It’s been a while! Difficult to connect to the Internet when we’re away from civilization so hence no blog posts for a little while.
It is now May 1 and we’re sailing from Vansittart Bay to the Hunter River where tomorrow we’ll be taking a helicopter ride over the Mitchell Falls. But to recap…
We arrived back in Australia (April 29) for a welcome from Border Force (having spent 2 hrs in Indonesia!) before taking in the sights of Wyndham, this tiny speck of a township at the tip of the Cambridge Gulf, established in 1886 with the Halls Creek gold rush. Once home to several thousand people, it now houses about 600, all of whom — save one — were indoors sheltering from the 38 deg heat. Although Marble Bar has the highest recorded temperatures in Australia, Wyndham holds the record as the country’s hottest place and we can vouch for that.
But today was not about Wyndham, it was about the Bungle Bungle Ranges. Wow! We took off from little Wyndham airport at 9 am in a Cessna for a two hour flight over the Argyle Dam, diamond mine, Ord River and the Bungles, which non-Indigenous Australians hadn’t discovered until the 1980s!
These beehive shaped sandstone domes were formed over 360 million years ago. Each of the bands is a few metres thick. The black bands are algae and the orange ones contain iron oxide. Our visit was near the end of the wet (only two seasons up here —wet and dry), so there was still a lot of greenery.
Equally amazing is the Argyle Dam, opened in 1972. The stats are mind-boggling: when filled to 92 metres above sea level, it contains 21 Sydney Harbours but that’s only 30% of its potential. At maximum capacity, it would hold the equivalent of 40 times the volume in Sydney Harbour, or 35 million mega litres! The dam wall is 98.5 metres high and is made from soil, sand, gravel and stones but no concrete to hold back all that water. Astounding!
These are some of the islands in the dam, indicating it’s not at full capacity.
After landing in Kununurra, a more modern and more populated town near the NT border and 100 kms from Wyndham, we lunched at the pub and then were bused back to the ship by Keith, a local legend, who by his own admission can talk under water. We learnt more than we ever wanted to know about the area from this former pharmacist turned bus driver.
Now for the great-grandfather story. This is about my paternal grandmother’s father, a Frenchman called Adhemar Jean Constant de Raeve, who after the death of two wives in Brisbane and divorcing a third in Sydney, made his way to WA in the 1920s, employed as an industrial chemist in Wyndham. And it was here that he died in September 1929 from cirrhosis of the liver and, according to the death certificate, is buried in “Wyndham Cemetery.”
Who was to know that there are no less than three cemeteries in this tiny town. I chose to explore the one closest to the ship (about a 1500 metre stroll) called Gully Cemetery, but no luck in finding Great-Grandpa. I did however meet the only local I’d seen on the Wyndham streets, a one-armed elderly lady whose right forearm was devoured by a crocodile some years back while she was walking across a small bridge over a creek! He mustn’t have liked her smile!
Keith, the loquacious bus driver, has kindly offered to check out the other cemeteries for me and email me a picture if he finds the de Raeve grave (they were a good 5 km away from our ship, so too far to walk). I suspect however that he lies in an unmarked grave like the many I saw in the Gully Cemetery.
Fabulous day which ended, like all the days on board, with fascinating lectures from our Expedition leaders. On to Koolama Bay tomorrow (April 30) and the King George Falls.