Tag Archives: Western Australia

A Day on Rottnest Island

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Monday 5 August 2024 – Today was the only formal item on our Perth agenda – we had a booking to catch the ferry over to Rottnest Island. This seems a cruel piece of naming to me; I’m sure there must be rottner islands elsewhere in the world. Indeed, there’s one on the fringes of London which has completely gone to the Dogs.

The item on our Audley itinerary was described as a “tour and bike ride”, with bicycle hire included in the booking, and a day at leisure on the island with just a lunch included. Jane professes not to have ridden a bicycle for longer than she cares to mention (and in fact had signalled this to Audley some time back in the trip’s planning process).  Also, given that wildlife was part of the attraction of the place, I wanted to take The Big Lens (which is also darned heavy); as well, I thought it might be possible, during our leisurely progress round the island, to whizz the drone up for a different view point.  This added two non-trivial items to be lugged about along with all the other stuff we’d need – sunscreen, water, that kind of thing.  Jane’s caution about bicycling, and the extra baggage from my photographic ambitions, gave us to decide to pass up on the bicycling idea and seek other ways of getting round the island. That, therefore, was the plan.

As Hannibal Smith so often said, “I love it when a plan comes together”.  Ours, however, didn’t.

Not in any way that detracted from an enjoyable day, you understand, but the way the day worked out was quite different from what I, at least, had expected.

We were to be collected at a nearby crossroads, so we made sure to get there nice and early, as instructed. By the appointed pick-up time, no-one had appeared to collect us, so we fell to wondering how long we should give them before stirring things up a bit.  Just at the point where we thought that Someone Had Blundered, a bus marked “Rottnest Express” did actually turn up, so we climbed on board and took about the last two available seats – it was quite crowded. The bus then took us down to the Barrack Street Quay (to which we could have quite easily walked, as it happens, but never mind) and we joined the check-in queue to collect our tickets.  It was at about this point that we began to realise that the shape of the day was different from what we’d imagined. For sure, lunch was included; but we also had an afternoon bus tour as part of our package, with no mention of bicycles. Having collected our tickets, we headed for the ferry,

which was already pretty much full, but we found a couple of seats, settled ourselves down and then we were off.

There was the usual video about safety and life jackets, with frequent mentions of the “friendly crew” to whom we could turn if we needed help. And there was a commentary, delivered as we pottered along the Swan river (originally Black Swan river, named by Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh in 1697) towards Fremantle, by a lady who appeared only to have received the script a couple of moments before she had to deliver it. The commentary, though, allowed us to understand some of the landmarks we passed, such as the old Swan Brewery

which, back in the day, had produced Swan Lager, one of only about half a dozen different beers readily available in Australia when I first visited back in the 1980s (others being Castlemaine XXXX, Tooheys, Victoria Bitter and, of course, the amber nectar of Fosters. Ah, the heady days before the craft beer movement had taken off!)

We got a silhouetted view of the Perth skyline

and passed a couple of pretty impressive mansions

that either still belonged, or used to belong, to people whose names meant absolutely nothing to me. And we got a good view of the industrial port by North Fremantle.

The ferry docked at Fremantle to pick up more passengers (the nice lady doing the commentary told us all to shuffle up to make room) and then the boat roared off towards Rottnest Island.

The main wildlife of interest on the Island, and something that Jane specifically wanted to see, was the quokka. There was some video on the ferry about how it was important not to disturb them or to feed them. I had no idea what to expect when it came to getting photos of this mysterious beast, which is why I’d brought the Big Lens, in case I could only see one in the distance. This is another way in which the day turned out very differently from my expectations.  As we walked off the quay, I saw my first quokka, by a “Welcome” noticeboard.

and it very soon became clear that it would not be difficult to see more of them. They were everywhere in the settlement beside the harbour. Indeed, you had to be careful not to trip over them.

You also had to be careful not to trip over all the people who were contorting themselves in various undignified ways to get photos and – inevitably – selfies with the quokkas.  It actually made it quite difficult to get a photo of one of these beasts without any people in it.  I did manage a couple, though. One quokka was still carrying a joey in its pouch

and was actually considerate enough to pose so I could get a clearer shot.

The area around the settlement, which has a shop, a visitors centre, a restaurant and a bakery, was pretty crowded with tourists,

many of whom were having their own moments with the quokkas,

and gulls and ravens,

which could lunge for any food which was not closely guarded.

The instructions about the quokkas were perfectly clear

but the beasts themselves didn’t make things any easier for the punters.

