2015/10 Australia trip - Cape Naturaliste |
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Sunday October 18th 
We made an early start, gone before the fee collector showed up, so this was another free campsite. We stopped in Australind for diesel and water, only to find that the tap was another that had to be held down and then delivered water at full blast. It was hard to tell how much actually went down the pipe to the tank.
We bypassed the town of Bunbury, and continued down the coast. Having seen that tuart tree we wanted to see what a whole forest of them looked like so we went to the Tuart Forest national park. We drove through a narrow gap in the fence into what we thought was a parking lot, but turned out to be the beginning of a cross country sand track 
through the forest.
In some respects it was a disappointment as the tuarts there were more like big shiny elms, but beneath them was an understory of arum lilies, thousands of them, some filling the space inside stumps. It was a magnificent sight even though half the blooms were finished. We’d seen a few in the woods around Melbourne but never like this. However, we’d not seen any mention of the lilies’ flower display in any of the brochures, and, sure enough, arum lilies come from South Africa and are a “declared pest” in the state.
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Tuart Forest (3.25) |
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Nevertheless, it was a pretty drive through the forest and we ploughed our way along the track and came out onto a gravel road which seemed to be on mining land with a big fence to keep intruders out except that we were on the inside! Eventually we found a hole where someone else had got frustrated enough to drive through the fence and we escaped.
The plan was to camp at Leeuwin-Naturaliste, a national park that has many pieces scattered along the southwest coast between Cape Leeuwin and Cape Naturaliste. I thought that was an odd name, part Dutch and part French, and then it occurred to me that although most of the towns in the state have aboriginal or British names the geographical locations like capes and bays do not.
We Brits tend to think of Captain Cook being the discoverer of Australia back in 1770, but he only sailed up the east coast. The Dutch had already been sailing up Australia’s west coast for 150 years, trading in spices with what is now Indonesia. They thought that what they called New Holland was mostly dry and worthless so all they did was name the bits they saw from ships like the Leeuwin.
Twenty years after Cook, Frenchman Bruny D’Entrecasteaux explored the south coast with his ships, the Esperance and the Recherche. We’d be visiting places with those names in a couple of weeks.
Ten years later France and Britain were at war and both countries sent expeditions to map the unknown coasts. Nicolas Baudin sailed around the southwest with his ships the Geographe and the Naturaliste. Amongst his crew were Hamelin, Leschenault, Francois Peron, and Freycinet, all names we’d encountered on our trips.
The British sent Matthew Flinders and he sailed along the south coast and met up with Baudin at what he named Encounter Bay. Despite being at war, the explorers shared maps and agreed to honour each other’s namings. The British eventually partly reneged on this, unable to accept Golfe Bonaparte as a name, and instead used Flinders’ Spencer Gulf (named after one of Princess Di’s ancestors.) Flinders subsequently mapped the entire coastline and his name appears everywhere; he also gave the continent its modern name of Australia.
We drove around Geographe Bay to Cape Naturaliste to see the lighthouse and the scenery. There were plenty of new flowers to be seen too but it was wet when we arrived and then
while we were at the lighthouse we were soaked by torrential rain. We never saw any scenery. Instead, thoroughly soggy we drove to nearby Dunsborough to get warm and have lunch and check emails at another Dome Café; seems to be a chain.
In a brief sunny spell we carried on to Conto’s Field and set up camp in a pretty but rather soggy site. The collecting ranger said that this rain was rare; normally it had stopped raining by now and it would be dry until Easter. We’d heard that kind of story before!
We walked the Caves Trail but never got that far, too many flowers along the trail. Sandie found her first orchids of the trip, three kinds.
We also heard what sounded like machinery that needed oiling, but it turned out to be a gang of white-tailed black cockatoos demolishing a fruit tree. It was nearly dark and this was the only picture that was at least recognizable.
We had a cold and damp evening, no sitting out this time. I’d bought some shoe glue in Australind and spent some time gluing my boot’s sole back on.
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Black cockatoos (0.41) |
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