An Overnight Oasis

Saturday 15th

Tonight’s lovely campsite is about 20 kilometres north of Wiluna, a nondescript town between Leinster and Meekatharra. The main thing Wiluna is renowned for is that it is the starting point for two great 4WD routes, the historic Canning Stock Route and the Gunbarrel Highway (of Len Beadel fame). After a quick drive round the township we drove out the first few klm of the Canning Stock Route then turned off to North Pool. Not sure what we are going to find but it’s a good road out so we will see what happens.

10 K later we arrived at a beautiful spot on the banks of a permanent water hole. Only one other camper here. We park our van nestled in amongst the river gums and set up for the night. The fire pot comes out and is set ready for lighting and cooking one massive rib eye steak for dinner.

(P) Not only did we sit and enjoy the fire and inhale the beautiful aroma of my “Mammoth” “tomahawk“ rib eye cooking over the hot coals Judith also omitted to mention how delicious it was! I must be more refined in my eating habits than when I was younger! I even shared it with Judith. Weighing in at 1.25kg there was even enough left to have with our Salad (potato salad, none of that green stuff for me thanks!) the following day.

North Pool is such a peaceful spot and so unexpected after miles and miles of dry, barren, rock strewn landscape that we have passed through over the last few days.

Sunday 16th

Travelling on to Newman the countryside starts to change from barren, dry and desolate, to areas that have had some rain and now starting to show green shoots coming through. Then closer to Newman as we cross the Tropic of Capricorn there is ample feed, hills covered with vegetation and water in pools along the roadside and some river beds. Our intention was to stay in Newman for a couple of days before heading into Karijini National Park but as BHP have bought out the caravan parks (we understand this happened to protect their staff because of COVID-19) and tourists are no longer welcome, we only stayed overnight at the Tourist information rest area. Newman was a much bigger town than we expected. Very much a mining town with a population of 5000 plus another ( approx) 4000 FIFO workers. We enjoyed a lovely walk around town after we arrived and collected some tourist info from the centre for some light reading tonight.

Monday 17th.

We have 3 days before we are booked into Karijini (so far the only prebooking we have made which was a few days ago ) we have to decide what to do in the interim. Philip wants to head just north of town to look at the Roy Hill mine. After about 50 kilometres he finally decides that we are not going to see much of Hancock Prospect’s huge mine as it’s all behind a range of hills just off the road. All we can see is a few spots of stockpiled tailings and one huge airport built especially for this mine. We drove into the airport to see a Qantas 737 sitting on the runway. It looks very out of place here in the middle of nowhere. Just a few kilometres on we cross a fairly new railway line heading into the mine. Again no sighting of the mine. Philip says mining companies should be made to construct viewing platforms for tourists when planning their mining operations. Not sure that they would agree. However he has his own mobile platform and binoculars with him. (Lots of people ask us what the ladder on the van is for).

The landscape heading north from Newman is quite surprising. We weren’t planning on coming this far north but we have a couple of days to fill in and it’s so pretty with green spinifex covered “jump up” hills, lush river crossings, deep red rock outcrops and clear blue skies, that we just keep driving. Every corner presents a new vista and although it’s very scenic it’s hard to take photos of. The road is a mining road so is wide and graded in parts. The ungraded parts are corrugated and have washouts that need to be avoided but as there is little traffic we have the whole road width to drive on just keeping an eye out for the other limited traffic. Most are mine vehicles which radio ahead to say they are passing. In 300 k we probably only see 3 other tourist vehicles.

About half way to Marble Bar we stop at a lovely little picnic area called Garden Pool near Beaton Gorge. There is a substantial water catchment here with grassed edges and beautiful old gums and only one other visitor. The nearest town to this is Nullangine, an old gold mining town almost defunct now. We had considered stopping here but the caravan park is closed so it’s on to Marble Bar.