Instead of the leisurely pottering about we had originally expected, we actually had a reasonably tight schedule to observe: lunch at midday, bus tour at 1.45pm, ferry back to Perth at 4pm. This gave us time for a coffee and a short walk before lunch, so we headed off towards the nearby lakes, which are salt lakes.

There’s vegetation regeneration work going on on the banks of the lakes, to help preserve the environment.

On the way, we came across a Laughing Turtle Dove, which is very prettily coloured,

and, in an area by the lakes, I managed to get a photo of a quokka in a more natural-looking setting,

and Jane got a cute photo of one having a bit of a sleep (they’re described as semi-nocturnal, whatever that means).

Their natural food is vegetation, and they particularly like the paler-coloured fallen leaves from the Moreton Bay fig trees around the settlement.

Human food is bad for them, which is why (a) there are the stern instructions not to feed them and (b) why the ones near the settlement live half as long as those further out in the island.  There are plenty of those – there are tens of thousands of quokkas on the island, making it the largest known colony; their success is due to the absence of natural predators and the exclusion of introduced ones – steps have been taken to remove cats, dogs and foxes.

Back at the settlement, as well as a decent lunch at Frankie’s, I got a couple of photos of the non-quokka wildlife which is profuse around the settlement: Australian Ravens,

which are noisy, with a call sounding about half way between an annoyed cat and a squalling baby; and silver gulls, which don’t necessarily get on well with each other.

I also managed to get a shot of a mother quokka with a joey

which I think was trying to climb back into its pouch, but mamma was having none of it and wandered off in search of food, with the joey chasing after.

After lunch, we hopped on board our Discovery Tour bus, with guide Leo and driver Sam

and were driven anticlockwise round the periphery of the island whilst Leo gave an interesting commentary, interspersed with some very bad jokes. It was our opportunity to learn something of the history of the island, which is somewhat chequered.

  • The island became detached from the mainland about 7,000 years ago when sea levels rose; before that time it was inhabited by the Noongar people.
  • The name Rottnest was conferred by Willem de Vlamingh, who first documented the island in 1696.  He saw the quokkas as large rats and called it “Rat’s Nest” Island, but in Dutch – Rottnest. The island’s aboriginal Noongar name is Wadjemup – “The Place Across the Water Where the Spirits Are”. The Perth locals, predictably, call it “Rotto”.
  • From 1838 to 1931, the island was used as a prison and forced labour camp for over 3,600 Aboriginal people, who were subjected to extremely harsh conditions on the island.
  • Other historical uses of the island include as a military site, and for internment camps housing enemy aliens during the world wars. Many of the island’s buildings date from the colonial period, often made from locally quarried limestone, and are now used as accommodation for holidays.
  • This accommodation came in handy as a quarantine facility during the Covid pandemic.
  • During World War II, two 9.2 inch guns were installed near the middle of the island at Oliver Hill, and two 6 inch guns installed at Bickley Point, for defence of the Fremantle port. The location of the island was seen as being important to the defense of the important port of Fremantle, the major base for the Allies in the Indian Ocean, as bombardment of any attacking ships could be made from the island before the ships would come into range of the port. In the 1990s, the (decommissioned) gun emplacements were extensively reconstructed, and since then a popular tourist activity has included a tour of the guns and the tunnels.

In many areas around the island there’s growth of seagrass, which is important for the integrity of the sea floor as well as for marine life. The seagrass areas can be seen as the dark areas,

with the paler areas being sand.  Anchoring a boat among the seagrass is forbidden and offenders are subject to a large fine.

There are other nice views on the trip around the island, with some secluded and empty beaches (some are less secluded and more popular among bathers).

From a headland on the far south of the island, Leo pointed out that the next landfall to the east was Adelaide, about 2,000km away, and to the west was Madagascar – 7,000km distant. Also around the southern point, there’s an osprey’s nest which is several decades old.

There was even an osprey on it.

The osprey seems to be some kind of an icon for the island; a board by the jetty says “Follow The Osprey”, and the trails are marked with a rather nicely-imagined osprey outline.

We stopped for a 20-minute break at the far western point of the island, where we could get some shots of the scenery, which had another osprey nest and some great rock formations,

and I got a nice clear photo of a silver gull.

I’d like to say how tricky this shot was, but I’d be lying; it was just hovering there before coming in to land.

After the tour, we just had time for a swift beer

before boarding the ferry for the return journey.

