ABOVE: Nancy feeds “Mommy Dearest” Nicky as Lia watches at left.


Naughty Nicky is the Joan Crawford of the dolphin world: internationally famous but a lousy mother.

So confided Lia the Kiwi dolphin handler at Monkey Mia as she warned that the road to the western-most point of the Australian mainland was the worst she had ever travelled.

We stopped into Monkey Mia to do the tourist thing on our way to Steep Point. Having been to Cape York in the north we thought we would drive as far as we could west, stopping to do the dolphin touristy thing on the way. I suspect Tin Can Bay's wild dolphin experience near home is as good but when in Shark Bay do what the tourists do.

Tip: If you are not keen on caravan parks, call up the Denham information centre and book a site at one of the coastal national parks camping sites first. The sites are cheap and picturesque but if you don’t book first you need to backtrack about 40km after getting into Denham, a rather pretty, pleasant town on the other side of the peninsula from Monkey Mia.

Denham is worth visiting so you can have a beer in Australia’s most western pub, the Shark Bay Hotel. Realising we would have to go back quite aways to the parks campsite we rather reluctantly booked into a caravan park taking consolation from the fact that we could have a wee night out at the pub.

Barry the park manager, who had just returned with his wife from a game of golf on an extraordinary course, shook his head when we told him we were going to Steep Point. The road was really rough, he warned, and the rogue waves out there ….. well, two locals had been a fair way back from the edge of the cliff last year when a wave reared out of nowhere and grabbed then, throwing them to the ground and breaking bones.

Early the next morning we headed across to Monkey Mia, passing the weird golf course in the parched landscape. The tees were artificial turf on concrete; the greens were black synthetic. We made sure we were at the dolphin rendezvous (cost about $16 each) before starting time at 7.45am but oodles of tourists, mainly foreigners, beat us there. We were told the five feeding dolphins were allowed three feeds of 500g each morning. It was up to them when they dined.

The first pod came in pretty much on cue. Thousands of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are in Shark Bay, living uneasily with 28 species of shark in the 4000 sq km of seagrass fields that host decent dugong numbers. God knows how lonely seamen ever mistook the lumpy dugongs for lovely mermaids but they are one of the reasons the bay is World Heritage listed. Shark Bay can boast to being the only place in the world that meets all the criteria for listing.

No one knows how the Monkey got into Mia (an Aboriginal word for “place”) but the fishing village became famous when a fishermen’s wife started feeding a few spare fish to some of the dolphins that followed her husband’s boat home in the 1960s.

Dolphin feeding grew as the tourist potential was realised and businesses cashed in. That led to a generation of little dolphins virtually cashing their chips because their mums forgot how to fish for themselves, never taught the kids and never looked after the kids properly.

National Parks moved in to bring in controlled feeding that would persuade the dolphins to live a respectable dolphin life instead of bludging and neglecting the kids. Dolphins live a bit like humans – eight hours sleep, eight hours work (hunting fish) and eight hours play. Unlike us, they can swim at 40kph, waggle their eyes independently and see equally well above and below the water.

Like us, they can be lazy if someone else can be persuaded to do the work. Nicky – named for her dorsal fin nick – is close to 40 but still can’t really look after herself. With her hand-fed rations cut down to a strict 1.5kg of the 10 to 20kg that she needs, she is forced to find the rest of her daily fish from the sea but instead of hunting she begs from fishing boats everywhere.

Not one of her eight calves has made it to adulthood. Little Nipper, Finnick, Nakita, Holikin, Nomad, Yadgalah and Yule have all disappeared. Possibly they starved to death because mummy couldn’t teach them to stand on their own flippers. A more likely explanation is that mummy was so obsessed with begging that she didn’t keep careful watch on her babies and nudge them back when they swam into the deep water in channels where one of the 28 species of sharks wait to pounce on straying dolphin calves.

No. 8, Fin, might make it. The dolphin rangers have high hopes because she has become pals with another female who might teach her how to be a real dolphin.

Meanwhile Nicky basks in fame as the most photographed wild dolphin in the world, a la Mommy Dearest.

Lia, from Auckland, was an excellent host at Monkey Mia and tried to be diplomatic about Nicky’s shortcomings, searching for a dolphin description for bad mother. She couldn’t come up with one.

We watched the first feeding. I had heard that some of the early crowd pings off after that and it can be easier to be invited to feed a dolphin in the second and third sitting. Bingo. I smiled hopefully at the chap holding the fish bucket, he beckoned and I fed the naughty Nicky a fish.

