Carnegie, Lorna Glen, Narndee and Home

Carnegie, Lorna Glen, Narndee and Home

Very few other travellers stayed at the Carnegie station camping area while we were there but two vehicles drove in one late afternoon – Lyle and Owen, two guys from the Department of Parks and Wildlife, accompanied by a guy named Neil Hamilton whom we were informed is the guru of Western Australian birds. They were doing a patrol up into the Gibson Desert looking for sandalwood poachers but were also hopeful to make a sighting of the famed night parrot, widely held to be extinct but like John Farnham, refusing to lie down. We hit it off around the campfire that night – we knew quite a few mutual acquaintances from when I used to work around fire and emergency people, and Maurs wanted to pick Neil’s brain about the local birdlife. They suggested that we visit another station on our way back called Lorna Glen. It was only about 40 kilometres off the main road and yep, you guessed it, the road is fine, and yep, you guessed it, we found ourselves back on a stretch of badly rutted road and us filling in large holes with rocks in order to negotiate a passage to Lorna Glen. 

Lunch down by the billabong

That way to Lorna Glen

More ruts Fawltey!

I guess we were old hands by now and we rolled into this really well maintained station area to be met by the caretakers, a Sydney couple who make the massive trip with their caravan every year to look after this remote and isolated station in the middle of nowhere for five months (it is a migration pattern that would puzzle David Attenborough - as it should because these people weren’t quite sure why they do it themselves). They told us that the station had just been acquired by Native Title and it wasn’t clear what the new land owners (or perhaps, original land owners) intended to do. The Parks and Wildlife Department have built a large enclosure on the station (I’m talking kilometres of perimeter fencing, all electrified) and cleared it of feral predators in an attempt to establish a healthy Bilby community. Our bird guru friend Neal has a theory that Bilbys and the Night Parrot share the same environment so he was hoping that the parrot would also get a leg up within the sanctuary. It seems the Night Parrot prefers to nest on the ground rather than in a tree like most other birds (don’t judge!) and so is vulnerable to anything and everything with a penchant for poultry (you can see that extinction is a risk when a species favours this lifestyle).

Night Parrots (illustration only)

Bilby - cute huh?



 

Anyway, David the caretaker said that he was going around the fence line that day to check for any breaks. Apparently the electric fence deters cattle who bump into it and get the message that they aren’t welcome but a camel will walk into the fence, get the shock, think “this is unpleasant, I’d better keep going forward!” and bust right through it. We do grow some very big, strong camels out there.

The camp area at Lorna Glen was good – a bit of firewood around and a water supply – what else would anyone need? There was also a shower and a flushing toilet about 100 metres away and this was appreciated too. After 22 days since leaving Kalgoorlie, Kevin and Shirley had finally exhausted their booze supply and we were nursing a little overproof Rum and some Scotch, so the campfire conviviality was reduced to cups of tea and a final nightcap to warm us against the cold desert night. The caretakers had told us of a few things to see and we set off to a place called Turtle Rock Pool. The station tracks were all well maintained and the directions precise. We didn’t see any turtles (or tortoises for that matter) and we didn’t notice a rock that looked like a turtle, but it was definitely a pool of water and a day out.

Turtle Rock Pool in all its glory

Picnic at Turtle Rock

 

We departed Lorna Glen. The road going out the front way was actually very good – 40 kilometres to the Granite Peak Road and another 70 to link up to the Gunbarrel Highway and another 35 to Wiluna. We stopped to pick up a swag that had obviously fallen off a vehicle, figuring that we would hand it in to the local police in Wiluna. No such thing. The local copper didn’t want to know about lost property so we left it at the general store in the hands of the young Japanese back-packer at the checkout. I figured that the chances of the owner actually getting the swag back were miniscule, and naturally I was quite wrong. We got word later (Kev had left his contact number with the store) that a grateful guy asked whether anyone had handed in a swag and was rewarded with a reunion with his beloved bedding.

Wiluna, besides having one of the finest graders in the world such that the main tracks are very driveable, doesn’t have much else. The pub has closed so there’s no beer (much to Kev’s dismay), but the local café was good and the people really friendly.  While we were having lunch a group of local indigenous folk came in, mostly kids, and they went through the place like a tornado – all laughing and running and yelling – it was good to see kids having fun. However we were on a quest. Meekatharra was 184 kilometres away and it was the closest place with beer.

The Wiluna Pub. No beer. No admission!

The road was good – a few strips of bitumen the rest good gravel. We checked in to the caravan park for $25 a night, had a shower and headed straight to the Commercial Hotel. Yes! Cold beer followed by some welcome pub food. We met a few fellow travellers in the pub who had hauled their caravans up the bitumen (a lot of them from South Australia) and we got talking to a couple about their trip which they said they repeated every year from Adelaide to Broome. The lady mentioned how she always prepared a heap of frozen meals so they didn’t have to spend money on the way up and I thought well that really helps the viability of our outback communities.

We were all pretty tired after a relatively long day and we hit the hay around 8.15 pm. Did I mention that there was a 24 hour truck fuelling station just over the road? Truck traffic plies the Great Northern Highway relentlessly, servicing the industry and mining sectors further north in the Pilbara. Trucks stopped to fill up so frequently that we didn’t even notice it after a while and even slept in until 7 am, however if you are a light sleeper and are considering a stopover at Meeka I’d weigh up other options one of which we found to be a place called Peace Gorge located about 3 kilometres out of town, as quiet as can be and quite pretty to boot. You would need to be self-sufficient to stay there though – no water or any facility, but we have certainly noted the area for future trips.

