2006/08 Australia trip - Wave Rock |
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Our destination was the town of Hyden and the famous Wave Rock. This is one of the pictures from ancient encyclopedias that has stuck in my mind for fifty years or more. The reality is much more than those ancient photographs. The “wave” is just the lowest part of an enormous hill of granite, Hyden Rock, very different from all the scenery around it. The wave cliff really does look like an enormous wave about to break and it dwarfs the little humans at its base.
It’s best seen late in the day when the setting sun lights up the wave without shadows from the trees. It’s well worth a visit, even though the view is marred by a knee-high wall that is cemented into the top of the wave. It looks like it was put there to save tourists from rolling down the hill and over the cliff, but it’s actually there to redirect scarce rainwater from the hill’s upper slopes to the town’s reservoir, so it’s unlikely to ever be removed. The town gets little rainfall, so perhaps that is why the park area is administered by the Shire of Hyden rather than by the state: so they can keep their wall in place.
We met a German couple and took pictures of each other cavorting on the rock, but their picture of us was a bit washed 
out by the extreme contrast. We climbed up the hill which is largely barren granite, and found strangely eroded boulders with holes and splits. I climbed up to the top of the rock, hoping for a good sunset view, but the sun just dropped into thicker cloud and was gone.
We stayed at the campground next door, and found that as we were residents on the night of August 8th, census day, we had to fill in a census form for the Australian government. What would have happened if we had been at Dryandra on the 8th? We would have gone unrecorded and the head count for Australia would be two short.
Wednesday August 9th
It was a cold night, close to a frost, but it was nice to see the sun again in the morning. We looked at some of the other formations of Hyden Rock. The Hippo’s Yawn looks just like that, a piece of strange erosion that allows humans to go and stand in the hippo’s mouth. The Breakers are another wave formation nearby and they would be famous too if they weren’t upstaged by Wave Rock itself.