Lia has hankered to be a dolphin guide at Monkey Mia since 1980s. She made it to Shark Bay a couple of years ago and worked in the resort for a year before being accepted as a ranger.

She told us another horror story about the winds and rogue waves at Steep Point. A year ago six blokes were fishing on the cliff with two spotters. A king wave unseen by the spotters swept the six off the cliff. One died; the others were in the water about four hours until rescued by helicopter.

We headed for Steep Point. I secretly hoped to see a king wave. From a distance.

Sas says with a thick Cornish accent that you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world except Carnarvon. She drives the Coffee Pot express along the One Mile Jetty and you don’t feel like arguing with her.

Indomitable is the word that springs to mind for this lady, stout of tongue and body. She is one of the treasures of Carnarvon, along with the heritage jetty, a tumble of old trucks and trains and an iconic satellite dish that helped track Apollo space missions.

Decommissioned after helping keep tabs on the disappointing swoop-by of Halley’s Comet in 1987, the dish was saved by the citizens of Carnarvon. A space and technology museum was built beside it celebrating the achievements of the 300-tonne dish, almost 30m in diameter. Opened in conjunction with NASA in 1966, it sent out Australia’s first satellite television broadcast as well as helping put man on the moon.

Opened by Buzz Aldrin in 2012, the museum is open 10am to 3pm daily on a seasonal basis. We were unseasonal so missed out but we did get to meet Sas the Cornish Coffee Pot driver (above, at the end of the jetty).

Her late husband was a Cornish merchant navy engineer who criss-crossed the globe. After he and Sas were married in the 1960s she spent a decade travelling with him until the zeroed in on Carnarvon as the perfect place to settle and raise a family.

“The weather here is as good as it gets,” said Sas firmly. “When my husband first came here he said this was it.” With a monthly mean average between 23 and 33 degrees, Carnarvon is often 10 degrees cooler than Exmouth in summer and 10 degrees warmer than Perth in winter.

Its average annual rainfall is a bit lean – 223mm – but that means lots of sunshine for Carnarvonites and visitors. Irrigation from the Gascoyne allows 176 plantations to grow tropical fruits and 70% of WA’s winter vegetable needs, picking 30,000 tonnes from more than 1000 ha of river delta land. Most produce heads south in a transport industry started by Sir Charles Kingsford Smith but Carnarvon also has a farmers’ market with fresh produce.

The downside is the wind. Trees leaning to the lee testify to its relentlessness although a local scoffed when I took photos. “Wait till you get to Geraldton,” he said. “That’s where the wind really bends the trees over.”

Carnarvon’s strength seems to lie in a strong volunteer base that preserves heritage and loves the town with a passion. Sas is part of that core.

Her marine background might explain the passion she has for the One Mile jetty and its history. She’s a bit cranky that Busselton down south was given a heap of money for its jetty and Carnarvon missed out but its interpretive project is still going ahead. A 2012 completion date on the sign has been crossed out and replaced with 2014.

I wondered if Carnarvon’s grant had been deferred because of the $60 million being spent on its levee banks to save it from periodic disgorges from the great Gascoyne basin but I wasn’t going to argue. I nodded gravely at the injustice.

Built in 1897 to cross shallow sand and mangroves, the jetty served Carnarvon’s wool and pastoral industries. It was the first port in WA to send out live shipments of stock, with sheep and cattle walking the long mile along the jetty to the ships bound for Freemantle.

Actually it’s not a long mile. It seems a really short one. We walked it instead of riding the Coffee Pot train and were left with a bit of a suspicion that the name One Mile sounded so impressive that someone cribbed on the measuring tape. Would they? Nah. But you have to wonder where they actually started measuring.

Jackie, the best little caravan park managerwe have come across, was dashing around getting ready for a few days off at Coral Bay.

Harvey had just turned 70 and was getting ready to head out on his own across hundreds of kilometres of sand dunes to a fabled wartime airstrip.

Leslie the 70-year-old retired Cockney carpenter was in a Cougar with Barbara waiting for a biopsy report on a skin cancer and getting ready to take few more steps and hormones in his transformation to a woman.

The Oasis Outback Caravan Park in Carnarvon turned up trumps when we popped in for a couple of nights for a bit of a scrub down. Vivacious Jackie greeted us, the grounds were lovely and the amenities better than many hotels.

