Click hereDozens of former and current members of Australia’s defence forces punching the air, spilling beer and hollering “Man, I feel like a woman” might arouse misgivings in some quarters but you had to be there.

“There” was the Rockingham RSL Club south of Perth, where about 700 people gathered to relax after the solemnity of the Anzac Day dawn parade and the mid-morning march.

RSL clubs in Western Australia do not have poker machines, which means they are friendlier and run by volunteers along the pre-pokies era lines of eastern RSL branches.

Rockingham’s RSL club is modest, opens two days a week and has a thriving membership of more than 600, bolstered by the Royal Australian Navy presence at HMAS Stirling.

The Navy provided most of the military trappings for the march and morning services at the cenotaph, which looks strangely like a well preserved Roman ruin.

A fine Navy band tumbled from a bus from Perth to lead the morning parade, a catafalque guard slow-marched to the central monument, the lone bugler was raised on a construction elevator to the height of one of the pillars and the moving service featured RSL president Mick answering questions about war from his young grandson.

After the raised lone bugler played the Last Post and a minute’s silence was observed, the first notes of Reveille sounded from up high. They were answered with beautiful precision from another bugler across the parade ground. Duelling bugles. Brilliant.

Back at the club a live band was playing, 18 kegs of mid-strength beer had started flowing and wine was pouring. A buffet lunch for 700 ran for a couple of hours and companionship rocked, as seen in the above photo (not sure about the guy on the right),

Andrew, an ex-submarine chef, explained to me what it was like for two people to cook four meals a day for a crew of 70 in a tiny cramped kitchen beneath the sea. We spent happy hours with friends we had met, two of whom had an uncanny resemblance to friends on the east coast.

Curly’s resemblance to Brian Hughes wearing a curly topee was made even more remarkable when he turned up wearing a pink pinstriped shirt of the style favoured by the man from Malarga. Barry (part of a large group of former prison officers who are regulars at the club) looked, talked and laughed like a slightly elongated Mal Churchill.

As the band packed up, the two-up shut down and darkness fell, we chummed up with a couple of young sailors. Callum confessed he loved Anzac Day and had tears pricking his eyelids at the service.

Two Kiwi girls who come from Perth every Anzac Day to run the bar as volunteers, Panache from Huntly and Taku from Wellington, reported the kegs were starting to run out.

We headed across the road to Isabel’s bed. That was our Rockingham RSL club finale for this trip. We hope to make it back one day.

“Dad,” said 8-year-old Ellie as she climbed out of the truck with her brickie father, “that slab looks like shit.”

Ellie was way ahead of the engineer quoted in the above poem, mounted in pride of place on the glorious knocked-down-and-rebuilt dunny at Newdegate in the WA southern wheatbelt.

About a dozen years ago Ellie was a regular offsider for her dad Mike Naisbitt. She loved helping him measure up and do other little jobs and had developed a critical eye for the rudiments of the building industry.

When she went with him in 2002 to measure up for the brickwork at the new Newdegate public toilet block, Mike was startled at his young daughter’s unusually strongly worded appraisal of the newly poured slab. On closer inspection he had to agree. The concrete foundation was too thin.

And there started the tale of the demolishment and rebuilding of the divine dunny.

Newdegate is mightily proud of owning the finest public convenience block in the west as so it should be but when I read the poem it was clear there was more to the story.

Here was the obviously rebuilt dunny in all its sanitary splendour but little Newdegate was pretty much shut up on Easter Sunday. We couldn’t find anyone to ask about what had actually happened.

Glory be. Just a short drive further east lay Lake Grace, an open-even-on-Easter-Sunday information office and Anna, a lively tourist officer who just happened to be the wife of Mike Naisbitt and mother of smart little Ellie.

Anna (above) was only too happy to fill us in on the story behind the flash flusher and the poem because she wants to make it clear that her husband had been forced to fix bricks on a brittle base. Never should there be any suggestion that his fine professional standards had been tarnished by the sanitary stuff-up and triumph.

Before we wandered on to Lake Grace we revelled in the finest public convenience block in the west. Both men’s and women’s toilets (three cubicles) had showers; the disabled booth had a superb detachable hose and rose. The tiles, walls and fittings were pretty much spotless.

