The Pilbara

9 July - Eighty Mile Beach

Derby and Broome lie at about the same latitude as Cairns. Northern Australia from Cairns north and west to Broome is often known as the Top End, or Tropical North - an area of fairly constant temperatures with seasons determined by rainfall. The Wet or the Dry. Well, that’s the theory. For the last week, the north west has had pelting rain, floods and road closures!

We were lucky in Broome. We managed to pick up a camping site at Cable Beach due to a cancellation. When we got there, we found out why. The poor sods who had our site in this totally booked-out town were camping in tents and were flooded out.

Broome is very touristy, a bit like Byron Bay with fewer hippies and more indigenous Australians. The town itself had little to offer us. A few pubs, over-priced pearl jewellery shops, plus the usual suspects of clothing and souvenir stores, are of little interest to us. Cable Beach, where we stayed, was the real attraction, with 22kms of white sandy beaches. The patrolled beach, close to the resorts, but a couple of hundred metres from our caravan park, was packed. Camel rides are the thing to do on Cable Beach. So we didn’t, just to be different! Forty or so camels plodding along the beach amongst the 4x4s and “Naturists” choosing to parade their wares, made for a very different beach scene.

The drive from Broome to our beach side caravan park at Eighty Mile Beach was far less interesting than the northern part of the Kimberleys. The flat plains seem to stretch for ever. At one point, we spotted a herd of wild camels strolling along, silhouetted against the steely grey sky. No flash saddles for these descendents of the ’Afghan Camel Trains’ that moved freight through remote Australia more than 100 years ago. Today, these feral herds are the world’s last remaining wild camels.

Eighty Mile Beach is about 350 kms from Broome and 250 kms from Port Hedland and there is nothing in between in either direction. So, to drive up 10 kms of dirt track from the remote highway junction to find hundreds of caravans and tents is a bit of a shock! This is a very popular fishing spot. We’ll try our luck tomorrow, but it’s very different beach fishing to what we are familiar with. The tides here can be as much as 8 metres between high and low, the beach is more than a kilometre wide at low tide and the water is very shallow at high tide.

The number of travellers like us on the road continues to amaze us. No matter where we go, roadhouses, beaches, bush camps, caravan parks or just on the open roads, thousands of nomads, backpackers and, at school holiday time, holidaying families, are hitting the road. We meet people who live in their vans or motor homes. They have no other home. Others regularly abandon their homes in ‘miserable’ cold places like Victoria for the winter and camp at one regular spot for six months every year. Many, like us, are just roaming about.


11 July - 90 kms south of Port Hedland

Ore trains over 7 kms long; tankers lining the horizon; red iron oxide dust covering everything. This is where it is all at. Port Hedland is one of Australia’s largest ports and, along with the coal ports of central Queensland, exports the enormous mineral wealth of the nation. Forty years ago there was nothing on the desolate Pilbara Coast. Today, the ore trains, dragged by eight locomotives, lumber in and out of town 24 hrs a day. Six mineral tankers are loading at the same time on the docks. Further out on the point, work continues around the clock to expand the loading facilities to eight tankers at a time. This is what kept Australia out of the recession over the past year or so.

Other than its significance as the port for the Pilbara mines, Port Hedland has nothing more to recommend it. Everything is red. The dust from the ore stockpiles covers the town. Every roof, every road, all the cars, every surface is red!

The industry supporting the mines and the port draws more than the normal Road Train traffic. Even though it’s Sunday, a truck roars past our camping area every few minutes.