Port Hedland

According to the locals, Port Hedland is the engine room of the Australian economy. It is the biggest export port in the country, once stuff is dug out of the ground it is sent here by train, loaded onto a ship and sent off to China. Mainly iron ore (which to the untrained eye is indistinguishable from ordinary dirt) but lots of other minerals as well. There is even a salt mine here, which is appropriate as Port Hedland is the sort of place one can imagine being sent to for punishment. Despite being a bustling town of some 16,000 souls, the services and shopping on offer are woeful - no butcher, baker or candlestick maker, and not even a hardware store. As we found to our dismay, there certainly isn't a tv repair shop either. The locals presumably spend all the considerable amount of money they get working for BHP and the other big mining companies here on supermarket meat and rent - we had a quick look in the estate agent's window, and a 3-bedroom investment house was advertised at $730k, boasting 10.6% return on investment. That works out to several multiples of the rent we are getting for our lovely house in trendy Williamstown. It's no wonder that half the shops in town had signs up advertising for staff, we can't imagine how people could afford to live here if they aren't on mining company wages.

We managed to fill in a few days here quite comfortably. There was a tour of the iron ore export facility, which disappointed a bit as we weren't allowed to get out of the bus, so all our photos have a reflection of the photographer from the bus window overlaid onto the picture. However, it did give an interesting overview of the export process. We watched several massive iron ore boats being either brought into port or taken out to sea by the very busy tug boats, you can tell the ship in the picture above is unladen as it is sitting very high in the water, the full ones are right down on the plimsoll line, so none of the red part shows at all. We also did the history walking trail around town, which would have been more interesting if more of the old buildings mentioned in the brochure still existed, rather than just being 'the site of the original ......'.

On the third day here we drove out to Marble Bar, about 200km away from Port Hedland, which claims to be the hottest place in Australia, based on a heat wave in 1923/24 when it didn't drop below 100 Fahrenheit (37.8 C) for 161 days. At this time of year it was a very pleasant low 30s, but it would get pretty unbearable in Summer when the average daily maximum is 41! The town was named when an early explorer found what he thought was a seam of marble in a stream just outside town, but it turned out to be jasper (don't ask us what the difference is), however the name stuck. In the picture on the right Wendy is leaning against some of the jasper rock, it looks very pretty and certainly very marble-like to us.