Jackie and partner Gerard hooked up a few years back in NSW and 18 months later Gerard, from Thames in New Zealand, mentioned he wouldn’t mind travelling around Australia. Six weeks later they were on their way on a working tour they expected to take two years.

They worked a bit in a caravan park in Darwin, travelled to Tom Price and saw an advertisement for a caravan park manager job in Carnarvon.

“We had never heard of the place but we got the job and four years later here we still are,” said Jackie. “We love the place. The climate, the lifestyle, the people. And the job. We fly home every year – our kids can’t understand what we are doing still here. We’ll move on one day but we are happy enough now.”

An African twang is detectable in Jackie’s accent. She was raised in Zambia where her father was in the North Rhodesia police force. He was targeted during the Congo uprising, advised to leave the country and brought his family to Australia when Jackie was 11.

Staying in one of the park cabins was burly Harvey Mader, a WA farm boy who says he has been earth-moving mainly on beef roads since he was 11. He just hd his 70th birthday. He has been working for 14 months on the levee banks being built around Carnarvon to prevent the Gascoyne River gushing out in a repeat of the floods four years ago that almost wiped Gascoyne Junction off the map.

We had come through the Gascoyne Valley Road soon after and had been startled at the damage. The Gascoyne can generate the biggest stream of water in Australia when it rages as it did then, smashing into Carnarvon’s west and sweeping away the crops that make Carnarvon a rich WA salad bowl.

About 18 months of work remains on the $60 million levee project but Harvey is heading off in autumn on his regular retreat to the abandoned Swindell air field , travelling along the Telfer road west from Port Hedland. In WWII the camouflaged airfield was a tightly guarded secret: mothballed Willys jeeps and other military hardware are still resting in the desert, preserved “as good as new” in the dry heat.

Harvey became acquainted with the place 45 years ago when he was planting explosives for a French exploration company. He discovered water sources, “some beautiful billabongs and fish – it’s all about the fish”. He released marron out there 10 years ago and now supplements the eels, mullet and barramundi with the little crays.

He’s a bit annoyed with the idiots in the Carnarvon council who ordered date palms to be taken out in a park east of the town.  They were planted in the 1890s by Afghan camel drivers and are heritage in their own right, he says.

When you are going through the desert you can keep your eye out for date palms and be pretty sure permanent water will be around them.

Harvey takes two weeks to get to Swindell. “You got to take it slow and know what you are doing. You see a lot of vehicles, new ones too, that haven’t made it. All that computer gear doesn’t stand up out there.

“People go there but not very often. And they don’t stay long.”

He stays three months. “I like my own company. Out there there’s no one to bother me.”

Like the ex or anything, although he does have a current woman in his life. She works in a federal security arm so we had better not say too much about her.

As well as a wife, Harvey used to have his own earthmoving machinery. “Sold it. Just do subbying now.”

He tried retirement but that didn’t work. “There’s only so many games of golf you can play.” He’s a bit worried about his weight, hasn’t had a beer for 12 months, does 200 daily push-ups and walks 5km.

I took a photo of Harvey with his fat-tyred Nissan rigged up rugged for the coming trip but I didn’t have a card in the camera. I had to be satisfied with a pic of the trailer he tows.

Across the park, Leslie and Barbara tow a fine Cougar fifth-wheeler they imported from America earlier this year.  The roomy living area and bedroom expanded by slide-outs have all comforts plus dozens of large plush toys tucked on shelves, pelmets, chairs and the bed.

Leslie used to be Robin, a London bloke who worked as a builder in Australia and had a wife and family. Now his licence says she is a woman, she uses the women's toilet block and hormones have given her a couple of shapes to augment her slender body, although the balding head under the cap is a bit disconcerting.

Cardigans cover builder-arm muscles. Doing the transgender thing is not easy at 70 and he is happy to settle with living as a woman without going the whole hog.

“He knew when he was eight that he should have been born a woman,” said Barbara. “His wife and kids didn’t handle it too well when he finally said he had to do something about it.’

Barbara, 67, and Leslie met in 1998 at a bowling night for singles in Logan City. Barbara, a nurse, was sympathetic about the transgender conundrum. They moved to Nambucca Heads and she encouraged him to dress as a woman.

“He had beautiful male clothes but now he can be what he has always needed to be he’s much more contented in himself.”

As partners they enjoyed rock ‘n’ roll and camping. A trip to Tasmania in a Jayco convinced them to buy the Cougar, sell the Nambucca Heads house and head off around Australia, probably for five years. The Cougar tows well behind the 3 litre Iveco and they explore on mountain bikes when they pull up. Good luck to them.