A sign said they were cleaned Monday and Friday and if any problems were found could visitors please advise the council (although that might have been a fruitless exercise on Easter Sunday because even the town’s service station was shut).

Sparkling mirrors, thick paper towels and soap completed the ablution assets. Testaments from tourists and truckies hung on the walls. A framed letter from Joan and John Hoskin commended the person who looked after the Newdegate restrooms: “They are a pleasure to use …. We have travelled the world a fair bit and they are the cleanest and tidiest restrooms we have come across ….”

We agreed … but what the heck happened? Anna filled in the gap. After Mike and little Ellie had looked with horror upon the thin slab, Mike had advised the engineering staff it was unsuitable. His misgivings were dismissed. He was told to go ahead as contracted with the brick walls, which he did when he realised he was banging his head on a brick wall trying to tell council staff that the slab was shoddy.

Funny to build a dunny on a crappy slab you know will never pass inspection. If the councillors were pissed off when the big demolition ball splattered the bricks and base, imagine how poor Mike felt. Resident Pat O'Neill thought it was highly amusing and penned his humorous poem.

All’s well that ends well. The No. 2 version has its accolades as hoped (although its virtues could be trumpeted a little louder), Mike continues to lay bricks and pavers around the region, certain staffers have moved on and little Ellie has hard-wired herself into the building industry as an apprentice electrician.

You might not be busting for a toilet when you approach Newdegate but the public convenience block, with a pretty picnic park across the road, deserved a halt so it can admired. 

 

Dick Sprouge and Jack Watson had long spurs of steel, sharp axes of steel and nerves of something a bit tougher. They were among the astonishing men of the West Australian karri forests who hooked on strap and spurs and climbed more than 200ft to the tops of the giant gums.

Sometimes they did it for fun but usually to lop off the tops so fire lookouts could be built high in the forests.

The mesmerising sequence above shows, at left, Dick Sprouge balanced 180ft above the ground swinging his axe to chop the top off the trees.  In the centre photograph he clings closer as the top begins to tumble, whipping the trunk back and forth. At right daring Dick stands relaxed and unaided on the top of the sawn trunk, calmly surveying the view.

We discovered the story of the karri and the crazy tree climbers at the Pemberton visitors’ centre. Three of trees to the lookout towers can be climbed by the public, with a safety cage around the spiralling steel pegs, and I was keen to feel the experience.

I dragged Tony to the famous 72m Gloucester tree a few minutes away and we surveyed the giant. I assured Tony, who has nursed me through more broken bones than we can remember, I would not try to go to the top – I only wanted to see what it was like.   

An inkling of that was gleaned from a sobbing young Asian teenager being helped off the bottom rung by her father. She had, apparently, climbed some of the way up but found the descent paralysingly scary.

An English couple in their late 60s sat quietly. They had been to the top, she said, but she had been terrified and sobbing on the descent.

I went up about a third of the way before acquiescing to Tony’s hollering that that was enough. The little experience left me even in more awe of Dick, Jack and the crazy karri climbers who scampered up, topped and pegged the giants.

Apparently only about 20% of the visitors climb the 153 spikes to the Gloucester top, where the wooden lookout cabin was replaced in 1973 with a safer steel and aluminium cabin and visitors' gallery.

Jack Watson set a world record for the highest climb up a tree by man when he shimmied up the Gloucester so the lookout tower could be built in 1947. He took six hours – a hell of a climb. The tower was officially opened in 1948 and named Gloucester after the Governor-General, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester.

The idea of lopping of karris to build lookouts came to the first foresters in the region because the temperate rainforest had few high spots, such as mountains, where fires could be quickly spotted.

In 1937 a marri tree near Alco was climbed and pegged and a small crow’s nest built in the upper limbs. The view was terrific so the karri climbing feats began the following year. Forestry officers Don Stewart and Jack Watson did most of the daring and brilliant work 200ft in the air.

Before that Dick Sprogue had begun climbing karri trees for the fun of it. One of the first trees he climbed and topped was for the amusement of the annual bush picnic crowd at Five-mile Brooke, northwest of Pemberton.

