Water everywhere at Kununurra

We’ve had almost a week in Kununurra, sorted out batteries and tyres, staying in a delightful caravan park with a palm-fringed pool just across a narrow street from our site. The temperature has been in the 30s each day, cooling nicely in late afternoon, so it has been really pleasant.

We are really doing the tourist thing, taking tours and hiring a small car to get around, rather than  

Sunset on Lake Argyle.

unbuckling the motorhome from power and water and taking in its annexe. This morning we booked in for another week, so we’ll leave on September 9.

Our first tour was on Lake Argyle, going by small bus from Kununurra the 78km to the lake, formed by the Ord River Dam. We visited the old Durack family homestead at Argyle Downs, that would have been ‘drowned’ when the lake filled, but was taken apart and reconstructed, stone by stone. There are gravestones there for family members, including Elizabeth and Mary Durack, so we paid special attention to that of Elizabeth, as she’s the mother of our friend Mike Clancy in Brisbane (I went to school with his wife Marg).

The inland sea of Lake Argyle.

Then the 8 of us boarded a 50ft catamaran for lunch and a full afternoon cruising and swimming on the lake. It is so big it is classed as an inland sea. Its sole purpose is to keep Lake Kununurra, 55km downstream on the Ord, topped up as it’s the one that supplies irrigation water for the whole Ord River Irrigation Scheme.

 Apparently it would take the water from five Port Phillip Bays to fill Lake Argyle and I can well believe it. It is supposed to have 25,000 freshwater crocs living in it but we only saw one basking on a rocky shore. 

One of the passengers swimming in the lake.

After seeing the sunset from the catamaran, we eventually landed and were driven home in the dark.

Our own private wanderings have taken us to Wyndham (fairly dusty, depressing little town where everything was shut on a Saturday morning) where we wound our way up a long hill to the Five Rivers Lookout. That shows Cambridge Gulf, with five rivers emptying into it, including the Ord.

There’s a fascinating striped rock found near here called zebra rock and we’ve visited the two places that have galleries of items made from that rock. One was beside Lake Kununurra and had catfish near a little jetty that one could feed. The original pumphouse for the irrigation, now disused, has become a restaurant, and also has dozens of big catfish lurking, waiting for diners on the verandah to throw over some bread. 

An albino catfish among the feeding frenzy.

We were interested in how the irrigation scheme is going as there have been many agricultural disasters with sugar and rice, for example, as well as cotton-growing.

We’d been told that Indian sandalwood is the new ‘wooden gold’ with a huge export market into Asia where it’s burnt in temples all day every day. Sure enough we saw lots growing, as well as big plantations of mangoes.

We couldn’t work out why the sandalwood plantations seemed to have various varieties of trees, but a most information visit to a Sandalwood factory informed us that the young sandalwood trees need certain host trees, whose roots they parasitize, eventually killing them.

One of the great irrigation channels.

There are now 6000 hectares under sandalwood here, not nearly as much under mangoes, and we also saw crops of chia, sorghum, corn, cane, pumpkins, melons, & papaws. The great irrigation channels extend north-west from the town 48km  . . . we followed one of the roads out of interest, beside such a channel, only turning around when the bitumen finished.

We’re told that new area we saw is the second stage of the scheme, and if we’d driven another 10km, we’d have been in the Northern Territory, where in fact the irrigation scheme is to be extended. 

A huge paddock of chia in the extended irrigation area.

There is such a supply of water here that the caravan park has signs up encouraging campers to use the sprinklers left around the place to keep the place looking green. John has turned into a right little sprinkler-holic, setting them up all around our site whenever we’re in residence.

Tomorrow we will do a flight from here to the Bungle Bungles, land, do some walking in the gorges, have lunch, then fly back, taking in the Argyle diamond mine, Lake Argyle and the irrigation areas from the air. A few days later we’ll be taken on a tour of El Questro, involving gorge-walking and cruising and lots of swimming.

We had intended ending our run along the Gibb River Road with a stay at El Questro, but this will be much better, being taken around in someone else’s vehicle.

We had to take our Avis car back to the airport this morning (no point in having one when we’re away on tours). It’s a nuisance having to collect and deposit a car at the airport, so we’d already arranged to get a Hertz car from a depot in the town for next weekend. While at the airport, two big Chinook Army helicopters had landed, and quite a lot of people had come out from the town to watch them take off again.

The original Ivanhoe Crossing of the Ord River, now
closed to vehicles.

One of the locals told us that when a Hercules lands, people rush out from town, as they can hear it’s different from the planes landing and taking off on tourist flights, or the commercial flights to and from Darwin, Broome and Perth.

Obviously, not a lot happens in Kununurra, but we like it a lot and have found quite a lot to do here. 

A final thought. The colours of the Kimberley are not just red rock and blue sky. There’s a lot of those two, obviously, but there’s also the straw colour of dry season spear grass and spinifex, the pale green of lots of smallish trees, bright green of new spinifex coming through after burning, and the blue-green of the waterways, particularly around Kununurra.