Wheatfields and Wildflowers

We've spent a few days meandering through the northern Western Australian wheatbelt, which is also wildflower country. We have to confess that this was partly to avoid the coast while the local school holidays were on, but we also found lots to see and do.

We spent 3 nights at Perenjori and 1 at Mullewa. The most famous local flower is the wreath flower, and we were lucky enough to see some magnificent specimens. Unlike the eastern states, WA is still in the grip of drought, and 2010 has been one of the driest years on record, so it apparently hasn't been a great wildflower season, but we still found plenty of colour to be impressed by.

This region is also famous for priest-architect Monsignor John Hawes, and we visited several of the churches he designed and built here. Mullewa was his parish for 22 years, and he not only designed the church pictured at left, but provided most of the labour to build it and painted several of the pictures that decorate the interior. Mullewa has multiple walks with excellent information panels, one of them gave us a terrific insight into the life and works of Monsignor Hawes, while others covered Mullewa's railway heritage, the town's history and the bushland and wildflowers of the region. Needless to say, we did all the walks on offer, even though the flies were far more friendly than we would like, and the wind has approached gale force.

Being Western Australia, you can't go far without stumbling over a mine of some sort, and there are some new ones being developed just east of Perenjori. We first experienced this on our way there, when we spent 80km and well over an hour stuck behind some piece of huge equipment being trucked to the new mine - the up side was that we knew that we wouldn't have any traffic coming towards us, as anything coming the other way had to almost bury itself in the scrub beside the road to let the oversize load past. From Perenjori we did a heritage drive to the old gold mining township of Rothsay, the drive was supposed to be a loop but part of the road was closed due to a new mine being set up (the destination of the aforementioned oversize load), so we decided to take a different route back to town. We were half way along our chosen back road when we unexpectedly came across a sign saying 'Security checkpoint ahead' and found ourselves being interrogated by a security guard. It turned out the the previously public back road had the previous week been privatised and given to a new mine company, and if we wanted to proceed on our chosen route we would need to be escorted through the new mine development. We initially said we would return the way we came, but it was close to lunch time so we told the guard we would pull off into the scrub on the side of the road and eat the sandwiches we had brought with us. By the time we finished lunch the mine security escort had turned up, so we decided to continue on our original planned route after all, which meant we followed our escort car for the next 10km or so, with check in points every few km. We felt like royalty with our own dedicated escort vehicle clearing the way for us! By this stage we were off the edge of the only map we had, but John's excellent navigation skills got us back on track to our home base.

We have finally shown the benefit of experience, stocking up at the local small supermarket in Perenjori well before it closed at lunch time on Saturday, with virtually no shopping available here in outback WA until Monday morning.