12 April 2013 - Tarunda Caravan Park, Fitzroy Crossing, Great Northern Highway, Western Australia

Halls Creek is much maligned, at least by tourist reports we have read and heard over the years. It would be absurd to pretend that it is a tourist destination although it has tried to capture the tourist dollar since it relocated onto the Savannah Way, aka Great Northern Highway.

Western Australia’s first payable gold was discovered here in 1885 by Jack Slattery and Charlie Hall, bringing 15,000 gold frenzied souls to this remote corner of the continent. The rush lasted less than three months but the settlement lived on as a trading centre for cattle stations, aboriginal communities and miners who stayed on in the area.

In 1948 an airfield was built near the site of the current town, about seventeen kilometres north, and over the next decade the old town moved nearer to this site. The highway passed through this new settlement and commercial focus switched to catering to the needs of those travelling through. The old town was abandoned by 1954.

Of course there are stories and legends that have arisen from the history of the place, as does from others. One that has been memorialised in bronze outside the smart Information Centre is that of Russian Jack, a prospector who pushed his sick friend in a wheelbarrow all the way to Wyndham  for medical help.

We had passed an uneventful night in the convenient, though unassuming, caravan park although the loud voices and carousing of the locals could be heard all around in the distance. We were tired from our camping expedition and glad to have our inner sprung mattress once more, so were not disturbed at all.

Waking early and not having to vacate the park until 11 am, we decided to hit the tourist spots before we left town. We headed south on Dawson  Road, an alternative route back to the state border crossing, which passes up the eastern side of Purnululu National Park and Lake Argyle.

China Wall

Just six kilometres from the edge of Halls Creek is a strange rock formation known as the China Wall. This is a sub vertical quartz vein protruding up to six metres from the surrounding surface. The quartz is hard and remains resistant to weathering. Its length is a mystery as the formation is visible from air at several locations en route to the Bungle Bungles. Initially we had understood that the jutting rocky ridges visible here and there all about were the formations we were seeking, but soon found that we were quite wrong. We caught sight of a small sign that took us up a private road and come upon the real Wall. A bonus for the morning.

A dozen kilometres further up the road we came upon the scant remains of Old Halls Creek. There a few stone memorials indicate where the post office and a hotel once stood, and there are also the remains of a mud brick building carefully preserved under a modern roof structure but with no information at all. The town was situated beside a charming creek and we thought the location delightful but the explanatory plaques and signage totally lacking. Given that this is hailed as one of Halls Creek’s tourist spots, more could be done.

We paused by the creek amazed to see a couple of pelicans so far inland but then remembered a film about the pelicans on Lake Eyre when there is water. There was a very large monitor lazing on a rock in the sun watching us out the corner of his eye, preferring to stay put if we would let him. We left them all in peace and moved on.

Lounging lizard

It should be noted that this old town marked the beginning of the famous Canning Stock Route which dates back to 1906, running 1,850 kilometres through the Great Sandy Desert to Wiluna.

We turned back for the new town, but took a side road to Caroline Pool, a camp site noted in the Camps 6 bible. This is an absolutely charming spot obviously popular with picnickers on weekends. Back in town, a town today of just less than four thousand people, and with many plain modern buildings, we found the aimless residents already installed under their favourite trees for the day; a thoroughly human occupation for those who have no paid work, no inclination to waste energy doing housework but a great desire to interact with their fellows. I can actually think of many people I know, mainly women, who live in modern western environments who do just the same but they meet in more sophisticated premises.

Caroline Pool

We filled with diesel delighted to find the price twelve cents a litre less than that paid in Kununurra, then returned to the caravan park, hitched up and headed out with an altogether better impression of Halls Creek than many of our acquaintances have enjoyed (or not enjoyed).

Seventeen kilometres west of the town we passed the turnoff for the Tanami Track. This is the road one should take to visit the world’s second largest meteorite crater at Wolfe Creek. Named after Robert Wolfe, a Halls Creek prospector, it is 870 by 950 metres across. However it lies 152 kilometres to the south of that turnoff and after much debate we had decided that was too far to go see a depression in the ground that was best seen and appreciated from air. And you know that we do not charter aircraft on a whim.

