Today it is 19 weeks since we left Tamborine Mountain on a road trip around Australia.
picking up signals!
they are listening
My last post was from the Barrup Peninsula. After leaving Dampier we headed for Exmouth and the start of the Ningaloo Coast. It is also the site of the North West Cape Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station (ADSSC), a facility that contributes to AUKUS by providing signal intelligence and information exchange on nuclear-powered submarines and contributing to the US-Australia military partnership. It is an eerie feeling coming out of the Pindan dirt county to find huge communication towers and satellite tracking installations. Exmouth built as part of the cold war machine in the 1960s is now going to be the site of Australian-built and funded housing for US military personnel working on the base. (worth listening to the 2025 Laurie Carmichael address )
This is American Australia.
Further on down the road we stay at Yardie Creek Homestead and then at Gnaraloo Station- a surfing and snorkelling mecca. There were signs of the recent coral bleaching on the reef but still patches of brilliance survive along with turtles, rays, and a myriad of technicolur fish too various to name.
studio on the road- days when it rains the bed becomes studio with a view to the river
We have hiked across mountains and over ranges, kayaked up rivers and estuaries, snorkelled through coral gardens, watched whales breach as they migrate from the north to the south. Heading south we travelled through Carnarvon then onto Gladstone Bay, Francois Peron National Park, Kalbarri, Gladstone Bay, The Pinnacles Desert before we hit the big smoke of Perth where we got a different dose of art and culture with the Hale Tenger exhibiton at the WA Art Gallery. We catch up with friends in Mandurah, Donnyborook and Baranup. We check out artists studios as part of the Margaret River Open Studios trail,. I visit The Understory at Northcliff, then we are back to National Parks as we round the corner and head east. We dive into bush camps at D’Entrecasteaux, Walpole/Nornulup, Waychinicup, Fitzgerald River, Cape Le Grand and Cape Arid National Parks, then we head through Esperance to Norseman and then the Nullabor Plain working our way home.
So much inspiration. My journals are filling fast with ideas and sketches.
This place we call Australia, this country that pre-colonisation was a place made of many different countries/nations. In ‘Tracing Australia‘ I am trying to track the stories that have been laid over the First Nations stories:,the various migrants - the Moluccan’s, the English, Chinese laborers, black-birded South Sea Islanders, Afghan Traders, Japanese pearl divers and so on. Each with their own contribution and perspective of Project Australia. We are a melting pot that does not yet know how to come together for the greater good of the final recipe.
We have seen Australia, this land, as a place we can use, exploit, pull things out of, a place that services us rather than a place we need to serve and honour.
Being able to walk on country, to camp in wild and remote places, I am reminded of what Australia must have once been like. I ponder what might have been had we been wiser and fairer.
I ponder how we can be wiser and fairer going forward.
