23 July 2013 - Big4 Albany Gardens Holiday Resort, Albany, Western Australia

Prior to travelling around Australia, my husband and I had spent the better part of a quarter of a century in Whangarei, New Zealand, where, when I first settled there in 1983, my sister warned  that I should carry an umbrella with me every day; that was the way of the weather in Whangarei. It would seem that Albany is much the same, or at least through the winter months. In fact there are many similarities between Whangarei and Albany; the sheltered harbour, the lack of sophistication, the down-to-earth basic honesty of the place, too far from the cultural centres of the region, close to simply gorgeous holiday spots. Although Whangarei is less than 200 kilometres from Auckland and its international airport, and Albany is twice that distance from Perth and its airport. Our family will be pleased to hear that we are in no hurry to settle in Albany. But today there has been no rain, so far.

Today we headed out to National Parks and the like, to the east of the city; Two Peoples Bay Nature Reserve and the Gull Rock National Park. We drove out along a road that takes one north and then east around the edge of Oyster Harbour. We passed many more modern homes than we had seen as we had travelled about the town and thought this might be the area where more social climbing types might choose to settle, however I suspect we will remain ignorant of the social geography of the place despite the fact we will end up spending eight days here.

The Two Peoples Bay Nature Reserve lies thirty five kilometres east of Albany, includes two secluded beaches which face east, protected from the Southern Ocean by a headland formed by the granite mountain of Mount Gardiner. The nature reserve was established in 1967 to protect the threatened Noisy Scrub-bird and its habitat.

On arrival, we found ourselves the only ones there, the Information Centre locked and the numerous exhibits and interpretative boards inside barely visible through the windows and out of reach of interested parties such as us. Likewise the modern looking toilets were locked, a fact we found very frustrating.

The correct name for the bay is “Baie de Deux Nations”, a far more logical and grammatical name, however the French word “nations” has been translated as “peoples”. It arises from an incident in 1803 when an American whaling ship used the sheltered waters to lay anchor at the same time as the French vessel “Naturaliste” (which keeps cropping up as we travel about the southern reaches of the continent).

By the late 1830s, American, British and eastern Australian whaling ships had moved from the over fished Pacific Ocean to the south coast of Western Australia. During the whaling season up to twelve ships anchored in Two Peoples Bay.

Much later, in the 1840s to be more precise, the naturalist John Gilbert discovered the rat kangaroo or Potoroo and the Noisy Scrub-bird here.

Today we set off on the heritage walk about the reserve, up the hill to a series of lookouts where we noted the cone shaped burrows of the potoroos but no evidence of this rabbit sized pointy faced critter, which is no surprise given it is nocturnal like so many of Australia’s amazing fauna.

Across the seaweed at Two Peoples Bay

The track then headed back down to the shoreline, but was barricaded off with flimsy plastic tape, easily stepped over. Down we went, through a charmingly intimate picnic spot and then to a dead end against a large granite rock. We crawled around the side of this to find ourselves on a rather dodgy ledge between the steep hill and the waves. Great stock piles of brown seaweed lay all along the shore where there should have been a seaside pathway. We made our way carefully along over this, feeling our way with our walking poles, Chris going ahead. In fact there were no problems at all; when we arrived back at the “boat ramp”, we saw that this must have been out of order for some time and will not be until excavators arrive to dig through the mountains of sea vegetation.  

We lunched in the picnic area near this, under the close scrutiny of at least a dozen magpies. In fact, “scrutiny” is an understatement, more under siege. As soon as the sandwiches came out of our Tupperware sandwich-savers, we were swooped upon by birds who had done this before, obviously with great success, but not today. We armed ourselves with branches of dead trees and sat eating, our lunch in one hand and weapons in the other. The birds did not give up until bread and fruit was consumed and we moved on to the thermos for our cups of coffee. Top marks for courage, to both the birds and ourselves.

We left the Reserve, having seen neither Scrub-bird nor Potoroo, and drove back along the road, initially heading toward Albany, but turning south to Ledge Bay, this on the northern shore of the King George Sound. Today with the northerly winds, the white sandy beach was sheltered and warm in the sunlight. There is one walking trail here, up to Mt Martin and to the beach directly across the channel into Oyster Bay from Emu Point. The track is marked “difficult” and I saw no merit in exhausting myself.

Back on the road toward Albany, we detoured through the suburbs of King River and Bayonet Head, where great swathes of subdivision and construction are going on. And then back to camp in time for Chris to give the landcruiser a good clean in readiness for its service tomorrow.