Busselton

We flew over to Perth yesterday with my brother Rod and his wife Cornelia. It’s just a short trip to Western Australia this time. We’ll be back home next Sunday night. When the AFL announced the fixture for the opening 15 rounds of the 2024 season and Collingwood was drawn to play Fremantle at Optus Stadium in Perth on May 24, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. We decided we’d fly over a week before the game and drive down south for a few nights before returning to Perth in time for the game.

We landed in Perth and picked up our hire car around 4pm. Rod was happy to drive. We’d booked our first night in Busselton, about 225km to the south. Our accommodation staff required us to check in before they locked the office at 6.30pm, so we drove straight there without stopping to check out anything along the way.

It was a good road all the way, reviving memories of the excellent roads we drove on when we were last in Western Australia two years earlier. The terrain was flat and featureless for some time, although there were quite a few kangaroos grazing in the roadside paddocks at regular intervals that we enjoyed seeing. Approaching Bunbury the countryside on both sides of the highway became scrubby and eventually forested. We saw plenty of charred trees en route, evidence of the fires that came through the region a few years back.

We arrived at our accommodation in Busselton in darkness. We knew there was a restaurant about 400m away as the crow flies, but over a kilometre if we followed the roads. It was near the ocean, and we could hear the waves crashing on the shore just behind our holiday park, so we headed off in the darkness towards the beach, intending to follow the shoreline around to the restaurant. Unfortunately we got lost in the dark and found ourselves walking through private property with high fences and locked gates that prevented us from reaching the beach. After some time we found an open gate and made it through to the path that followed the beach, but I’m sure we ended up walking a greater distance than if we’d done the sensible thing and followed the roads on the map. Thankfully, the meal was good and we found our way back home again afterwards – by following the roads.

We woke this morning to find two ducks sitting by our front door. They stayed for about an hour, no doubt waiting to be fed. Eventually, out of luck, they waddled over to a neighbouring unit where a small child terrorised them by chasing them round and round the garden until the ducks managed to find an escape route.

Busselton’s main tourist attraction is its jetty, which heads out into Geographe Bay in a northerly direction for a distance of 1.8km, making it the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere. The original jetty was gunbarrel straight. It was used for rail cars to cart massive timber trunks from the state’s karri and jarrah forests out to where the ships docked. The bay is shallow, so the jetty needed to go out a long way from the shore to where the water depth could safely accommodate the large freight vessels that carried the timber around the Australian coastline and sometimes to foreign ports as far away as Europe. In 1978 Cyclone Alby destroyed the 700m length of the jetty closest to the shore. It took a great deal of money and a huge effort from the community to raise the funds to restore the jetty, although today it leaves the shore in a different place, so it no longer extends in a perfectly straight line, but instead changes direction slightly where the new section meets the surviving section of the old jetty.

Its about a leisurely half hour walk from the shore to the end of the jetty, so we walked it after breakfast. It was breezy but pleasant. Rail tracks on the jetty allow a small train with 15 carriages to carry tourists out to the end of the jetty every hour. We were midway along the jetty when the train passed us. One section of the jetty was adorned with plaques commemorating loved ones whose ashes had been scattered from the jetty. Many of them had been fishermen and women who spent a good deal of their leisure time throwing in a line from one of the many fishing spots along its length. We spent a short time enjoying the view from the end of the jetty before walking back to the shore.

After lunch we made our way back to the jetty again, because this time we were going to take the train out to the marine observatory at the far end. We would have visited that when we walked out earlier in the day, but there were no tickets available until the 1pm session. So we soon found ourselves at the end of the jetty again, and this time we entered the building and made our way down a broad spiral stairway that provided observation windows at five different levels as we made our way down to the depths of the ocean floor – roughly 9 metres below the surface. The observation windows allowed us excellent views of the marine life that lived on and around the jetty piles – small fish, corals, anemones etc. That was really enjoyable, and made it worth our while to come out to the end of the jetty for a second time today.

The tourist train brought us back to the shore again. It was now about 3pm and time to head south to our next destination, Margaret River. We elected to take the scenic route, Caves Road, which took us on a winding trail through well forested country on both sides of the road. We hadn’t expected to see so many wineries along this road, but there were many, often surrounded on all sides by bushland. It was very different seeing wineries laid out in this way, as opposed to the broad open vineyards you find in the Yarra Valley back home. It really was a beautiful drive and it was a shame we didn’t have time to stop at any today.

Our self contained apartment is right in the heart of Margaret River, so it was only a ten minute walk to dinner tonight. We ate at Swings and Roundabouts, which also happened to have a winery out on Caves Road that we passed on our way down here. We sampled a paddle of four of their finest wines with our pizzas and were well satisfied.