 

We found a cut diamond at Emu Creek. We heard the station was a top spot to camp beside the river and as we drove up to the homestead the diamond walked out to meet us in the person of Joyce Surenne Penny.

A cut diamond is many-faceted, transparent, light-emitting, brilliant and tough. Add a dash of warmth and that is the lady born a tough Scot and put through more challenges in Australia than Clive Palmer has in an election.

She’s written a book, “What Every Woman Should Know Before She Marries a Farmer”. Her first husband was a farmer, she’s married now to a farmer, and says in her book “Don’t ask about the ones in between. I’m a repeat offender.”

“In between” she was a marketing manager for a shopping centre in Perth who one day told the Saudi prince owner she could handle the manager’s job. “You know in my country you would be expected to walk three paces behind your husband,” he replied before giving her the nod to a career managing shopping centres from Perth to Melbourne to Sydney, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and the Philippines.

She stitched up all 200 leases in the Sydney Harbourside development months ahead of schedule.

Joyce (above in the rustic homestead with corrugated iron interior walls)  is a good-looking, energetic 66-year-old with a disarming mix of frankness, friendliness and firmness. You sense she has the brains, strength of mind and muscle power to tackle almost anything.

Joyce’s strategy for managing shopping centres was direct. She is keenly aware that businesses rise and fall. “Look at video rentals.” Some awake to find they are no longer flavour of the month and have been superseded by new fads or products. “When they said their rents were too high, I would say ‘No, you are not making enough money. Now how can we help you make more money?’

“If they couldn’t make more money, we would work with them to ease out of the business with as much as possible instead of letting them linger and go down in a heap. It was the humane way.”

I had a load of washing when we rocked up at the homestead 22km east of the North West Coastal Highway between Exmouth and Onslow.. Joyce whipped it through for $3 and said she would hang it out. “Go down to the river, set up and relax or swim. Come and get it when you are ready.”

Pleasant indeed was the riverside, with firewood piled beside an innovative fireplace and barbecue set-up. “You can tell a farmer has made that,” said Tony approvingly. “It is a beauty.”

Later we talked to Joyce and husband Darryl over a cup of tea and marvelled at the diversity of their station life. They have accommodation available and thanks to regular rental by mining companies exploring the south of the Pilbara (commercial quantities of uranium have been found around the property) they have survived the gutting of the cattle industry by Julia Gillard’s savage clamp on live exports.

The industry is embittered that it was ripped apart overnight because the ABC aired a dodgy, five-year-old video showing in inhumane slaughtering of Australia cattle in Indonesia.

“Farmers don’t like to see that happen to their cattle either,” says Joyce, “but there were other ways of dealing with that. We were fortunate we had the accommodation because that ended up bringing in as much income as the cattle when the industry collapsed.”

Evidence of Joyce’s can-do adding-value philosophy is everywhere. Emu Creek station will take you on a couple of tours around the station or to a lookout for a sunset drink. A select range of home-made preserves are on sale and you can dine handsomely on home-cooked meals if you feel like a break from cooking. 

Husband Darryl has a couple of wheat properties down south run by his sons. He and Joyce bought the 340,000 sq km Emu Creek four years ago as a family investment and hit some tough times. “We had difficulty coming to terms with expected cattle numbers and profitability,” said Joyce wryly. The Gillard Government delivered the king hit.

Joyce did what she had advised her faltering shopping centre shop owners to do: she set about increasing income. As well as building up the accommodation and value-adding for tourists, she took a job for a year working at a gold mine in Laverton.

She and Darryl agree that the tough times tested their marriage. “Especially having to live apart,” said Darryl.  “But we came out the other end with a stronger relationship.”

Now Joyce is excited about a venture with the traditional owners, offering cultural awareness weekend seminars at Emu Creek.  The daughter of 10 pound Pom parents who emigrated to Australia when she was a small child is also buoyed by the prospect of a sand gravel business developing on the station.

The road past Emu Creek runs to Mt Augustus in Kennedy National Park and the experience of a couple of Germans who came that way from Alice Springs also has Joyce thinking. “They were thrilled because they had five days where they saw no one,” she said. “They had travelled all over the world and said the country they came through was equal to anything they had been anywhere else.”

