Kojonup - Boyup Brook

From Narrogin we planned to spend a few days at a town called Katanning. On the way we stopped at Wagin to have a look at the local 'big thing' - the Giant Ram. They left you in no doubt that it was a ram and not a ewe!

We hadn't booked at the caravan park in Narrogin and when we got there we were quite surprised to find that the park was full of workers, which meant they had no room for travellers like us, so we continued on another 40km or so to Kojonup. Both towns are firmly in sheep territory. Kojonup has a very interesting historical display at their visitor centre, we spent several hours exploring both the European and aboriginal stories given. There were a few shocks, such as the praise some footballers gave for their coach in 1972 when he forced the local publican to allow the aboriginal players into the front bar with the rest of the team at the end of year celebration, instead of making them stay out in the back yard. In 1972! It certainly came as an unwelcome surprise to us to realise how close to the surface overt racism has been in Australia so recently.

On another day we headed back to Katanning to investigate what local delights we had been denied. It turned out that there weren't very many, but we ended up spending nearly an hour at the local saleyards. This is the largest sheep saleyard in WA, trading more than a million sheep every year. We were there the day before sale day when they were unloading the sheep and it was frantic with sheep, dogs and sweating workers sorting and penning the animals. Apart from barking dogs, the sheep control implement of choice appeared to be a supermarket plastic bag tied to a stick, the sheep bolted from this when shaken at them. Or maybe they were just frightened of their shadows, they certainly don't appear to be the brightest of creatures!

Washing day at Kojonup provided a surprise. While John was doing the ironing afterwards he was horrified to find a bee crawl out of the shirt he had been wearing when he had been attacked while we were out walking in Narrogin. It had not only stayed hidden somewhere inside his shirt all that evening, but had somehow survived 3 days in the dirty clothes bag, then a washing machine cycle and all day flapping on the clothes line. It presumably didn't survive being crushed in a paper towel, sealed into a plastic bag and deposited very quickly into the rubbish bin!

From Kojonup we moved a further 90km to Boyup Brook, another sleepy sheep town. While Boyup Brook itself didn't offer a great deal for the adventurous tourist, we took a day trip to the mining town of Greenbushes and did a 10km walk through forest and past evidence of the area's previous mine history - mull heaps, mine shafts, tunnels and lakes formed in old mine workings. The current, still working mine has very little to see, as most of the activity now occurs underground.