Peace Gorge near Meekatharra

Breakfast the next morning turned out to be a surprise birthday party thrown by Kevin and Shirley for Maurs as this was our last day together before we split, we going south and they going northwest. Kev and Shirley were the best of travelling companions in these remote areas and we have several more camping trips planned with them in the years ahead. All good things end and we said our goodbyes and set sail for Mount Magnet, about 195 kilometres south. The trip south was positively dull. We were now cruising down the Great Northern Highway and the only thing worth reporting was us having to pull off the highway for a few minutes to allow a massive over width truck carrying another massive overly wide vehicle to proceed north. We were very familiar with Mount Magnet having stayed there the year before and we booked in for two nights at the caravan park to reprovision, plan our track home and investigate staying at a station for a few days for a little R&R after our arduous, um ….. holiday.

Maureen's surprise party

Narndee station is just north of Paynes Find and about 40 kilometres off the highway on a well maintained gravel road. They have a large area set aside for campers, and being the only campers, we had our choice of campsite. That situation remained for the rest of the week and apart from a daily visit from Rob the station owner, we were alone. Facilities were minimal but adequate. There was a small shower block powered by a wood fired donkey heater that afforded plenty of hot water so long as you collected the wood and lit the fire, a flushing toilet, and a fireplace made out of an old gas cylinder. This provided both warmth on some really chilly nights and a great cooking area for our camp oven and kettles.

Narndee campsite

Cookin' in the pig

Narndee sunset

I don’t know if you would include these items in the facilities but we had a live-in dog (Bella) and cat (Rebel) who seemed to like our company. There was a sprinkling of different animals around the homestead, and these would wander through from time to time; a couple of retired racehorses, a Shetland pony who thought that he was the boss, two pigs , a calf, and a crazy goat who was convinced that he was the boss.

I'm the boss!

No, I'm the boss!

We're thoroughbreds, we don't listen

 

We spent the time here relaxing and honing up our camp oven skills with Maurs cooking a variety of casseroles using our dehydrated vegetable stock and some (much prized) mutton and lamb shanks that we got from the Mount Magnet Butcher Shop. We discovered that the local area has some quirky history. We went out to an abandoned station (Boodanoo) to see where in the 1920s the owner was shot through the head while standing in the open talking to his wife. The bullet came from a high-powered .303 rifle used by a roo shooter to kill a kangaroo but after despatching the roo the bullet had ricocheted off a rock and struck the hapless station owner. The extraordinary part of all this was that the shooter was two miles away at the time and had no idea that the stray bullet had gone so awry until sometime later. Neither man was known for his good fortune.

Boodanoo Station remains

The other odd piece of history has been termed The Murders in the Murchison and involves a reasonably well known author, Arthur Upfield (creator of the Australian detective character Boney). This all happened in 1929. Upfield was searching for a method to infallibly dispose of a body for a book he was writing and a friend opined a foolproof solution. Another man, Snowy Rowles, a pleasant, handsome young fellow was a party to the conversation. The idea was to incinerate the corpse along with a large animal (likely a kangaroo in those parts) in a very hot fire, crush the bones, and remove any foreign materials from the ashes, such that no one could detect a human presence. A short time later Snowy left with two other men to find work around the area and later returned alone, driving the other man’s vehicle which he claimed to have bought off him. He mentioned that the other two had continued on looking for work (I think you know where this might be going). Another gent went off with Snowy and again Snowy returned alone. Even in remote areas like this people start to be missed and a search for these gents began after a while. Eventually the police came across a suspicious and recent fireplace. Sifting through the ashes they found a wedding ring – that was eventually uniquely identifiable as belonging to the last victim of Snowy’s excesses. I gather that Snowy either forgot the recipe or got lazy and neglected to sift out the foreign material. Upfield shared his misgivings with the authorities, a little taken aback that life was copying art. Further bad luck befell Snowy when a detective sent to make the arrest recognised him as an escaped prisoner from the Geraldton area a few years before. It didn’t turn out so well for Snowy (oh, and that wasn’t his real name either) and he met his fate at the gallows in Fremantle in 1932. Other than that, it keeps pretty quiet around the Murchison.

Rock Pool, Narndee

So after lazy days of moping around the camp soaking up the sunlight, cooking meals in the camp oven and generally keeping the home fires burning it was time to hitch up and leg it back to Perth ahead of a fresh brace of rain coming in from the Indian Ocean. It was a big trip (over 3,000 kilometres all up) and I reflected that I, a city slicker in a small 4WD hauling a camper had driven two famous and demanding roads. It wouldn’t have happened without Maureen’s keenness to do it or Kev and Shirley’s company, and looking back at it, it was a great trip through exciting and unique country. But I think next time I’d do it in a slightly bigger vehicle. Well gotta go. Alaska is calling and I still need to write up our hiking/driving holiday in the UK last year (let alone our journey through India). Ciao to all who have read along with us. I hope you have enjoyed the blog.

Where we went

It's goodbye from us....

and it's goodbye from her...until next time