The weather conspired against us once more but we were not to be beaten. Our plans for the day were modest, just a short drive around the immediate environs and to explore the town itself.
Esperance has a population of 14,280 and has all the services one might need in this corner of the world. Its history has been up and down as is the case with most places; it’s not a boom town these days, for sure, especially in the middle of the winter.
Like all places in Australia, it has been home to aborigine people for tens of thousands of years, but it is European history that occupies our interest. The very first European to call by was Captain Pieter Nuyts in his ship, the Gulden Zeepaard, in 1627, although he didn't actually set foot on land but did manage to record some flowering plants. He continued on, mapping 1,500 kilometres of the south coast.
In 1792, two French frigates on another mapping voyage of the coast under the command of Admiral d’Entrecasteaux took shelter in one of the sheltered harbours. The first ship gave its name to the bay, L’Esperance, and the second, Recherche, to the archipelago, the great string of 110 islands and 1,500 islets that protect Esperance from the great Southern Ocean.
Matthew Flinders called by a few years later, in 1802, and named some of those islands, and then Edward John Eyre called briefly with his aboriginal guide.
But it was not until 1863 that the Dempster brothers arrived in the area, having come overland from Northam with their families, guides and over 3,000 head of stock, and that was the beginning of agriculture in Esperance and the surrounding area.
When gold was discovered in Coolgardie in 1892, the throngs of miners and support crew came up through Esperance, arriving by ship and so Esperance became an integral part of the gold rush.
However doom was spelled when the rail reached Coolgardie from Perth in 1908, and Esperance became superfluous as a supply port. The town was reduced to a holiday resort and fishing village, with the struggling pastoralists hanging in where possible.
But then in 1956, a consortium of American companies and the Western Australian Government joined forces, under the title, ELD. This became one of the largest corporate farming projects undertaken in Australia. The project was that 40,000 hectares of scrubland would be taken up and made into farmland each year. The proviso was that half the land had to be sold to ordinary farmers within ten years and the other half to American investors. ELD provided forty blocks each of about 1,000 hectares a year. At least 325 hectares had to be cleared and developed for wheat and / or livestock farming. The application of superphosphate played a large part in the new development too.
With the low cost land on offer, it led to a rush of farming settlements in the Esperance district in the 1960s with people coming from all over Australia, Europe and America. The original concept had collapsed just four years after inception, however once the Government became involved, operation continued through to 2003. The success can be measured by the change in numbers of those involved in farming. In 1954 there were only thirty six farmers in the area, utilising about 8,093 hectares. Today there are about six hundred on more than 404,686 hectares.
The forty kilometre Great Ocean Drive is well documented for the tourist, and we headed off in reverse, hoping the weather would improve by the time we reached the coast.
The Pink Lake, not at all pink now, has high salinities as does the Hutt Lagoon we called into on our way south from Kalbarri. The lake covers an area of ninety nine hectares and is home to significant numbers of Hooded Plovers and Banded Stilts. It is just one in a chain of wetlands that circle the town of Esperance, the others including Lake Warden, Woody Lake and Mullet Lake and like the rest of the wetlands, plays a significant role in wildlife conservation.
We drove on through the coastal scrub to the sea, and up to the wind farm, which like that at Albany, is owned and operated by Verve Energy and takes advantage of the reliable southerly winds. The turbines here are smaller and less in number, but no less impressive, standing high above the very beautiful coastline.
Australia’s very first wind farm, the Salmon Beach Wind Farm, was built, here at Esperance in 1987, then was decommissioned fifteen years later. One of the two turbines is now situated in the museum ground, the other in situ as a memorial to its pioneer status.
But the wind farms we called up to today are at Ten Mile Lagoon, nine turbines built in 1993, and a further six turbines at Nine Mile Beach built ten years later, almost a continuation of the first lot. They operate in tandem with Esperance’s gas turbine power station to provide electricity for the town, because remote as it is, Esperance is isolated from the national or state power grid.
We called into the Ten Mile Lagoon, Nine Mile Beach, Observatory Point, and Twilight Beach, this latter voted Australia’s best beach in 2006. These are all very beautiful, all well-appointed with smart access stairs and lookouts, but the further we drove, now heading eastwards back toward Esperance, the clouds rolled in from the ocean and visibility was appalling. Despite that, and even though the photos I took did not reflect this, the sea was a lovely blue, the clear clean water on such fine white sand beautiful even on such a very dreary day.
After about fifteen kilometres along the coast, we arrived at the outskirts of the town, and passed below very smart modern homes perched high above the sea, contrasting with the rather uninspiring homes in town nearer our camp. We stopped at the Rotary Lookout high above the port and town, an excellent place to enjoy 360 degree views on a better day. After Chris refused to walk further afield in the drizzling rain, I suggested we give up on the sightseeing and head to the museum, which we duly did.
The museum has rather abbreviated opening hours and is staffed by volunteers. We were warmly welcomed and ushered into what was previously the town’s original railway marshalling yards, the goods shed and office.
There is a wealth of exhibits in the museum covering every aspect of Esperance’s history, all well labelled although not as professionally curated as that in Albany. Those that particularly stood out for me were:
·
The wreck of the Japanese owned Sanko
Harvest, a 30,000 deadweight bulk carrier, carrying a cargo of highly soluble
fertiliser and heavy fuel oil, that came to grief on a reef about six miles off
Cape Le Grand in February 1991. The ship broke up over the following two weeks
and released its cargo into the sea. I am sure I can remember this happening,
all the way from New Zealand.
·
The other feature which cannot but impress are the pieces of space junk,
dropped all around the town when the USA’s Skylab space station crashed to
earth in July 1979. It was to have come down in the Indian Ocean, but the
landing was rather miscalculated. The Shire issued the USA with a fine for
littering and that fine was finally paid, in full in 2009, when a radio show
host raised the money and settled the account on NASA’s behalf. I do not recall
any of this but then I was in Vanuatu with a month old baby. Space junk was
definitely low priority.
By the time we emerged from the museum,
the day looked a bit brighter, however I was pleased to head on back to camp
and settle in to the warmth of our little home. The weather forecast for
tomorrow looks promising. Time will tell.
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