Monday 19 August 2024 – Vansittart. Now, there’s a name to conjure with! Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s one that I had come across before. In the God Old Days when I used to cycle a lot because it was fun, before the appalling Surrey road surfaces put a stop to all that, one of my regular routes led through Windsor. Skirting round the edge, because I wanted to avoid the hill that leads up to the Castle, I actually used Vansittart Road as a way to get back towards the river.

The name Vansittart crops up here and there in British politics, so I don’t know the provenance of the Windsor road’s naming. But the Kimberley one was named after Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley, one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in British history (May 1812-December 1822). The bay’s name was conferred, like so many in this region, by Philip Parker King, an early explorer of the Australian and Patagonian coasts.

While I settled down to relax for the day, and try to be well for a putative medical checkup in the evening, Jane went off to the nearby Jar Island. Here she is to tell you about it.

Jar Island was named after the many broken jars found there, once used for storing and transporting trepangs, or sea cucumbers. Fishermen from Makassar in the southern Celebes (the present-day Indonesian province of Sulawesi) visited the northern Australian coast throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, negotiating fishing rights and interacting with the Aborigines. The processed trepang is prized in Chinese cooking for its texture and flavour-enhancing qualities and is used in Chinese medicine; the Makassan trepangers, after collecting and processing trepang in Australia, returned to Makassar to sell the product to Chinese traders.

However our objective on Jar Island was something far older…

The usual Zodiac to shore was followed by a short walk through familiarly rocky terrain,

and the familiar instruction to leave backpacks and hats (this time there was an actual hat-tree),

but the familiarity ended there: the art in this gallery was very different to that we had seen before. Formerly known as “Bradshaws” (after Joseph Bradshaw, who was the first European to see and record such art, in 1891), and now known as Gwion Gwion, these styles of representation are far older than the Wandjina art of our previous excursions – at least 17,000 years old. There is considerable uncertainty about who created them, where they came from,  and what connection there is, if any, to the Aboriginal communities who created the Wandjina art. This has become a political as well as anthropological issue; if the Aboriginal people are not the descendants of the Gwion Gwion artists, this has the potential to undermine native land title claims in the Kimberley. Lengthy discussion of all of this can be found in Wikipedia and a gallery of typical Gwion Gwion art can be found here.

A thought provoking excursion on many levels…

While Jane was away on Jar Island, I was resignedly reading the papers in my cabin, when there was a knock on the door and the ship’s doctor came in. I wonder whether the frustration I’d expressed to Lucille the evening before had provoked the visit; maybe it was just a visit he’d already planned. Anyway, he quickly took my temperature, which was normal (I’d taken some paracetamol), asked about a few other symptoms about which I only had to bend the truth slightly, and declared me fit.

I was no longer a number (cabin 524) – I was a free man!

This meant that I could join the afternoon expedition, which was a visit to a site on the Anjo Peninsula with an unusual geology and even stranger story.

It was another wet landing, on to a beach with some unusual shells littered about.

A short walk up a sand dune dotted with Spinifex grass

led to a very striking landscape,

a salt flat with some rocky outcrops dotted over it – really remarkable sight. The rocks themselves had a great variety of colours, and I could have spent quite some time exploring them,

but this was not what we had come to see. That was just beyond the salt flat.

There, among the scrub and trees, is the wreck of a Douglas C53 Skytrooper, a troop transport version of what we Brits know as the Douglas Dakota.  This one was being used during the second world war as a ferry plane to, well, ferry evacuees. Having done so, on 26th February 1942 it was supposed to fly from Perth to Darwin, with an interim landing at Broome. The pilot set out on the wrong course – wrong by some 20°* – an error only realised when it was too late to get to anywhere with an airfield before the fuel ran out. In casting around for somewhere to land, the pilot realised that Jar Island was too rocky, but then saw the salt flat and did a wheels-up crash landing across it, ending up where it can be seen today.

All aboard – pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, radio engineer and a couple of military telegraphists – survived the crash. So did the radio, so they were able to describe where they landed, even though they didn’t actually know where they were.

Their rescue was remarkable, in that no-one knew they’d set off on the wrong course, so when they failed to turn up in Broome, all the searchers started looking in the wrong places, expecting, not unreasonably, to find crash sites en route to Broome. One person in a searching aircrew, though, recognised the description of the salt flat and so headed for the area, enabling the crew to be rescued. They had survived for a couple of days using pipes from the crashed aircraft to distill drinking water from seawater.

The crashed plane is a fine subject for photography,

and Jane had a private smile when gravely told that this engine, now detached from the wing,

was a Whitt and Pratney.

Nearby were a couple of interesting trees.  One was a paper bark tree,

which is a type of myrtle, apparently; and the other was a sizeable Boab Tree, though not anything like the monsters we saw in Madagascar.

It was surrounded by Pandanus (screw pines); someone had collected some of their pinecone-like fruits and left them in a small pile for people to admire.

Our group filed slowly back across the salt flat; I hung back as much as I could so that I might get a few aeroplane shots without punters in them, which meant that I was practically alone as I trudged strode back towards the re-embarkation point

where, to everyone’s delight, a surprise beach party had been sprung on us!

Champagne and cool jazz made for a fine end to an unusual and interesting excursion.

Tomorrow is a Big Day, in many ways. We’re coming towards the end of the cruise, so we get our passports back, and it’s the last day for any laundry to be done – these things are important, you know. There will also be the final Gala Dinner.

More importantly, it will see the final excursion of the cruise; scenically, we have been promised, outstandingly the best. Since I’m now allowed out, I can’t wait. But you’ll have to, I’m afraid.  Keep your eyes peeled for what I hope will be some really striking images!

 

* The pilot error may well not have been incompetence, but wartime tiredness compounded by bad luck. When plotting and then following a course, a correction has to be applied to compensate for the difference between magnetic north and true north, and this may have been forgotten. Also, the amount of iron ore in the ground can make compasses do strange things, so an error of this magnitude is not necessarily something to be dismissive about.