The Tanami Track does intersect the Canning Stock Route, but is more likely to be taken by well equipped 4WD enthusiasts  who wish to travel on down to Alice Springs, a mere 1,050 kilometres or so via the old Tanami goldfields.

However all this is academic because we remained on the sealed road, the highway heading in a more westerly direction on to Fitzroy Crossing. The road carried on across the savannah lands along the excellent surface we have enjoyed all across the top end of the country. After nearly a hundred kilometres, we came to the Mary Pool rest area, a spot that we had earmarked as a possible overnight camp for yesterday although we had instead decided to stay in Halls Creek. Given that it had taken about an hour and a half to arrive at the rest area, I was glad that we had decided to break our journey at Halls Creek rather than arrive late here.

Across to the Mary Pool rest area

Mary Pool is however one of the loveliest free camps we have ever seen and part of me regretted that we had not come on to stay here, or that we did not decide right then to stay on and continue the journey on the morrow. The access road crosses the Mary River on a narrow concrete causeway and enters a beautiful park area of trees. The bird life is amazing and includes egrets, pelicans, cockatoos and corellas. We walked back down to the river where there was the general warning about crocodiles. We suddenly saw what we thought was a small freshie in the water beside us and then realised it was simply a large monitor swimming across to sun warmed rocks.

Views at Ngumpan Cliffs

After lunch we returned to the highway and pressed on a further hundred kilometres to the next rest area at Ngumpan Cliffs, again marked in the travel bible as being a picturesque spot to rest. The short trip to the lookout is currently riddled with corrugations and the recreation area is all barricaded off as a work area. Construction of new picnic structures and amenities is underway and will surely make this an excellent stop, but not today. We paused to photograph the spendid views along the orange cliffs and plain below then pressed on yet again. Chris had remarked only a short time before that it seemed that we had been slowly climbing, and yet generally the road had passed through relatively flat land with a few low ranges both to the north and south, marked on the map but hardly noticed from the road.

From this lookout we swept down to the plain below and it was obviously that we had indeed been climbing after all. The last hundred kilometres passed mainly across the floods plains of the great Fitzroy River although that river, when in flood today, does not normally rise more than twenty metres and extend out from its banks more than fifteen kilometres.

Fitzroy Crossing has a population of 1,500, somewhat smaller than Halls Creek, but also with a negative reputation among fellow travellers. It does however do a better job at promoting its attractions and promotes itself as the “Heart of the Kimberley and Home of Geike Gorge”. I had never before heard of the Geike Gorge but had of course heard the name “Kimberleys” without understanding fully the implications.

The Kimberley is one of the nine regions of Western Australia, situated in the northern part of Western Australia bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts and on the east by the Northern Territory. Several days ago I made an ignorant comment about not being aware that the Kimberley’s had a coast line. Of course it does and if you should examine a map of the north and western coastline, it is evident that there are magical harbours, Sounds, Islands, Points, Bays, Capes; all a paradise for coastal sailors. Much of this is only accessible by boat which makes those places even more tantalising.

Fitzroy Crossing far to the south of that coast sits at 114 metres ASL and became a township around the crossing, the one place on the Fitzroy to be forded by the pastoralists and others who came this way. The first bridge was not built until 1935, replaced by a more substantial structure in 1958 although even this bridge was often closed for months during the monsoonal summer. In 1977 the new bridge south of the crossing moved the focus of the town from its original site. Just two years before the town had been gazetted although it had appeared on maps since 1903. This does establish that Fitzroy Crossing is a relatively new place in the context of European settlement of Australia.

I have already mentioned the population of the town however there are a further 2,000 or so people living in up to fifty aboriginal communities scattered throughout the Fitzroy Valley. Of the total population, about 80% are aboriginal although that drops to about 60% within the town itself.

There are three camping grounds here, the first across the river a couple of kilometres out, the most expensive but the only with a swimming pool. It did look rather lovely. There is another up at the Crossing Inn; we thought it might be a bit noisey being in the grounds of the weekend drinkers so we settled for this one, mid-priced and right in the centre of town. There are few of us here and yet we find it most satisfactory. It will do us well for the next couple of days.