He merrily climbed and lopped trees leaning over bush railway lines or log landings and in 1939 topped and pegged the 1939 120ft Pemberton Tree, a small fire lookout tree at the back for of the Pemberton Forestry Office. The tree still stands but hasn’t been used since the Gloucester Tree was opened.

On his retirement Sprogue bought land at Manjimup, where he pegged several trees and happily retreated to the top of one on hot summer days.

The other two trees that can be climbed by the public near Pemberton are the Bicentennial and the Diamond. The Bicentennial, at 75m and reached by 165 spikes, was pegged and opened for Australia’s 200th birthday in 1988 and is the world’s tallest fire lookout tree.

Karri gum grow only in WA and are now protected. On the west coast above Hamelin Bay we wandered through groves of grandeur and thought it would be fun to find Boranup Beach.

It was fun, in a way: Isabel bumped and crawled over a rocks and sand, valiantly thrusting through bushes before deciding the elusive beach was just too elusive.

Boranup is on the “never mind” list but I still have a hankering to climb to the top of that Gloucester tree.

 

A big cod skull has a 15cm lure jammed in its mouth like a cigar. Buoys and lifebelts festoon driftwood trees surrounded by shells and coral in a mesmerising display of treasures tossed on to beaches by King Neptune.

It might not win an ikebana championship but Trevor’s arresting garden outside his van home at Boat Harbour is testimony to his energetic daily sweepings of the sand to clear rubbish left by tides and untidy people.

He is particularly proud of a marine growth that has hardened into the shape of a boot: the boot has long rotted away.

Trevor, from south of Sydney, is a bit of a legend at the picturesque beach about 100km east of Albany. His wanderings around Australia came to a halt five years ago when he parked up at the junction of the road into Boat Harbour and became the unofficial caretaker of the camp ground.

He picks up rubbish, cheerily gives information to campers, cleans the beaches and collects donations for the Progress Association - which is trying to keep the area as a freedom camping zone.

Most mornings Trevor heads around the rocky headland to fish and keep an eye out for rogue waves. He warns new campers about the sudden big waves on the rocks: “When you see them coming stick your foot in your bucket and hang on.” He gives the fish to farmers who give him firewood to sell to campers.

Clad in singlet and clutching a can, he has no idea how long he will stay at Boat Harbour. “Why would you live anywhere else?” he beams, gesturing at a murky creek on his doorstep. We wonder if it might not get a bit cold in winter on the edge of the Great Southern Ocean but Trevor seems one of those characters impervious to the elements.

He wouldn’t mind exploring a bit more of Australia but it he leaves his patch of paradise someone else would surely move in. He might push on one day but he would have to sell his beloved Harley and he’s had that longer than he’s had any woman.

His mother Bettina is visiting when we pull in and get directed to the half-dozen beachside spots to the west. More sheltered spots are to the east along the stagnant creek where Trevor feeds the local ducks.

We score a brilliant site on a concrete slab looking out towards Antarctica. With sunny cobalt skies, translucent turquoise water, white sand and brown-red rocky outcrops we could be in a tropical retreat – except for the hint of iciness at times in the breeze. It’s the end of summer. Days can be surprisingly hot but when clouds or darkness clutch at the sun a chilliness snaps the languid mood.

Tony does the Queensland Shudder and zips up Isabel into a cosy nest, happily humming his theme song “When I Die It Will Be In Winter”. 

We fish the rocks more tentatively than Trevor and happily pull in a medley of pan-sized rock fish and a few herring. We stay a night or two longer than we intended and talk about dawdling longer but more southern beaches of WA beckon.

And the weather is getting brisker. We farewell barefoot, singleted, beer-clutching Trevor and move on. We get lucky at Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grande national park. Despite the school holidays and early Easter rush we score a campsite overlooking Lucky Bay, surely one of the most stunning beaches in the world.

Small waves curl from the brilliant clear water and splash gently on to bay’s curving beach of icing sugar. A few people are swimming. A kite surfer daubs a splash of yellow-red-orange on to the scene.

If Australia is the arse-end of the world and this is the arse-end of the country facing Antarctica, it’s not too crappy at all. We hope Trevor has a nice flannel shirt though, just in case.