So, the day had had a very different pattern from what we’d been expecting, but was enjoyable and interesting nonetheless. I don’t know if Audley had taken Jane’s reservations about bicycles on board and had altered the booking, but it’s certainly true that the information we had was largely

a quokka shit. Jane insists on taking credit for that one. No matter; we had a good day and we got to see the quokkas.

The morrow is our final day in Perth.  We have no formal plans, but I expect we’ll think of something. You’ll have to return to these pages to find out what that was, won’t you?

 

A Day in Fremantle

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Sunday 4 August 2024 – Stephen, the driver who ferried us from airport to hotel, had waxed lyrical about many things, among which was Fremantle when the market is on, meaning Friday, Saturday or Sunday.  He had suggested taking a ferry down the river for the views over the various suburbs, and then catching the train back, which thus became our plan A.

Plan B, involving travelling both ways by train, was drafted and adopted very soon after discovering that the ferry was fully booked. The train station, a handsome building,

is very close to the hotel, and so we could very quickly be discovered staring at the screen of a ticket machine, trying to work out which of the various fare options we should take, given that “return ticket to Fremantle” didn’t seem to figure among the candidates.  We each opted for a Day Rider ticket, costing about Aus$10.  The machine disgorged a small slip of paper, which seemed to be very different from what everyone else was using – they were beeping in and out through barriers, using cards or phones. However, it was quite possible to simply wander past the barriers, so we just walked through and fervently hoped that was a legit tactic. It didn’t seem to be policed in any obvious way at all. The Fremantle train came, bang on time, and left, bang on time, to start the 17-stop journey through the suburbs to Fremantle – “Freo”, as the natives call it. We noticed, as we went along, that they don’t give you much time at any stop to get through the doors before they are closed; at least one couple very nearly got separated by the alacrity of the process.

We also noticed that Transperth have their own version of the UK’s much beloved “See it, Say it, Sorted” campaign.

Mercifully, it’s just posters in the train rather than the inane broadcast slogan we have to endure in the UK.

After 45 minutes we arrived at Fremantle and started following the crowds from the train towards the centre of town.  Driver Stephen had mentioned that Fremantle was much less high rise than Perth, with many of the older buildings still extant.  And this makes it a very attractive centre to walk around.

We decided to reward our fortitude for taking on the public transport system in a far-distant land by having a coffee.  There was a bewildering choice of establishments, so we chose one at random and were able to sit out on the pavement and watch the world go by, the while admiring the planters that demarcated the road’s central reservation.

It seemed that going by in some kind of ostentatious, classic and typically American car was A Thing;

the red one came by at least twice whilst we were taking coffee.  Maybe he was showing off, or maybe he couldn’t find a parking spot large enough for his Chevvy; but his licence plate, CRUZN 57, tips the odds in favour of the former, I think.

We were in Market Street, which we guessed might lead us to the fabled Fremantle market; and so it proved as we walked a few more steps along the road.

(The extra crowds outside the market hall had been attracted by a street performer, who was in the middle of a very polished and amusing act involving bullwhips and other tricks.)

It might have been crowded outside but that had nothing on the press inside.

All sorts of enterprises were in action, offering all kinds of things.  There were, of course, many stalls selling foodstuffs

but there were all sorts of other emporia as well.

I was quite taken with this chap, who was examining with great intensity the selection of pins at a stall specialising in pins and fridge magnets.

He looked very much like a connoisseur of such things, seeking Just The Right Thing to add to his clearly very well-established collection. Either that or someone that the stallholder needed to keep a sharp eye on.

The other Fremantle attraction that driver Stephen had waxed lyrical about was

The Prison, which is Western Australia’s only World Heritage Listed building. So we headed that way, past a striking installation on the wall leading to it.

Entry is free, and takes one into a courtyard off which there are entrances to a variety of exhibition rooms,

but the best value of a visit comes from a (paid) guided tour.  There are various different tours on offer; the one that interested us was the chance to see inside the place, the “Behind Bars” tour.  We had about 45 minutes to wait, so looked around the various free exhibits, which had a lot of information about the history and significance of the place, as well as displays of various aspects, such as prison clothing.

Normal prison garb
“Punishment” garb

We had a coffee at the “No Escape Café” whilst we waited, and took the chance to experience a slice of typical Australian gastronomic culture.

Our tour was led by a very knowledgeable and friendly lady called Debbie, who gave us a brief overview of the history of the place, before taking us into the inner part of the prison.

