27 July 2013 - Wave Rock Caravan Park, Hyden, Western Australia

 I am sure the farmers of the wheat belt woke happy this morning, happy to hear the rain still falling gently upon the land. While we empathised with the farmers, we were not as happy with the prospect of sightseeing yet again through a veil of rain.

I was regretful that we had done yesterday’s journey so little justice. Narrogin had been but a refuelling spot for us but could have offered so much more in better weather. Here there is the Dryandra Woodland that offers walks and the sort of education we enjoy, but not in inclement weather.

Kulin apparently offers spectacular shows of wildflowers in the season. Here the flowering gum, eucalyptus macrocarpa, a particularly beautiful tree is the emblem of the town. Kulin is also the beginning of the Tin Horse Highway, a celebration of the Kulin Bush Races, which are held in October every year, and beyond. Through the driving rain yesterday, we had noted two very colourful tin horse sculptures beside the road, obviously part of this artistic trail.

Before we left our excellent little caravan park in Kulin, Chris sat crunching the numbers with his log book in hand and discovered that the landcruiser’s performance yesterday before refuelling at Narrogin, had been abysmal; a mere 4.7 kilometres per litre, in fact the worst ever performance throughout our entire travels.

We drove on up through the rain, the road through from Kulin to Kondinin following an old railway line, overgrown with weeds and in some places sagging into the salt lakes we passed. Checking the map, I decided that Kondinin’s grain silos must be unloaded into trains coming south from Narambeen, before or after they travel on east to Karlgarin and Hyden. Once the whole of this region was networked with rail, now so many of them are closed.

We passed fields of blooming golden canola crops, and even more golden flowering Australian wattle growing beside the road, the great litter of Paddy or Ghan melons strewn on the bare muddy edge of grain crops and flooded drains, sometimes reaching across part of the road. Already there was evidence of ground saturation and that if it kept on coming down, there might be floods rather than welcome irrigation. Traffic approached us with their headlights shining; Chris reckoned they were not used to driving in the rain hence the overkill of safety precautions.

The small towns we passed through were as uninspiring as those passed through yesterday; rain mist and rain drenched towns, puddles and the absence of people tend to convey that image.

As we approached Hyden, we were overtaken at speed by a big white ute with “Ngati Porau” plastered across the rear windscreen; we spent the next five minutes trying to remember where that Maori tribe were most prevalent. I thought we might ask the driver if we caught up however I suspect he had reached Norseman or Esperance before we pulled into Hyden.

There, at Hyden, we saw a crowd of school girls gathered at the side of the netball courts; play was proceeding despite the rain. We found the newsagent, doubling as the post office, the supermarket, the scrapbooking shop and half a dozen other small shops in the same complex, a welcome refuge from the rain staffed by a delightful young woman who informed us the Weekend Australian would be in on Monday. We settled for the Weekend West which had only had to come from Perth.

A couple of kilometres to the east of the town, we pulled into the Wave Rock resort. The caravan park is run in the same way that Kings Canyon or Uluru are, except there seems to be no aborigine benefit here. Our reception was faultless, friendly and informative. We were handed a bundle of useful information and asked for $38. We had considered we might spend two nights here, however learning the tariff, we decided we would make do with one.

We set up and had lunch quickly before heading off to do all that we might otherwise have taken two days to do. Fortunately the showers had cleared, for the moment.

We drove sixteen kilometres north from Wave Rock to The Humps and Mulka’s Cave, most of the road sealed with just the last couple of kilometres deep slushy slippery mud. We started with a visit to Mulga’s Cave, where we saw some of the four hundred and fifty separate handprints and images on the walls, the largest collection of Aboriginal paintings in the south west of Western Australia.

The exact use of the cave is unknown, however the cave gets its name from a legend style story which serves to warn people from breeding across family barriers, a rather gory story. The aborigines have a complex set of relationship taboos, which basically guard against incest and inbreeding. The rules have been explained several times in museums; however I cannot begin to get my head around it all. The system is apparently successful, because they managed to survive for fifty thousand years or so in an isolated part of the world.

There we set off for the two walks on offer, the Kalari Trial, 1,670 metres up and over the granite humps standing high above the plains of grain and salt lakes and then 1,220 metres through acacias, rock sheoaks and sandalwood bush, the Gnamma Trail, named for the rock waterholes or gnamma. While the rain had ceased, water continued to stream down over the rocks, showing the colour of the geology at its best. At the summit, we lent into the wind and lower down that same wind whistled through the sheoaks, sounding like waves crashing on a rocky shore. Beautiful natural gardens grew in basins of earth and rock, bright with colour, all quite incongruous on the otherwise bare rock.

On the flat ground around the granite outcrop, we jumped across flooded temporary streams and stepped around full waterholes. These same waterholes when empty can seem devoid of life, but when it rains a dramatic change comes over them. These basins burst into life as seeds, spores and eggs lying dormant in the mud hatch and multiply. Crustaceans such as fairy shrimps, seed shrimps, water fleas and clam shrimps breed quickly in the warm shallow water. Tadpoles and then frogs feed on them, attracting birds, lizards and snakes. The circle of life resumes. Today we could hear the frogs but as usual, not catch sight of even one.

