Em and Stu Do Australia Part 1: WA’s Warlu Way

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Two weeks. Travelling 3000 kilometres of WA’s most unforgiving stretches of bitumen throughout the Pilbara. With a 10-month-old. In lowest-budget possible campervan.

This was way down the list of Stu’s and my preferred methods both of conveyance and accommodation for the first road trip of the first month of our national trip.

Camping with baby: completely idyllic. I am very calm.

But COVID-19 impacts on price and availability of all secondhand cars and camping vehicles, and on the price and availability of accommodation, combined with the ironclad restraints of a pre-saved budget which must last six months, narrowed the options to one: a Britz Voyager, aka Big Bertha.

It quickly became apparent that trying to nap a baby twice a day in tiny campervan in 35-degree sun was in practical terms more akin to placing baby, like a cake, in an oven. We became swiftly adept at blocking every chink of light with homemade blackout curtains; drove around with Terminator-style scenario calculations whirring as if through special X-ray glasses; calculated the thinnest possible fabrics in which a baby might feel secure yet not overheat; and evaluated every tree in terms of how much shade it might produce at a certain hour at which the sun would shine from a certain angle.

Stu and I picnic at a park while waiting out Augie’s afternoon nap.

When we found desired shade spot (rarely at actual caravan park):

Set up portacot in exactly portacot-sized floor space, remove all hazards from reach of wily baby, put up the curtains, direct tiny fan in optimum direction. Go through whole sleep-routine rigmarole, projecting calm to baby while sweating bullets and wondering in panic to self what will happen if baby never naps again. Sweaty baby falls asleep in sweaty arms, put baby down, creep out van, slam shut heavy door holding breath at the noise. When he wakes in 45 minutes unpack whole setup, go about day. Three hours later, repeat. In evening, repeat.

After first night on tiny wooden “bunk” above Augie’s head (Augie was in the spot the main bed was supposed to pull out into) Stu cut and run – thankfully not back to Perth, just to a borrowed hiking tent outside. But someone had to be on Augie duty inside and I was the one who fit in the coffin, ah, I mean, on the board.

I heard a noise. Was there a noise?

I learnt to creep inside the van at 9pm, shut the metal sliding door as quietly as possible, pretend to be part of the curtain for a while, holding breath and sweating, and once Augie had stopped rolling around glaring and squinting in half-woken irritation, wondering who had dared disturb his slumber, climb noiselessly Spiderman-style on to board above his head and spend night without turning over, using light on phone to check time, or getting up to pee.

Ever.

Stu tells me he was eating Doritos and watching Netflix in his tent each night.

Somewhere around the return approach to Port Hedland I began to entertain fever-dreams of flying back to Broome with Augie and letting Stu drive all the way back in one hit, but even this escape was denied me as the planes were apparently a) made of solid gold and b) did not fly on Wednesdays.

Stu and Augie staying warm at Tom Price.

Notwithstanding these character-building (surely?) experiences, we managed to have others that were unforgettable for the right reasons as we followed the Warlu Way, a driving route that highlights Aboriginal legends in which the mighty Dreamtime sea serpent Warlu emerges from the sea and journeys inland, then north to the Kimberley.

We visited a place I have reported on for years: Murujuga National Park on the Burrup Peninsula off Dampier, the world’s largest rock art gallery. It contains more than 1 million images over thousands of hectares of spectacular rocky hills, including the world’s first known depiction of a human face. It’s regularly in the news because of the proximity of heavy industry, namely the Woodside Pluto gas plant, the Rio Tinto iron ore port and the Yara Pilbara fertiliser plant, and the continuing open question of whether combined acidic emissions from these industries are causing the rock art (subject to a World Heritage nomination in progress) to deteriorate more swiftly than ordinary weathering would cause, and thereby to damage the prospects of the heritage listing.

The colours of Murujuga.

I thought I was familiar with Murujuga. I knew the closeness of industry to the art. I knew the media-approved images of specific rock art motifs (not all are allowed to be photographed for cultural reasons: for example, no images of humans). But it was another thing entirely to see the art, at least that portion of it an easy-access tourism boardwalk was designed to showcase, including a thylacine drawn by humans who saw them extant, thousands of years ago. And what some believe is a mangguru, a fat-tailed kangaroo that lived 40,000-50,000 years ago.

An Indigenous guide from the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation yelled an entreaty to the spirits inhabiting the place before we entered, to let us safely pass through.

Turns out it’s not just a few isolated pictures on rock.

The potential mangguru.

We saw not only tens of pictures, large and small, just in this tiny area, but also the beauty of the actual landscape these images exist in, a gallery whose architecture is as beautiful as its paintings, which can never be moved to hang on any other wall. To see the place is to understand why Aboriginal people lived and learned and painted there over tens of thousands of years. And why it is World Heritage-worthy.