The prison was built by convicts, who had been transported from the UK, between 1852 and 1859, using limestone quarried from the site.  Western Australia at the time was in a bad way – a small colony which had few resources, skilled or unskilled, to expand the economy.  Between 1845 and 1847, York Agricultural Society, supported by several merchants, lobbied the colony’s Legislative Council to petition the British Government to send convicts. They saw this as the best option to help supplement the lack of skilled and unskilled labour. The petition was successful and the first convicts arrived in 1850, with building the prison itself being their first task. At first called The Establishment, it was renamed Fremantle Prison in 1867. Transportation ceased the following year when the Hougoumont carried the last convicts to Fremantle. Nearly 10,000 convicts passed through the ‘establishment’ between 1850 and 1868, and the prison remained in use until 1991.

Debbie, of course, gave our group vast amounts of information about the prison as she led us around, and I, of course, have forgotten most of it. She described the induction process, which was a pretty undignified matter for incomers, then led us through the kitchens (much expanded from their original size)

to the exercise yard

which must have been a hellish place – as many as 700 male convicts left to their own devices from 8.30am to 4.15pm, overseen only by a guard (in a separated cage for his own protection), and with nothing to do to occupy their time. What could possibly go wrong?

Amazingly, in the mid-20th century, some turned to art, and there are the remnants of so-called Carrolup Art on the walls.

Time, and the nature of the limestone wall beneath, has faded the paintings, but there is an illustration of what it would have looked like in its time.

There were further examples in some of the cells.

Ah yes, the cells.  Debbie then led us to the actual cell blocks for the men’s part of the prison.

We got a chance to see what the original cells looked like, and how they developed over the years that the prison was in operation. The original cells were torturously tiny, and were gradually expanded over time.

Typical cell, 1852 – 1860
1860 – 1870
1920 – 1960
1960 – 1980

Some of the cells were extravagantly and exquisitely decorated with art.

Some were more simply decorated

1980 – 1991

There were two other areas that Debbie showed us as part of this hugely interesting tour: the gibbet room, which was in use until as late as 1964,

and the women’s prison (now a youth hostel!)

Although women were incarcerated for anything from the slightest to the most serious of offences – drinking, through stealing to prostitution – it could be supposed that their prison life was less arduous than the men’s.  There were some 70 women prisoners, as opposed to the 700 men, and their time was at least occupied, with washing and mending (and even eventually cooking), which must have been preferable to day after day of boredom and lack of privacy for those men not on labour gangs or working in the kitchens.

After this engaging couple of hours, we wandered on a little way from the prison, past the Fremantle Oval

where, of course, the game is Australian Rules Football, not cricket. Outside the Oval is a statue

dedicated to

(Look it up; I can’t be doing with explaining it here.)

We pottered on for a bit, past some artworks of different vintages

and I got my first wildlife photo of this trip, a Western Corella (a sort of cockatoo),

which was among a whole bunch of them cackling and squawking in the trees.

Our wandering had taken us back to Fremantle train station, and so we used the train to get to North Fremantle for a cocktail followed by an early dinner at Bib & Tucker, which was very pleasant and an opportunity to watch the sun go down. Then we caught the train back to Perth, so the Day Rider tickets came in very handy, thank you very much; a good decision, accidentally made.

The morrow has us participating in the only actually scheduled activity during our time in the Perth area, a visit to Rottnest Island, where the main objective must be to get a photo of its characteristic wildlife. How that went, and whether I was successful in catching a good photo of it, will have to wait for the next, thrilling, installment.

 

 

Getting there – and getting essential supplies

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Saturday 3 August 2024 – The agency, Audley, which is managing our itinerary (under the beady eye of the household travel co-ordinator, i.e. Jane) has done a distinctly average job of creating, and, critically, presenting us with, our schedule. Quite early on in the planning process we were given a very good general idea of where we would be and when, and what we would be doing when we got there; but important details (timings, meeting arrangements, etc) were missing, in many cases until a couple of days before our departure, and a few things had to be corrected after regression errors crept in as we moved from version to version of our schedule.  However, it looks like the whole – and very substantial – itinerary has come together nicely. As well as to Jane, thanks are due in no small part to Judy at Spear Travels, who cracked the whip very effectively for us.

STOP PRESS: Two days into our vacation, our trip is at last visible to us on the (admittedly cool-looking) Audley Travel Companion app, which will be a convenient way of accessing our itinerary details, which would otherwise be a bit of an encumbrance to  carry round with us everywhere.

