2015/10 Australia trip - Leschenault |
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We needed to do some shopping and find a campsite for Saturday night, often difficult close to towns. We headed into nearby Australind, a funny name for a town but it was created to breed horses in Australia for the Indian market; a business that didn’t work out.
We found a Coles for food shopping and next door, to Sandie’s delight was a café advertising Devon teas (scone, cream, jam, and a cuppa). Then, while we were looking for a shopping centre to buy some shoe glue, we spotted a laundromat, the ideal kind: empty, with parking at the front door, so we could eat lunch while the clothes were dancing in the machines.
By the time we’d finished shopping there wasn’t much day left and we decided to camp at the nearby Leschenault conservation park. Unfortunately our two GPSs sent us to a city park with the same name. Even worse, that park was in the middle of a new housing development and we think that the GPSs had the map of the original road design, but the builders later chose to eliminate through-traffic by omitting all but one of the connecting roads. We could see the road we wanted but the only way out to it was the way we came in!
Leschenault conservation park is on a peninsula, with ocean on one side and a salt water estuary on the other. The first sign we saw was a “risk” warning. Western Australia’s parks have signs warning visitors of the risks of falling, undertows, king waves, snakes, and on and on. This particular sign was for disease carrying mosquitoes, which may be a problem at certain times, but we saw very few.
There was still one campsite available so we were lucky. We set off to see as much as we could before dark. The estuary was full of birds, mainly black swans, but also ducks, pied cormorants, and herons, with ibis and kookaburras in the bush.
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Leschenault (5.28) |
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We also found a pair of splendid fairy wrens. There are blue fairy wrens in most parts of Australia, but Western Australia’s splendid wren males have to be the gaudiest.
Near to the campground was this magnificent tuart tree, with enough convoluted limbs for a Harry Potter movie.
The park’s area has a fascinating history, beginning with eccentric foreigners then the 1960s’ hippies followed by mining companies’ pollution, and now a conservation park.
This was one of the nicest evenings of the trip, sitting outside and watching kangaroos, ibis, and parrots. I’d been trying to get pictures of these Port Lincoln parrots for days 
and now we had parrots all around us, rummaging through the scrub.