Karratha

Every now and then a song gets stuck in your mind, playing endlessly on a loop and impervious to attempts to purge it from your brain. There must be a button in my brain labelled ‘Play Continually until until exhausted!” The song currently on this loop is the well-known Big Rock Candy Mountain, sung by the Soggy Bottom Boys in one of my favourite films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The lyrics portray a wonderful land of extreme, if somewhat absurd, abundance as can only be imagined by people with not much at all.

I am not sure why this song is playing on loop, except it could be sparked by the contradictions we see in our land generally and more markedly in this part of Australia. On the one hand, there is the sheer scale of things up here in The Pilbara and The Kimberley – the size the iron ore extraction and the infrastructure to move it and the wealth it generates for many and excessively for some. On the other hand there is the dispossession and poverty of the few, the Aboriginal people whose country this has been for thousands of years and who were dealt with cruelly, harshly and criminally by Europeans who assumed simply the land was theirs for the taking.

Or perhaps the song is on loop because it is one of the tracks on my iTunes playlist. Either way, I do need a rest from The Big Rock Candy Mountain!

We have been in Karratha for a few days now and are heading off on Sunday morning for Onslow, which is merely a stopping point as we inch our way south.

Karratha is one of the bigger towns along the Western Australia coast, and has afforded us an opportunity to rest, stock up on a few things and visit some of the more interesting things in the wider district. Karratha is the product of the mining boom and has grown to meet the demands of the mining, port and gas industries. It is a town of neatly laid out roads, paved kerbs, modern buildings, schools and health facilities, and with the industrial side of things handily placed outside the populated areas. It even has a K-Mart that the girls sussed out and insisted on investigating. What is it about K-Mart? I would have thought that they are all the same, so once you have seen one store, you should not need to see another one. It is one of life’s mysteries. On the other hand, each Bunnings store is unique, and we need spend time in each one.

While we are at Karratha we took a drive back to Roebourne, a smallish town about 30 kilometres back towards Port Hedland, and Cossack, a long-abandoned seaside town that actually seems more vibrant than some of the towns of The Kimberley. The main attraction at Roebourne was the Old Gaol which was a very grim reminder of our dark history and treatment of Aboriginal people. We called by the local Church of England which for some strange reason has sturdy steel windows – barred and padlocked. We debated whether this was to keep people in, or as an exercise of anti-mission, to keep people out. Cossack started life in the early days of the pearling industry, but over-working of the resource saw the industry move on to Broome. What remains are some beautiful old colonial buildings built of stone, and a flicker of life in a quite decent café operating out of the old customs building. As a sign of how things change, from Cossack you can see parts of the new ports used for shipping iron ore and dozens of ships queued out to the horizon, waiting to fill their bellies with the precious red dirt from the Pilbara mines.

On Sunday we pulled stumps and headed for Onslow. Onslow is not precisely en-route, but every other town south from Karratha is a drive too far. It turned out that Onslow is also a drive too far, at least for John and Anne, whose Jeep continued to suffer problems of overheating. John set off with a bootload of coolant, and did well for the first hundred kilometres, but after that, we had to pause at increasingly shorter intervals to top up the coolant tank as the car continually overheated. We pooled our ignorance of things mechanical and automotive and John and Anne again have put themselves at the mercy of NRMA, who, to me, have gone well beyond what might be seen as generous. I think the service deal is for a 100 kilometre tow, but there was a 260 km tow last week, and now a further tow, first to Onslow, and hopefully to Geraldton – over a thousand kilometres! The Manns insisted that we continue to Onslow and they have parked at a truck overnight lay by.

The road to Onslow is not especially interesting. The road is very flat and straight and there were little flutters of excitement when we encountered a slight curve. The landscape is tuft grass and spinifex and stunted looking bushes stretching to a shimmering horizon. I am sure the bush thrives with animals and birds, but from the road it looks a very barren desert, with an army of termite mounds keeping silent guard.

We can only hope that the morrow brings good news for John and Anne. In any case the car must get to Geraldton so that the problems can be sorted once and for all.

I don’t have as many photos this week, but I thought some might be in need of a caption. Please, if you have a moment, put some suggestions in the comments.