The longest of journeys starts, as the saying doesn’t quite go, with a single taxi ride. Our taxi turned up early and got us very comfortably to the airport, whence everything moved very swiftly and unproblematically through the journey to Perth, our arrival point in Australia, reached via Singapore.

I say unproblematical; actually our departure from London was delayed, but only around 30 minutes. Any more than that and our transit through Singapore might have been rather inelegantly brisk, but the timings worked out fine.  We spent a long time on the various taxiways between terminal and takeoff, and I got an opportunity to capture a timelapse of the rather elegant ballet that goes on when there are several aeroplanes converging on the relevant runway.

I was interested to see a Concorde parked on the outfield; I didn’t realise that there were any left in the wild.

The arrival process of getting through customs and immigration and picking up our bags at Perth was impressively smooth and swift. We had to fill out an arrival card on the flight from Singapore, in which we promised that we weren’t convicts (no longer, it seems, an entry requirement to the country), didn’t have tuberculosis and weren’t bringing with us anything untoward, meaning, basically, foodstuffs. Because I knew that the Powers That Be in Australia are quite pernickety about such things, I had decided that we shouldn’t bring any home comforts that might cause a ruckus at the border; so we actually arrived in The Foreign without any of Twinings Finest Earl Grey just in case. Or, more accurately, not in either of our cases.

We were greeted at Perth’s airport by a very cheery chap called Stephen, who whisked us swiftly to our hotel, the QT, whilst simultaneously giving us a useful commentary about Western Australia and Perth, and making a useful recommendation of an outing we should undertake (Fremantle) and when (Sunday, i.e. tomorrow) because The Market Will Be On, and that’s a Good Thing.

The hotel is quite posh and is extremely conveniently located in downtown Perth,

but is architecturally unremarkable beyond being 18 stories tall with a Sky Terrace at the top (the highest bar in Perth, we understand), which sounds like something we should definitely acquaint ourselves with before we move on.

Another key datum that Stephen vouchsafed was that the shops were only open until 5pm, and, it being by this stage about 4.30pm, as you can understand we had an important shopping mission to undertake, which was to find a supermarket, and fast. Google Maps promised that there was a Woolworth’s (no relation, for those of a certain age) a couple of minutes away, and so off we scurried – not in quite the right direction, as it happens.  The Woollies was in a mall, and our efforts to find the entrance led us down a rather disreputable-seeming alleyway, which was, however, decorated rather beautifully.

Suffice it to say, we eventually found the shop and returned to the hotel bearing our spoils, whereupon we discovered something that raised the hotel in my estimation. They provided a kettle in the room. And largish cups for the tea. And milk in the minibar fridge.

Having used the shopping expedition to help us orient ourselves, and still being fairly full of Singapore Airlines (really rather nice) food, we needed to spend a few minutes before finding further sustenance. So we went for a walk. Obviously.

We didn’t cover much ground because it was heading towards sunset and, being winter, it was likely to get a bit chilly after the sun had disappeared.  But we were able to get a sample of the colonial buildings one can still find in Perth, squeezed in between all the modern high rise stuff.

Perth Town Hall (you can just see the side of our hotel on the left)

The old Treasury building

The Old Courthouse

We headed down to the water – the Swan River – also passing more modern buildings such as the Bell Tower

which has definite shades of Sydney Opera House in its side view.

Nearby is Elizabeth Quay

which has a very distinctive footbridge giving access from the west.

As you can see, the sun was going down by this stage, and it was indeed getting a bit chilly, so we headed back to the hotel, past another part of Perth’s architectural vernacular,

modern buildings in a faux-old style.  I think a lot of the colonial-era buildings have been demolished over the years, and in many cases replaced by steel-and-glass constructions; but there was more than a sprinkling of this more welcome style as well.

The QT Hotel offers an Italian restaurant called Santini, and we repaired there for an early evening bite to eat.  It was Saturday night and there was a wedding going on, so it was a tad on the raucous side, but provided a decent enough meal, after which we retired to our room to try to stay awake for a while to try to stave off the worst of the jet lag.  Crossing time zones can be unsettling enough, and crossing them from west to east is the more challenging direction, and we wanted to try to avoid the usual wide-awake-at-4am consequence of losing seven hours of the day.

I have to report that we failed, although not spectacularly.  It was around 8.30 at night when we both decided that we were losing the struggle to stay awake, and so we turned in. We had no formal schedule to have to work to, just an inchoate plan to get to Fremantle somehow. Stay tuned to see how that all worked out, eh?