six weeks since we’d left Alice Springs. James tried to fish from the beach, but had to give up when a pod of dolphins insisted on lolling around in the shallows beside him. The boys rolled down the sandhills and buried each other in the warm sand. The days slipped past easily without much getting done and I realised how much the pace of our lives had slowed down. At home, every day seemed to be pun
ctuated by activity: cooking, tidying, cleaning, activities to amuse the kids, more food preparation, shopping, more cleaning and tidying, bored kids needing to be entertained, work deadlines, school homework, ‘must-watch’ television … on and on, relentlessly, every day. Now we got by with the bare minimum of cooking and cleaning, and a sand dune, a rope swing and a couple of books were all the entertainment we needed.
One day we drove to the Pinnacles in the nearby Nambung National Park. We wandered around the huge expanse of yellow sand exploring the weird, skinny rocks that seemed to be growing up out of the ground. They were entirely random – tall ones, short ones, skinny ones and fat ones. Sometimes there were lots of them all clumped together and then there would be a bare patch with just one solitary sentinel. I tried to get my head around the thousands of years of erosion that had resulted in these strange rock formations, but it was too hard. To me it looked like an alien landscape or even a set from a bad science-fiction sitcom from the 1970s. I half-expected them to move when I looked away. We spent hours playing a daylight version of spotlight that involved hiding behind the rocks and sneaking up on one another.
Nannette helped us by taking over the boys’ schoolwork. Before changing careers and studying law, she had been a primary school teacher for more than twenty years. She had much more skill and patience than us and they got a full day’s work done every morning with very little whingeing. One day I overheard her ask Dylan to come up with a sentence using the word ‘for’. He thought about it and then said, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, put that down!’ I heard my own voice in his and was thankful that he had censored my more usual phrasing.
Nannette told me the boys seemed to have grown up a lot in just a few months. When I watched them doing the dishes that night – still bickering but getting the job done pretty efficiently – I decided she was right. Most days they were on the move all the time, running around with huge bursts of energy, then collapsing in a heap for a few minutes before heading off out again. When they were little, I used to joke that boys were like puppies: you had to walk them twice a day or they would destroy the house. I was trying to be funny, but the truth was that their energy had always exhausted me. Sometimes I had envied my friends with daughters, who seemed to be happy to spend entire afternoons sitting still and doing craft.
Now I realised that they had needed more than regular exercise all those years. They had needed freedom. Out here – where they could run, wrestle, shout, jump, swing, roll down hills, throw sticks and stones, dig holes, sing silly songs at the top of their voices, lie in the grass and climb trees – I had never seen my sons happier.
The open spaces seemed to calm them down as well. I wondered if their constant motion and noisiness in the city had been a response to the boundaries and restrictions that I kept placing on them. Some of them had been necessary: it was my job to make sure they didn’t run out onto busy roads or fall off our balcony. If I was being honest, though, part of it was also that I was scared for them. When they were wrestling, I imagined dislocated shoulders and broken arms. When they played at sword fighting, all I could think of was eye injuries. I had spent years trying to shut them down but now I was learning to trust them and let them explore their world the way they wanted to.
When it was time for Nannette to leave, I drove her back to Perth – but not without taking a wrong turn onto the highway and getting just a little bit lost. We stayed overnight with her friends but as we ate dinner in a lovely Thai restaurant, making adult conversation and drinking expensive wine from a proper glass, I felt strangely restless and out of sorts and realised I missed my family. I woke up at dawn the next morning and was back on the road two hours later. When I got to the campground just after noon Dylan said, ‘Why are you back so early?’
James grinned at me from his camp chair where he sat with his left foot up, nursing a beer. They had spent the previous morning at an abandoned tip, throwing old bottles into the heap. After that they had played at being gladiators on the dunes and James had broken a toe as he tumbled down, head over heels, clutching both boys and rubbing their heads into the sand.
Steep Point is the furthest west you can go on Australia’s mainland. Beyond it, in Shark Bay, lies Dirk Hartog Island – just off the coast, close enough to see and only fifteen minutes by barge from Steep Point. The water is shallow and calm and flat on the bay side of the point, protected from the ocean by the island. On the other side, the towering cliffs that give Steep Point its name plunge into the Indian Ocean. Apart from people determined to stand on the edge of the country, like us, Steep Point mainly attracts devoted fishermen for whom the beach is just a convenient place to launch boats. Most of the campsites were empty.