Glorious flora on The Humps

The Humps are one of four major rock ‘islands” in the Hyden area, the others being Wave Rock, King Rocks and Graham Rock. All four are “inselbergs” or island mounts. Being massive blocks of granite with few open fractures, they have withstood the weathering action of the wind and water and are now left towering above the softer more erosion prone landscape around them.

The small patch of woodland around the Humps is dominated by huge old salmon gums, the same we have admired along the side of the roads travelled today and most of yesterday. They are such graceful trees particularly when they stand in isolation along the road side. They generally do not grow to more than twenty five metres in height, yet are the tallest trees growing in the eucalypt woodlands of this area. Their presence alerted farmers to the quality of the soil; they do like the best to grow in. It is also interesting to note that their tap root often extends as far below ground as the tree is high.

Satisfied with our brisk walks through this bonus site, one we had not been aware of before our arrival in Hyden, we set off along Woolocutty Soak Road in search of the Rabbit Proof Fence. The receptionist at the caravan park had alerted us to its whereabouts and we were keen to see it for ourselves.  The State Barrier Fence South Section, or Rabbit Proof Fence, was originally erected between 1901 and 1907 in a desperate attempt to hold back the advancing masses of pasture eating bunnies, making their way across from Victoria. The fence is located between Starvation Bay, east of Esperance on the South Coast, to the Ninety Mile Beach, east of Port Hedland, spanning a distance of 1,827 kilometres. It used 1,800 tonnes of materials in its construction and in addition to this, posts were cut from the adjoining bush wherever possible. It has long since fallen into ruin, and it was with some difficulty that we did in fact find a remnant back from the road.

One of Hyden's many artworks

We headed back into town, to refuel with diesel. On check-in we had been given a 4 cents-a-litre discount voucher for the Liberty Fuel outlet. There are three fuel retailers in this little town of 500 people, and we were keen to check prices before cashing in on the voucher. Liberty’s price was $1.71 a litre, another independent outlet had his diesel at $1.70 and the unmanned BP pumps were almost ten cents cheaper again. We did not fall for the Liberty sales trick and filled instead at the electronic pumps, taking a lot longer to do so as we worked our way through the directions.

We spent some time near the railway station, admiring a series of artworks constructed from scraps of metal and off cast rubbish, all very clever and offering a serious commentary on the history of European settlement of the town and surrounds.

Hyden was only settled in the 1822, although surveyors, sandalwood cutters and gold prospectors had passed through before. By the end of World War I, Kondinen was already an established town, and by 1920 farms had been taken up as far east as Karlgarin. The first blocks in the area were taken up by men who generally worked part-time at clearing their land while they earned a living on more established farms further to the west. As cropping gradually became more established, the arduous trek to Kondinin to deliver bagged grain became just too hard, physically and economically. The Old Kondinin Road was just terrible and transport was far from reliable. Consequently, bagged wheat was stock piled in Hyden, pending the arrival of the much sought after railway line. By the time trains finally arrived in 1932, there were 60,000 bags of wheat waiting to be shipped out. I do wonder how many years of harvesting these represented and what the life is for a bag of wheat!

Today farmers still struggle with their existence here across the Belt, battling climate and economic change, but then that is the way of agriculture. Today, Saturday 27 July, they were happy, with the rain and celebrating with a sports tournament in town; netball, hockey and AFL football with those down from Bruce Rock.

In the late 1950s the Hyden Progress Association began to explore ways of catering for the increasing numbers of visitors coming to see the unusual wave-like formation carved out of the flank of Hyden Rock. Wave Rock attracted international interest when a photograph of it won a major competition in New York in 1964. The photograph was reprinted in National Geographic and the rest, as they say, was history. Little further promotion was required.

From the local tourism committee grew the Hyden Tourist Development Company, a locally owned organisation which now employs more than seventy local people. The motel was built, and subsequently upgraded; the roadhouse came next, followed by the caravan park at the Rock and then the Resort. In 1998 the new airstrip was opened delivering just some of the 140,000 visitors who come to Hyden each year.

Next it was time for us to see what we had come for; Wave Rock. We returned to the caravan park, parked the landcruiser and set off on foot on three of the available trails; the Wave Rock Walk, Hyden Rock Walk and Hippo’s Yawn Loop, completing the last stage as the afternoon was winding up and the ring-necked parrots and galahs were circling ready to roost.

Chris walking beneath The Wave

The geology of Wave Rock is very much like that of the Humps, and as impressive. Here however is the Hyden Dam, right up on top of the rock, which supplied the town’s water supply right up to the year 2000. Wave Rock, a granite cliff, striped spectacularly with algae, is over 100 metres long and more than fifteen metres high.  In 1960, crystals from Hyden Rock were dated as being 2,700 million years old, amongst the oldest in Australia. Actually that is a fact that makes my eyes glaze over too; rocks are old, that is just a fact.

Back at the caravan, we patted ourselves on the back; we had done everything we wanted to at Wave Rock, albeit at high speed, and we could move on again tomorrow. However it must be said, that while this park is exorbitantly priced, it is very nice; modern, immaculate, really without fault. Yet one should not overlook the fact that there is a $7 per vehicle fee to view Wave Rock, so perhaps the all-inclusive tariff of $38 is not so bad after all? And the long detour trip has been worth every litre of diesel.