6 August 2013 - Domblegabby Rest Area, near Caiguna, Western Australia

We certainly were not the first to break camp this morning, although few were willing to stay long. Norseman could do well to have a little competition. I found out that several folk were delaying their departure, waiting for the Information Centre to open. It is there that the only dump station in town is located, and not accessible until office opening times. According to hearsay, there is a $3 charge for making use of this, which is a bit rich when you have to pay $38 to stay at a caravan park that has no dump facility. I advised our neighbours that one of the rest areas east of Norseman supposedly had a dump site; I had read it in the CMCA book, so they thanked me profusely and headed off, pleased to be ahead of their schedule.

We drove into town and called into the newsagent where we were able to buy today’s Australian, a miracle made possible by airfreight, for which we were very thankful, and even more so because we only had to pay the marked $2 price. Sometimes life is not a rip-off, after all.

Before leaving town, we headed up Beacon Hill, encouraged by the wonderful woman in the Visitors Centre who assured us the road was very caravan friendly. It is not really and the caravan would have been better left at the bottom, however hindsight is a marvellous thing and maybe her own experience amounted to pulling a single axle ten foot caravan some years ago.

However the views were stupendous, well worth the effort. From there we saw the 40 metre high Phoenix Tailings Storage Facility covering twelve hectares of land and holding four million tonnes, fluted by the rains which one day, we fear, will engulf the town and folks of Norseman. Mt Thirsty at 430 metres can be seen to the north-west from the town. Below are the busy workings of Central Norseman Gold, a subsidiary of WMC Limited, which has been mining gold here since 1936. Two underground mines currently operate, producing some 100,000 ounces a year. The mines resulted in water being piped to town, and have added much needed stability to the local community.

A little to the north can be seen Lake Cowan, admired from the gold course yesterday, extending six kilometres south of Norseman and ninety kilometres to Widgiemooltha. As I said yesterday, it is mined for gypsum, for use in ceilings, but originally provided rather salty water for the mines. The Esperance – Coolgardie Highway which we travelled yesterday and several days before that, crosses Lake Cowan about five kilometres north of Norseman on a dolerite dyke, a naturally hard and stable crossing point.

Chris was impatient to be off, so we descended down the Mine Road, and pulled into the service station to fill the tanks. Here we paid $1.69 per litre, uncertain of the prices that lay ahead, but glad to have full jerry cans on the roof for emergencies.

And so we headed off east wondering at what was ahead. The scenic Fraser Range, a series of granite hills surrounded by the world’s largest hardwood forest, was the first we had to cross however one should not consider this a hardship. The road was undulating and never steep, and all very beautiful.

We paused at the Fraser Range Rest Area to confirm the existence of a dump point, and found the rest area to be a very beautiful spot above several semi-lakes, a lovely spot to camp however it was barely morning tea time.

The next on the Nullarbor Links was the Sheep’s Back at the Fraser Range Sheep Station. Here Chris lost two balls in the knee high fodder and called it a round, penalising himself with a score of fifteen, which sounded fair enough. I finished in nine. A couple of travellers who were staying for a couple of nights at the Station chatted with us for a while, watched Chris tee off the first time and then the four of us rummaged around in the long vegetation to no avail. They bid us farewell, concerned that it was their presence that had put Chris off his shot, but once gone could not be blamed for the second loss.

The station was first settled in 1872,  the first to be founded in the Nullarbor Plain area. It comprises vast open grass flats, cleared and quite different from other sheep grazing lands we have come across. Today they diversify with accommodation, a café and a shop, manned by foreign backpackers, such as the young German girl we met today.

We travelled on, stopping at the Mount Pleasant rest stop. The mountain rises to 597 metres ASL however I am not sure whether we were at the summit or simply in the vicinity. We had fun scavenging for firewood after lunch and tied it onto the roof. Our specific plans to have a campfire were non-existant, however we were now ready for any such eventuality.

We drove on, finding that our Tomtom was totally untrustworthy regarding the whereabouts of Balladonia. The road house lies ninety kilometres to the east of Fraser Range Sheep Station, although Tomtom thought it was something else altogether. Still when you are dealing with more than a thousand kilometres, what is an odd thirty or so?

The golf course at Balladonia warned of “snakes” however the weeds were more problematic. We really needed a weed-eater, however we both did the best imitation we could with our clubs. The short fairway took numerous hits and chips and did not delight in the slightest. After we had finally holed our balls, we noticed a couple of chaps waiting to tee off. We wandered back up the “fairway” and chatted for a while. They were paunchy corporate types travelling in a company car, and on their way back to Canberra. They mentioned that a “leather wedge” might be quite useful on a course like this, indicating the toe of their boots. We watched the stoutest one tee off; a powerful shot straight into the mulga. I suspected he would be using his “leather wedge” rather than persevering with his club as I had to arrive at my rather large score.

Before leaving we noted the diesel price here was $2 a litre, and were glad we had refuelled at Norseman. We could have visited the museum that is part of the roadhouse, where one can see more space junk, more of that dropped from the same craft that fell out of the sky at Esperance in 1979, but how much space junk can one enjoy?

The road continued on, soon quite flat and very straight. There is a 145.6 kilometres (or ninety miles, in old-speak) stretch of road that is the longest straight in Australia. I would suggest that there are many long straight stretches on this road that would be the longest; they go on and on. Here though, unlike some of those long stretches across the Mitchell Grass Plains, for instance, the landscape is far more attractive.

We passed several RFDA emergency airstrips but were not required to move to one side for the Flying Doctor. That would indeed be quite a surreal experience, would it not? However we did have to frequently move to the far left to allow wide loads go through. Thirty nine kilometres from the end of that longest straight, we pulled in to this rest area.

There are at least seven other parties in so we are not alone. The sun has already set, we have travelled about 330 kilometres directly east and will cross into another time zone tomorrow. The sky is wide on this flat landscape and the few trees about provide picturesque silhouettes. I have heard a few jets crossing the skies far above; we must be on the flight path between Perth and Adelaide?