Lake Nallan proved to be a haven from the strong winds blowing from the north, fuel consumption is bad enough in the Landcruiser without battling head winds. The Great Northern Highway, from Perth to Port Hedland has to be one of the busiest highways in outback Australia. The road is in good condition and a tribute to WA transport, noticeably better than many of the roads that we travelled over the east. Just look at the map of WA to see how remote the route of this highway is. Most of the vehicles travelling north were road trains carrying machinery to support the enormous mining industry. Most of the road trains heading south were empty, going back for more freight. Many vehicles were wide loads, the wider ones up to 8 metres wide. These had special escort vehicles and the UHF CB in our vehicles proved to be greatly beneficial, channel 40 being the communication to truckies, road workers and fellow caravanners who saw sense and ignored the recommended ch 18.
A free camp at Gascoyne River, Middle Branch gave us a couple of days respite again. The Gascoyne is a huge seasonal river system having three main branches where it crosses into inland WA. Runs all the way west to near Carnarvon on the coast, it had recently been in flood. Several nice billabongs, (water holes) remained and were home to myriads of birds, parrots, raptors, wrens and finches, a bird-watchers heaven. We even saw fish in the pools, amazing this Australia, no water for years but when it does come, the fish and shrimps and yabbies are there.
The camp at Gascoyne River, is at least 200k south of the next city of Newman, we were then amazed to find that we had a good Telstra phone signal and were able, here in the middle of the WA outback, able to use the Internet better than we could when we lived 20k from the city centre. This proved to be an example of the side effects of the spread of mining camps across the country.
From Gascoyne, still heading northwards, we arrived at the Tropic of Capricorn. It was starting to warm up and a complete change in the country side. At the Tropic Of Capricorn, some 20-odd k south of Newman is the Capricorn Road-House or Cappies as the truckies were calling it. This place has to be the busiest road-house in the country, dozens of road-trains were there, pulling in or heading out, an amazing insight as to how much freight is being carried by road to the resource hungry mining industry of the north-west. Next to the roadhouse was a large camp of typical "dongas" small two or four room accommodation for the fly-in-fly out (FIFO) mine workers. The comings and goings around Capricorn seemed quite extraordinary after all the kilometres of seemingly empty country that we had passed.
Newman
Newman is one of the oldest iron ore mining regions in Australia, indeed, Mt Newman was well know when I first arrived in Australia in 1964. Along with Mt Tom Price, the region has the richest deposits of iron-ore in the world. Newman ore lode has been assayed as up to 60% plus iron, many of Australia's big money men have been made their fortunes up here in the region called the Pilbara. Iron ore is transported by privately owned freight trains. These trains are over 2 kilometres long, thousands of tonnes of ore trained to Port Hedland for shipping to China and other overseas buyers. Tom Price ore is trained to Dampier, again to be shipped off around the world. One story that we heard was that the Queen owns substantial private shares in the Iron Ore mining industry in Australia.
At Newman, we drove up from the visitor information centre to the look-out above the town; it was easy to see the expansion since we were last here in 2006. And busy? Definitely not a quiet outback town is Newman but could be a good base to stop at to explore a fair bit of the outback.
At the visitor information centre, the town had considerately provided for caravanners, a toilet dump point and a tap to re-fill our water tanks, as we were going to be camping again for the next four nights, this was very handy.
Click on the link below to view some photos.
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