Australia is a big country. No question about it. There’s loads of space here and Western Australia has more than most. With a population of two and a half million and a square mileage of just over one, an average family has roughly two square miles to themselves. I know it doesn’t work like that but it makes for an interesting comparison with the UK which has a population density of 727 people per square mile. This means that . . . well, as the Americans say, you can do the math.
Currently, Adrian and I are sitting in tens of square miles and, as far as we can tell, we’re the only people here. Just us, the bush and the Southern Ocean, oh and a few kangaroos. We saw them foraging by the path yesterday when we took ourselves off for a run. We had amazingly good timing on that one: just got back to our glam shack when a storm blew in from the sea and here were we, smugly sipping tea, watching the white horses on the water and listening to the rain pelting down on the roof.
We’re travelling south and east from Géographe Bay, driving through bush, national parks and farm land. The area is surprisingly green and, as we make our way further south, we see cows and sheep grazing in verdant fields. If it wasn’t for the eucalyptus trees, the ubiquitous windmill water pumps (iconic symbols of rural Australia) and the amazingly good roads, this could be Devon.
We call in at Margaret River for some food and spend a night at Bow Bridge, near Peaceful Bay on the south west coast. For our host, Niki, a fourth generation farmer, this remote place, with its chalets-in-a-shed, is her and her husband’s retirement project. There’s no internet, no phone signal, nowhere to go, but the chalet is rather luxurious with a huge bed, big fluffy towels, seating by a fire and a view of the inlet through the gum trees. With a glass of wine in one hand and a book in the other, we surrender ourselves to nothing much to do.
We’re now further east, in another glam ‘shack’ overlooking the ocean a few miles from Bremer Bay which rather ambitiously describes itself as a town. ‘You know there’s nothing there,’ says Niki as we say our good-byes in Bow Bridge and she isn’t wrong. There’s a petrol station, a mechanic’s shed, a large brewing company and a small health clinic. Supposedly, there’s also a cafe, a museum and a hotel, but we’ve yet to find them.
So, forewarned, we stop in Albany for supplies and take a walk around this old town, known for its whaling station and as the last place the ANZACS saw before sailing to Egypt in 1914. Most of them didn’t come back. We then call into the York Street cafe for coffee and muffins before continuing our drive on the wide, smooth, well-signed road that is all ours for fifty, sixty, seventy miles at a time.
Our entertainment on these drives is intermittent, varied and sometimes a little surreal. Listening to June Whitfield playing Miss Marple on a deserted road in the Australian bush (us, not her) is just a bit weird, but because we only get it in short bursts before lack of mobile signal puts paid to BBC Sounds, we then have a Mozart oboe concerto followed by Supertramp or Fever Ray before, ‘Signal’s back!’ and we have a little more June.
So here we are in our rather new and very well equipped Bremer Bay ‘shack’, with the bush and the sea and the sky. I love it that I can strip to my skin for a shower without drawing the curtains on the floor to ceiling windows because there are no eyes to look in unless you count the two on the Currawong that pauses, twigs in beak, on root to its nest. I also love the bush, the eucalyptus, the peeling paperbark trees, the smells, the sea and the endless white sand, all of which speaks of my childhood in that subterranean way that childhood experiences manifest themselves. Oh, and the space. Did I say? there’s a lot of it about in this part of the world. Loads of it. And it seems we have it all to ourselves.
