Skylab and Stonehenge

Brrr. It’s been cold, and still is, in the southern parts of Western Australia. But we still enjoyed our time in Esperance, exploring the town and its wonderful beaches, even though it was far too cold to even think about swimming.

One bonus was a late afternoon walk from our caravan park to the nearby port facilities, just in time to see a huge bulk wheat carrier arrive, finally pushed sideways by two sturdy little tugs into its berth on the wharf. There was already an iron ore bulk carrier loading, as well as another vessel

loading nitrate. Trains are coming and going all day and night to the port, hauling iron ore from further north.

The Esperance Museum has many treasures, not the least of which is a special Skylab display. When Skylab crashed through the earth’s atmosphere in 1979 and bits scattered over that southern part of WA, people went out scavenging everywhere. The Esperance council even sent a $400 litter bill to the US Government, and following a campaign by a Nevada radio station, it was finally paid just before the 30th anniversary of the ‘littering’.

There’s also a big display of domestic stuff that’s now seen as historic, but of course people our age recognise most of it from our youth. There were ice-chests, cheese dishes, kitchen implements such as mincers, and other things our mothers all used. Maybe we’re museum pieces too!

At the summer and winter solstice, the sun shines

through those two stones at the front.

This trip has had lots of new experiences, but when we left home, we never imagined we’d leave Australia (as in visiting the ‘foreign’ Hutt River Principality) and certainly had not planned to go even further afield to Stonehenge.

Yes, we have visited Stonehenge . . . but it was just outside Esperance. It was a result of making a new friendship when in Newman. Kim and Jillian Beale were doing what many southerners do in August, escaping the winter by taking their caravan to northern areas. We had a great time together and they told us we must come and stay with them on their 1000-acre property near Esperance, on which they have erected a full-size replica of the UK’s Stonehenge.

The story of how and why was fascinating. This farming couple had no intention of getting into the

John enjoying the calm of the henge.

tourist industry but had watched with fascination as the blocks for this project were being cut at a quarry just across the road. It had been ordered by a Margaret River entrepreneur who had planned a boutique brewery with the henge as the central attraction. Then, of course, he went broke and the quarry management needed to find a new buyer.

Kim, a member of Esperance Rotary, took the idea to that club as a new tourist attraction for the town and planning started. But the idea became very divisive, with some people claiming that it would attract nutters and followers of the Druidic religion.

It was damaging the Rotary image, so Kim and Jillian decided to take on the project themselves . . . at no little expense, as you can imagine.

So now this group of huge pink granite stones sits on a section of their lovely property, all 137 stones, including those weighing between 38 and 50 tonnes, and 18-tonne lintels to a height of 8 metres. They have converted one of the garages in their nearby home to a small entry office and souvenir shop, open from Thursday to Monday, and are suddenly in the tourism business.

Jillian and Kim Beale on the altar stone.

When we stayed there for a couple of days, there was a fairly steady stream of visitors, paying the small entrance fee to wander in the blissful calm among the stones, which seem to just sit on the green turf. A video Kim showed us had revealed all the preparation work that had gone into the concrete footings that had been made to support the great stones, and it was fascinating to watch a crane and two front-end loaders gently placing each stone in position.

Visitors drive to the house from the front entrance and many stop to photograph the gorgeous Gelbvieh cattle Kim breeds. They are beautifully quiet and very photogenic. Jillian claims all the ‘girls’ do their hair in a different way, and sure enough, when we toured the farm in her 4WD, every mop of rusty-coloured hair atop their bovine faces seemed to grow in a different way.

While at the farm, we ventured further along the road to the Cape Le Grand National Park, reputed to have the most beautiful beaches in Australia . . . or the world. They are glorious, all white sand and turquoise water, but once again, too windy and chilly to really enjoy.

After a couple of laughter-filled days with Kim and Jill, who are now very good friends who promise to visit us in eastern Australia next year, we left them to drive north towards Kalgoorlie. Fairly soon we left the cultivated crops of wheat and canola behind and were back in typical Outback country with turnoffs to mines appearing.

Norseman perpetually paws the ground,

maybe looking for more gold.

Norseman is a quiet little town, home to a well-established goldmine, with gold exploration dating from the late 1800s when a young man’s horse called Norseman had pawed the ground and ended up with a gold-bearing piece of quartz in his hoof.

There’s a bronze statue of Norseman, a group of tin camels made from corrugated iron on a roundabout to commemorate the camel trains that serviced the area, and huge waste dumps from the mining. One of them is very pale, and so terraced and serrated by the weather that it almost looks like a Mayan temple.

Next stop: Kalgoorlie, then we return to Norseman and finally turn our noses east across the Nullarbor.