2006/08 Australia trip - Rottnest and the quokkas |
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Sunday August 6th
The weather looked reasonable with light winds so we decided to take the ferry across to Rottnest Island to see the quokkas, small marsupials. There are a lot of ferries competing for the traffic, and we ended up on a different ferry from what we 
expected, but it was the one we’d found, so we stuck with it: the Rottnest Express, a high speed catamaran service. Rottnest is out in the Indian Ocean, about a half hour west of Freemantle, an island of limestone and sand, with a number of internal salt
lakes.
We soon found some quokkas, but those in town looked a bit mangy. Quokkas are small marsupials, smaller
than a wallaby. If we’d have been in Tasmania I’d have said they were pademelons, but they looked to have a little more hair than those little guys. Depending on your point of view, they are either small, cute wallabies, or they are large, hopping rats. Certainly the babies are about the size of a European rat.
Our best pictures were taken out amongst the bushes, but some quokkas also hang around restaurants and the shopping centre looking for handouts. Most of those die young as the diet is even worse for them than it is for us. There are also peacocks competing for the same food, and they are much harder to deal with, really mean 
birds. While looking for quokkas we ran into a number of these banded plovers and this very shy stumpy tail,a type of skink.
Rottnest was named by a Dutchman, who obviously saw the quokkas as rats. The British settlers used Rottnest as a prison for aboriginal men, particularly those that didn’t understand the European’s concept of property. Many of the original prison buildings are still there and used today for other purposes. “Rotto” is now a popular holiday spot for the inhabitants of Perth and “Freeo”. The island has a group of volunteers who look after the cemetery and the old buildings and provide information.
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Rottnest Island (13.34) |
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The island is big enough to keep people interested for a week, but, having no transport, we just stayed in the Thompson Bay area. Inland the island has a few lakes, but they are saltier than the ocean, good for the salt trade, but not for any farmers. Later in the day, the rain rolled in, but we were about walked out by then.
Back at the campground in Freemantle, heavy rain and high winds persisted through the night, with occasional lightning and rumble of thunder. This reinforced our earlier decision to skip Western Australia’s south west coast and leave it for a future trip later in the season. We had met too many residents of that area who were up north to avoid the cold and wet and wind of July and August!