Karratha, Burrup Peninsula & driving to Millstream Chichester NP

Leaving Jane, MrsTea’s friend, & her husband Phil’s home in Onslow was not easy, they had made us feel so comfortable & welcome. Living in a house felt like quite a luxury to us & the climate conducive to outdoor patio living made for easy reminiscing & nostalgia laden conversation. Phil & I of course were not part of the nostalgia but nevertheless enjoyed hearing about many of the ‘girls’ escapades not previously known to us, as well as finding plenty to talk about of mutual interest. We left later in the day & took the red dirt road via Peedamulla back to the coastal highway, then north to Karratha, but decided to seek somewhere to camp before reaching the town. As is our way we chose to follow a track away from the highway in the hope of finding a nice quiet spot to ourselves rather than simply stopping at one of the easy & popular roadside traveller rest areas. The perfectly smooth graded nature of the track we took toward the mouth of the Fortescue River & the coast should have alerted us, but we failed that test & continued onward (for around 30kms) in search of that little piece of solitary paradise. By the time we had passed a mine the size of a small town, along with a bitumen road running parallel to ‘our’ ultra smooth dirt road, signs telling us the sealed road was not for us & traffic lights giving priority to the gigantic haul trucks we were wondering just what we might find at the end of the track. Then we reached a river, clearly tidal, but with only a few inches of running water over the stony bed. We crossed, not knowing how long we may be on the other side. A few more kms on we reached the end of the track, finding 20 or more caravans & other travelling rigs all set up in what was clearly a semi permanent manner! These were ‘die hard’ fisher folk, all with boats, & there for the ‘season’ stuck between the mine to the east & the huge Fortescue river estuary lined with rocky outcrops & extensive mangroves. After consulting with couple of fishermen (& reassuring their suspicious nature that we had no intention of disturbing their crab pots they had just put in for the night, tied by ropes to mangrove roots above the expected high tide level) we worked out both the tide times & heights, reassuring us that we would be ok to drive out the following morning & that the tide would not be high enough to swamp us during the night. Those camped longer term were all on higher ground to us, as our spot showed evidence of being inundated by higher tides. There was less water in the crossing in the morning, but it had become obvious that the water was salt water, having dried to a hard crust on the side of the vehicle.

This section of the highway (between the turn off to Karijini NP & Karratha) was one we hadn’t travelled on before, taking us through attractive Pilbara country, pastel colours offset against the red ground, big open expanses broken up by spinifex covered hills, often with rocky red ‘cliffs’ at the top. Increasingly too we saw industrialisation in the midst of wilderness, Gas plants, iron ore mines & gold mines we think. To us mines are just mines, & mostly we just knew we were looking at huge metal complexes or flat topped tailings heaps literally the size of mountains along with plenty of ‘Keep Out’ signage, & freight infrastructure – roads & rail. 4 trailer road trains, 55m to 60m long carrying ore were commonplace on the road, they & holidaying caravaners made up the bulk of the traffic. For us who have, in recent times, become accustomed to half a dozen or less of other vehicles a day, the road felt busy, but in reality it wasn’t, seeing perhaps another vehicle or two every 10 minutes or so. The combination of sealed road, traffic & mines suggested to us that people were taking precedence over country & this perception was then reinforced when we arrived in Karratha. An industrial support town, there to house miners, support the mining infrastructure & to produce sea salt. Somehow everything about the place shouted “the only value of this country is what you can take out of it”. We shopped & then drove out to the Burrup Peninsula, passing a number of snow white & crystallised salt pans. Clearly there are Karratha residents with humour going by some of the ‘decorations’ in the middle of these salt pans. The naked mannequin, head in the salt, & flippers on it’s feet was our favourite ….. but much of what could have looked stunningly beautiful was instead ugly rubbish strewn ‘waste-ground’. More evidence (to our way of thinking) of the ‘use & take’ mentality which seems to accompany extractive industrialisation.

The Burrup Peninsula is a place we have long wanted to visit, an ancient place under threat from, yep you guessed it, Big Money! Corporations who value only profit, & governments who support them. Here there is (was) prolific rock art, some of the earliest anywhere in the world, petroglyphs pre-dating the Egyptian pyramids & much else most think of as ancient civilisation. Much has already been lost during the establishment of industrial complexes & ports to export what gets dug up. To those who’s profits or employment depend upon mining the seemingly simple examples of rock art are worthless, but to those peoples who’s ancestors created them (as well as to anyone who values unique evidence of human history) this is a place beyond value. In recent years campaigns to protect what has not yet been destroyed have seen a relatively small area known as ‘Deep Gorge’ preserved as part of the Murujuga National Park. It remains poorly signed & policed however. Once found, we also found parties of loud voiced, beers in hands disrespectful visitors, together with their dogs (not allowed in NP’s) leaving the gorge with samples of rocks in their hands. It was not a good look. We believe these to have been Karratha locals, whitefellas old & young, with their families.

There were also petroglyphs depicting people, but we respected the request not to photograph them.

Having spent time at a car wash to hose off the salt & then shopped at what was an exceptionally busy Sunday – supermarket staff were bewildered as to why – checkout queues 10+ people long on every checkout . We thought perhaps the whole town were getting their shopping done because the day was too windy to do much else, our time in Deep Gorge was far more limited than we would have liked. We spent around two hours there, initially seeing little, but then seeing more & more as we became accustomed where & how to look. Some of the Petroglyphs were obvious, others open to our interpretation & some too weathered or complex to understand at all. Some up to 30,000 years old alongside some as recent 160 years old. Although unable to understand many we nevertheless felt (once others had left & we were alone in the gorge) a sense of reverence for those people for whom this place had been important & for their surviving ancestors who still find the need to battle to protect this priceless piece of the world’s history. Small voices in large but seemingly deaf ears. Our hope is that there may still be secret & hidden ancient treasures in places not seen as industrial targets.

We left Karratha later than was wise. The road sign said 50kms to Millstream Chichester National Park. We wrongly assumed that this meant to the campgrounds in the park. Once two parks (Chichester & Millstream) they are now combined. The campgrounds are in the Millstream section, at the southern end of the park, & the 50kms was to the Northern (Chichester) boundary. Unaware of this at the time we loved the switchback drive through sunset glowing spinifex covered hills, but became increasingly concerned about the possibility of not reaching the campground before darkness fell. Our concern became reality at around the time the sealed bitumen road gave way to what, without doubt was the roughest, most awful section of road we have had the misfortune to drive on. The worst corrugations, combined with washouts & potholes. To make things even worse it was now that we discovered the new “you beaut’ headlamp globes I had fitted just before we left home were absolutely useless on high beam, & just to compound that, one of our driving spotlights had blown a globe! So we were driving what at the time was an unknown distance on a surface which consistently felt like it was ‘vehicle damaging’, with lights not much better than a few candles. The combination of these things meant we were unwilling to change lines to seek the smoothest (ha ha) part of the road for fear of damage, so we hugged the middle of the road, gritted our teeth & hoped we didn’t have too far to go. At various times we consulted our maps & gps, but somehow remained uncertain of just where we were in relation to campgrounds. Our lights were so awful, they failed to illuminate a couple of signs we passed & in my now stressed & tetchy state I stubbornly refused to reverse our rig to get our lights pointing straight at the signs, nor to stop to open up the Tvan where our torches were stored. And so we kept on keeping on, still with gritted teeth & averaging 10 to 20kph until eventually reaching the campground some two hours after dark. Tea was a quick & simple affair that night followed by bed in the Tvan, in basic ‘hatch open’ mode. (Reversing in & setting up ‘properly’ just wasn’t a possibility until we had daylight).