First major inconvenience ...
- mcnovies
- Oct 9, 2024
- 4 min read
As planned, we headed to Gwalia thinking we would visit the museum, have a wander around and camp there for the night.
Gold was first found in Gwalia in 1896. In 1897 a London based firm sent a young mining engineer Herbert Hoover to inspect the Gwalia mine and in November 1897 that company bought the mine. Hoover was at Gwalia for six months in which time he designed the Mine Manager's house and oversaw the design of the staff and office buildings.
In 1929 Hoover was elected the 31st president of the United States of America.
The mine was closed in late 1963, then reopened in the early 1980s and is still operating today (24/7)
The Mine Manager's house still stands and is used as a bed and breakfast and has a café, where we had lunch. The museum is great, a number of the original homes still stand as well as the original hotel which is currently boarded up but apparently the mining company is keen to restore it!
The day was hot…38 degrees, the camp site was in a car park, no a scrap of shade and perched atop the mine that operates 24 hours a day…we decided this was not the camp site for us!
From there we headed south to Lake Ballard. Lake Ballard is a saltwater lake not far from the town of Menzies.
Fifty-one metal sculptures have been installed over 10 square kilometres of the lakebed. Takes a while to walk around the full installation, we did most of the installation, not the whole lot! Camping beside the lake is free and we were lucky to get a spot right beside the lake, even luckier to get a great sunset and sunrise.
From Lake Ballard we started the trek to Cue and Big Bell. After the dirt finished Pete decided the air-up the tyres as we were finishing our unsealed section and would be back on the black velvet bitumen for a few weeks..
All good…great plan…until he tried to close the rear car door. The door handle was not functioning…again it was 38 degrees…the door was definitely not closing! We contacted the Toyota dealer in Newman and booked the car in for fix-it job on Thursday. Pete did a great job securing the rear door so we could drive…ratchet straps, bungie cords and tape … all good. However, because the door was not 100% closed the ‘door open’ alarm was not happy. So not happy it has been beeping for the last 860 kms !!! Far from ideal!
We continued our journey to Big Bell where we camped for the night.
Big Bell is a ghost town located about 30kms from the town of Cue. The town of Big Bell was established in 1936 to provide accommodation for the gold mine workers, the hotel was reputed to have the longest bar in Australia. Unfortunately, the township only lasted about 20 years but at one time housed 800 people.
Tonight we are in Newman and hopefully the trip to Toyota will be short and we will have a door that actually closes…and no more alarm beeping while we drive!
After quiet a few days doing quite a few kms we are looking forward to Karijini National Park. A couple of days in the same location and the chance to do some great bushwalking.
Pete - my final thoughts on the Great Central Road ...
It was an amazing experience, not just from the perspective of how long the road is (1126km – Yulara to Laverton), and how remote the communities are that live on, and rely on the traffic that uses it, but as a driver it was at times like driving on an unsealed freeway and at other times like many other unsealed roads full of ruts, corrugations, washaways and changing conditions.
Mirages abound and they play tricks with both your eyes and your brain – sometimes they appear quite close and look as a real as water on the road – then they disappear slowly – sometimes they disappear quickly. Other times they are quite some distance away and behaviour similarly. But sometimes, the mirage is not a mirage – it is water and it can catch you out … and there can be great expanses of it! We were told at Warakurna that the water can sit on the sides of the road “for months”! Where it has dried up is usually characterised by long deep tyre tracks that weave across the road as the driver has attempted to miss or get out of the water – these tracks can be 6-8 inches deep and have dried hard.
The other observation is the amount of broken car, truck and caravan bits that randomly appear – from broken metal fittings such as gas bottle brackets to towballs to ratchet straps and occy straps (I counted 10 in the space of about 10kms before I gave up) and all manner of bits that have departed their original fixing point – they don’t dominate the space but they certainly become a dangerous obstacle at speed on an unsealed road and prompt you to concentrate.
The other notable item is the number of upturned cars that sit on the side of the road. From Docker River right through to Laverton (877kms), I reckon there would have been at least 1 car every 5 kms - lots of AU Falcons and VT Commodores and 80 series Land Cruisers with a peppering of mini vans, trucks, the odd Barina. I have seen estimates of around 400 such vehicles.
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