She is cross with successive Australian governments for failing to support farmers. “Primary producers are not regarded highly enough in Australia, not like they are valued in other lands. This country will not get it right until it sees farmers for what they are worth.”

The couple was irritated that after 40 years of successful grain growing Darryl had to attend a course and pay a fee to become accredited by someone who had never grown grain.

“Australia needs to undo its reliance on data rather that raw experience,” says Joyce. “Good sheep are bred by stockman, not by data programs.”

Her book for would-be farmers’ wives has plenty of humour. Quote:

“You may not be expected to kill, hang and dress your own meat (although I have) but you will be involved in the packaging and cooking of meat killed on the farm for home consumption. I never met a farmer yet who is a vegetarian. It helps if you can be reasonably detached when you are asked to cook meat which you very well know was the lovely little lambie you named and raised by hand … serve him up with mint sauce roast vegies and good humour. This is farming.”

It also contains some harsh realities about the gruelling side of life in an asset-rich cash-poor industry and is worth reading by anyone who fancies himself/herself as a leader or economist. It could well have been titled “Everything a Politician Needs to Know About Farming Before He/She Runs the Country”.

Unlike the song, they don’t call the wind Maria on the north-west coast of Australia. They have lots of pithy names for it. None are pretty.

Some say the gales come mainly in the summer months. Others shrug and say that’s the way it is all year.

“From now till March, you got anything to do outdoors you do it in the morning. In the afternoon it’s windy on the coast from here to Esperance,” said camp host Greg, checking us in to Cape Range National Park on Ningaloo Reef.

He was wrong. Further south along the reef and at Carnarvon the bloody wind proved more challenging than some of the boggy sand tracks where we tested Isabel’s ability to crawl over dunes.

We wanted to do the inland sand coastal track from Cape Range to Coral Bay. Isabel’s first little test was Yardie Creek, silted up at the mouth for five years. Sand at the creek crossing has been churned to powder but with 30psi tyre pressure Isabel walked through.

The track past towering cliffs and brilliant sand-fringed turquoise bays proved easy going. We planned a return visit to stay at one of the camps at Ningaloo Station – a better option coming from the south as the camp sites are a fair drive north of the station, so you have to do a fair bit of extra driving to book in, get a key to the gates, and then drive back to a camp site. Not surprisingly, the key has a $100 deposit because of the temptation to just keep driving north.

Jane at Ningaloo Station said a bit of sand was over the road on the coastal track to Coral Bay “but if you got through Yardie you will have no problem”. The bit of sand turned out to be a couple of decent sand blows where we took the discretionary side track.

 We wondered about the sand blows coming in from the west and along the Fraser and Gold Coasts from the east. Will Australians one day end up clustered around Alice?

Isabel trekked in and out of sandy tracks as we looked for a free camp site but were put off by the blasting gusts of wind. And the signs that said “No camping”. We kept our eye out for a free site we had visited before north of Coral Bay. It is now run by an Aboriginal corporation and has fee charges. And wind, bloody wind.

We came across Vance, escaping on a week off from a mining services construction site in the north. His 4WD was jammed with diving, fishing and photographic gear. He followed us in ploughing over a challenging sandy hill to pretty Dog Rock bay. No “No camping” sign was in sight. It was worse. The sign said  “No Fishing.” Mercifully, we were sheltered from the wind so we elected to stay.

Tony and Vance exchanged national parks conspiracy theories over a beer and wondered how we would get out the next morning. He also had some interesting stories about Aussie workers being paid off at construction sites in favour of Irish and East European workers on 457? visas. Suspected reason: they are not being paid properly and find themselves on the next plane home if they complain.

 In third gear low range, Isabel strolled over the long sand hill out the next morning.

Coral Bay lived up to its name. It delivered neat pies at the bakery, head-shaking prices at the supermarket and bloody wind. Vince went snorkelling, found himself a long way out and had to swim hard to get back. We left him to spend the night at Coral Bay as he eyed the single girls strolling by.

We pushed on to Warroora Station and one of the finest camp sites yet on a sandy dune overlooking the bottom end of the reef.

In small bays and lagoons of glorious clear water we caught flathead, whiting and dart, watched sharks and turtles cruising by, listened to waves crashing on the reef at night, spoke to no-one else for a week but enjoyed the company of goats, sheep and red kangaroos with black ears. Idyllic. Except for one thing. Rattling up the greatest rate of knots yet, we didn’t call it Maria

ABOVE: Warroora Station - such a fabulous camp site. Shame about the wind..