We also saw the colossal processing plants Woodside and Yara have built only a few hundred metres away, belching steam and fire.

I am not qualified to know whether the scientific work done thus far on the potential deterioration of the rock art from acidic emissions is definitive, and much more knowledgeable people than me (all with opposing and sometimes vested interests) disagree.

Industry on left and right as viewed from the tourist boardwalk.

But feelings can’t be right or wrong, and seeing these two sights juxtaposed, so closely, makes me feel that the appropriateness of this co-location, and of approving the expansion and extension of Woodside’s gas processing as proposed, especially in light of a World Heritage nomination process, is about something more than whether the emissions are harming the art itself.

Perhaps nowhere else in the country is the clash of cultural, environmental, tourism and economic values more obvious than in the Pilbara – as long seen by tourists on their drives, but most recently highlighted by the Juukan Gorge disaster – and perhaps nowhere else in the Pilbara is this juxtaposition more visually striking than at Murujuga.

From Dampier we drove inland to explore Karijini National Park using Tom Price as a base, and having our now 11-month-old in tow guided our choices of what to see in this vast park in the three days available.

Murujuga’s rocky hills descend to the gorgeous Hearson’s Cove.

Old Emma chose hikes based on doing the most difficult things she was even potentially physically capable of. She had things to prove to herself and the world and was determined to make use of every minute spent in a national park. New Emma chooses the easiest possible thing to do with a baby…

… and finds out how hard that is.

Nevertheless, there is plenty to do in Karijini carrying a baby; we still ran out of time.

Happily for Stu, a side effect of having Augie means I can’t take an additional hour to do every hike purely for photography purposes. Augie makes his displeasure known when you stop to have a drink of water, take a photo, read an interpretive sign, appreciate nature, etc. He greatly enjoys rock pools but is not satisfied with paddling and feels the need to plunge bodily in, behaviour not compatible with nappy-wearing. Changing to swim nappies adds a new layer of palaver to every hike, so his chuckles of delight at paddling quickly turned to screams of rage.

Nonetheless, Fern Pool, Fortescue Falls, Hamersley and Joffrey gorges all proved utterly spectacular places to pass an “awake window”. A special memory is succumbing to the temptation of Fern Pool and swimming its entire icy breadth to discover that it is named Fern Pool for the cool, dark caves full of maidenhair fern behind the waterfalls.

One of us was on Toy Duty in the back of the van at all times and couldn’t see much, so we took turns driving, for Karijini treated the driver to a gorgeous show of greenery, towering rock and wildflowers that make you realise why this is such an excellent time of year to see it.  

On the descent to Fortescue Falls.

Our last stop was Eighty Mile Beach, an unusually shady and well-appointed caravan park set in the region of the globally significant wetland. It wasn’t turtle nesting season, so we couldn’t enjoy this local attraction, but we did get to spend half an hour on the beach appreciating the uninterrupted vista that gave the beach its name. A thick blanket of shells carpeted one strip of beach, and closer to the water, countless little shelled critters scurried. It was just astounding; when you crouched to look every square foot of sand had at least two or three little crabby creatures crawling about with a fancy house on its back. I was hard pressed to convince Augie to Just Watch and Not Touch. And filling the caravan park were numerous waterbirds – Eighty Mile Beach is a hotspot for migratory species and Augie’s first word other than Mumma and Dad has been “bird” of which we are very proud.

I don’t want to harp on about it, but I will point out that these protected and celebrated destinations are not immune from the uneasy coexistence between environment and industry in the Pilbara either. We viewed Rio Tinto’s Marandoo mining operations within Karijini itself, which trains ore to the Dampier port at Murujuga, and the Eighty Mile Beach wetlands are within the footprint of an immense proposed energy project beginning to attract controversy.

On our last morning, a beautiful pink sunrise marked the end of our first camping-with-a-baby experience. I was glad we hadn’t flown back from Port Hedland after all.

But we were very grateful to return to Broome, to the refuge my old friend Hannah so generously let us call home base for July: a real home with a bathroom, and a floor, and ceiling fans and airconditioning, and a palm-bordered grassy backyard for Augie to play in and learn to throw balls for the patient Dusty.

At Hannah’s, we bid Bertha good riddance and picked up the 4WD rental for the next leg: the Dampier Peninsula.

Joffrey Falls. Augie contemplating the future.

JOBS TALLY
Bookshops visited: 1. Parmas eaten: 1

Broome’s Magabala Books, one of Australia’s biggest Indigenous publishers, is well worth a visit with its books on sale inside.

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Dampier’s rough as guts and thoroughly enjoyable Mermaid Hotel. A massive parma, rating 8/10.