We set up the tent just a few metres from the water’s edge and the boys were immediately welcomed by a big silver fish which almost beached itself next to them. They chased it in and out of the clear shallow water for an hour and it kept coming back for more. They were beside themselves with excitement at having a pet fish.
An hour after arriving we had our rods in the water at the front of our tent and within minutes the boys had caught two flathead, a bream and a whiting. We cooked them on a fire on the beach and went to sleep listening to the water lap gently on the sand just outside the tent.
When the ranger came by in the morning to collect our camping fees we told her about our fishy friend. She said it was a poisonous toadfish with razor-sharp teeth, a fiercely territorial nature and an evil temperament. The year before, one had chased a man out of the water and bitten his toe off. She also mentioned there was a tiger shark in the bay at the moment and advised us to ‘just have a look around before going swimming’. But there were also dugongs and humpback whales and turtles around the point, and stingrays and more fish than we had ever seen right on our beach. Later that morning, a school of dolphins swam past us and one hurled itself high out of the water in what seemed like an act of pure joy.
At the top of the cliffs, we found a wooden sign that said ‘Steep Point: Westernmost point of Australia’. We took a photo and then drove along the ridge, getting out of the car to walk along the edge of the cliffs and look down at the pounding waves.
‘So where are the bloody whales then?’ James said.
A spurt of white foam at the bottom of the cliff caught my eye. ‘Right there.’
The first whales of our trip were wallowing around where the dark rock face disappeared into the ocean. We followed them on foot as they cruised up the coast. When they had gone, we stood on the edge of the cliff and watched giant turtles gliding gracefully in the water below us. I saw a flash of white near the horizon and I looked up just in time to see a humpback whale throw itself out of the water and hang in the air for a moment before slamming back down onto the surface.
Further along the track, a group of men were fishing from a rocky ledge. Holes drilled into the rock held their rods and the lines dropped down the side of the cliff into the deep water. When the rod bent and jerked, they sent a grappling hook down the line to grasp the fish and haul it up. They only fished at dawn and dusk, spending the rest of the blindingly hot daylight hours and much of the night drinking. Along the cliff’s edge, plaques marked spots where people had died. Some had suffered heart attacks. Others, barely in their twenties, had fallen and drowned on the rocks below.
There were no women in any of the fishing camps. They looked to be the most basic of set-ups: humming generators powered fridges that I would have bet held little more than beer and sausages, and most of the men must have been sleeping in their cars, because the only other shelter I could see were a couple of half-heartedly hung shadecloths. When I asked if any of them had brought their wives, one man told us that he and a friend had brought their families along for the first time the year before, but not to this spot.
‘You camped down on the beach?’ he asked. We nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s where we were. I woke up one night and I could hear waves. Waves! Down there it’s dead flat all the time. I got up but it was pit
ch black and I couldn’t see a thing. I walked down to the water and this wave hit me. By the time I got back to the tent, the water was halfway up the beach. My mate, he grabbed his baby out of its cot just before the whole thing went underwater. We lost everything. Some bloody tsunami set off this monster wave that made it all the way here. If it wasn’t for that’ – he gestured towards Dirk Hartog Island – ‘we’d all be dead. Anyway, the missus doesn’t want to come back here anymore.’ He finally noticed my horrified face. ‘Nah, you’ll be right. Once in a lifetime thing, they reckon.’
On the way out of Steep Point, we were flagged down by a man standing at the side of the road beside his car. One of his tyres was completely shredded. The road was so rough that he had driven on it for a few kilometres before realising he had a puncture. He needed James’s help because it was a bit tricky for him to get down and crawl under the car to position the jack properly. He only had one leg. His wife couldn’t help – she was very overweight and was firmly wedged in the passenger seat, pressed up against the dashboard, with a little white dog on her lap. Together, he and James jacked up the vehicle – and the wife and her dog – and changed the tyre.
Our next stop was at a tiny roadhouse on the turn-off to Monkey Mia – a 220-kilometre round trip off the main road.
‘Everyone’s going to ask if we went’, I said.
James groaned. ‘It’s just so far.’
‘Yeah, like Wave Rock’, said Oscar.
We found a caravan park in Denham and at eight o’clock the next morning we were at Monkey Mia. The dolphins turned up right on cue, just as they had since the 1960s when the local fishermen began feeding them. They snorted around in the shallows, hassling for fish and sucking up to the handlers during the fifteen-minute talk before grabbing their food and taking off. Despite their worldwide fame, they didn’t really do much for me. There didn’t seem to be much dignity about the whole thing.