Category: History

After a 1200km drive across the Nullarbor, we arrived at Ceduna and performed the manoeuvre at the roundabout.

From here, you can either drive directly across to Port Augusta or you can tour the Eyre Peninsula.  The Peninsula is famous for its seafood, particularly oysters, so we weren’t going to miss out on that.  Ceduna itself is a small, quiet, seaside town but you can’t help noticing there’s a large court house, a domestic violence unit, a relationship centre and the caravan park has a security fence.

I spent some time at the National Trust Museum which should get an award for packing the most exhibits into the smallest space.  It has rooms full of radios, sewing machines, typewriters, stuffed birds, household appliances; sheds full of farm machinery and vehicles; a school building, a relocated cottage to name a fraction.

One particularly interesting room had displays about the Atomic testing carried out by the British in the 1950’s at Maralinga which is 400km NW of Ceduna  This seems to be a largely unknown part of Australian history.  At the time, the town housed 550 British and Australian nuclear scientists, technicians and Army and Air Force personnel. There were 7 major weapon tests at Maralinga and hundreds of ‘minor’ trials including radiological experiments which scattered long-lived plutonium over a large area.  There were long term health issues for service personnel and the local communities.  For example pilots were told to fly through the toxic clouds to gather data.

The site was cleaned up in the late 90’s and now there are 3-day tours out to the testing grounds where you can explore the remaining infrastructure and visit the burial pits where all the contaminated equipment was buried.  We decided to pass on this one.

We were planning to start our drive across the Nullarbor once we left Esperance but decided to detour north to see the gold mining twin towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder.  The Goldrush began in 1893 after three down on their luck Irishmen stumbled upon some gold nuggets and registered a claim.  You can see the incredible wealth of the towns at the height of the gold rush in the architecture of the main streets.

At the museum, local man Geoff does an excellent tour at 10.30am, bringing alive the history of the area and the people.  Hear tales of famous gold nugget finds and see a display worth millions of dollars kept behind bullet proof glass in The Vault.

See the pub where the death of a local miner in 1934 sparked the worst riot on the goldfields.  Look out for the ghost of a woman who fell down the stairs in the museum building in the early 1900s.  Find out how a young miner was rescued by early divers after being trapped in a flooded mine for 9 days in 1907.

Jonathan went on a 2 1/2 hour tour of the Fimiston Open Pit, known as ‘The  Super Pit’ a working gold mine.  The tour bus goes down into the mine and drives amongst the huge trucks and mine workings.  The daily blasts can be viewed from the lookout.  The pit is approximately 3.5 kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and over 600 metres deep.

Who’d have thought there’s a life size replica of Stonehenge as it would have first looked, on the WA south coast, just outside of Esperance.  We used to live in Wiltshire in the UK and Jonathan drove past the real Stonehenge every day on his way to work, so we had to visit.  Someone’s mad idea of a tourist attraction that could be built from the local pink granite.  It sits in the middle of a cattle farm with views across to Esperance Bay.  It could have been yours to own for $5 million recently.

The centre overlooks King George Sound where two convoys departed for the battlefields of the First World War.   It was opened on 1^st November 2014 to coincide with the centenary of the departure of the first convoy.

Through interactive displays, it tells the stories of soldiers, nurses, army chaplains, surgeons, war correspondents, photographers and even the horses who left in the convoys.  You are given a card at the entrance which lets you follow the story of one particular person, from embarkation to the end of the war, when you find out if they returned home.

An amazing amount of thought has gone into the design of the building and the exhibition to take advantage of its position.  The pool of reflections is a quiet room for visitors to sit and contemplate whilst looking out across the bay.  The names of all the men and women who left on the conveys slowly move across the screen underneath the water.    For thousands on those ships, it was the last time they would see Australia.

Thousands of horses were sent across with the convoys but only one Australian horse returned home – Sandy, who was the mount of Major General Sir William Bridges.  When Sandy died in 1923, his head and hooves were mounted and his head can be seen at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The Convoy Walk leads up to a lookout and information boards along the walk provide details about all the ships in the convoys. At the start of the walk is a sculpture of a torn and crumpled letter and scripts from original letters and postcards written during the war.

The centre is within the grounds of Princess Royal Fortress which was built to protect the shores in times of war.

You could easily spend a whole day at the complex.  The entrance fee for the centre is $24 but everything else is free.

Donald Campbell is the only person to have set both land and water speed records in the same year.  The land speed record was set in July 1964 at Lake Eyre, South Australia. We discovered today that the water speed record was set on Lake Dumbleyung near the town of Dumbleyung in Western Australia on the afternoon of 31^st December 1964. Campbell achieved the double with only hours to spare.  A replica of his Bluebird K7 jet engine hydroplane was commissioned by the town for the 50^th anniversary of the record and unveiled by his daughter Gina Campbell.  Bluebird reached 276.33 mph (444.71 km/hr) to set the record.

Hundreds of people visited Dumbleyung for the 50^th anniversary only to find that the pub had recently closed when the owner ran into financial trouble.  This was a double whammy as it was outside the pub that Campbell had announced to the world he’d broken the record and it was also New Year’s Eve.  One of the visitors decided to buy and restore the iconic building and it’s now open for business again and contains a shrine to the great Donald Campbell.

“In memory of the men lost on HMAS Sydney II 19^th November 1941.  Lest we forget.”

She was returning from convoy escort duties to Java when a German raider ship disguised as a Dutch merchant vessel opened fire, off the West Coast of Australia.   The ship was destroyed with the loss of all 645 crew members.

There are 645 birds in the central Dome of Souls representing the number of crew members lost.

The Waiting Woman represents the families who waited for their loved ones to return.

The name, rank and home base of every man lost is etched into the Wall of Remembrance

Interestingly, the HMAS Sydney II was built in Jonathan’s home city of Newcastle upon Tyne.

The one hour tour at Pearl Luggers was very informative and given by Rachel, a Geordie lass.  A lugger is a small sailing boat with a particular type of sail called a lug sail, and it was these luggers which were used by pearl divers.

The early years of pearl diving in Broome were shameful times as Aboriginals were kidnapped from the West Kimberley by gangs known as ‘blackbirders’.  They were drugged and put on the luggers and forced to free dive for the pearl shells.  Women who were pregnant were often taken as it was thought they had a better lung capacity.  There is a statue to acknowledge these female divers at Roebuck Bay.

With the introduction of diving suits in the 1880s, divers could go deeper and stay under for much longer which increased the amount of pearl shells that could be recovered.  This pretty much brought to an end the practise of coercing Aboriginal divers and Japanese divers were mostly employed.  It was a highly dangerous occupation.  The suits were primitive and many divers suffered from divers’ paralysis (now called ‘the bends’).  Many became addicted to opium to deal with the pain.  The helmet itself weighed 45kg and if a diver fell over on deck while wearing the helmet it would break his neck.

Pearl shell was highly sought after particularly for making buttons and Broome supplied 80% of the world’s pearl shell.   If a pearl was found when cleaning the shells, it was expected to be placed in a P. Percy Box which allowed pearls to be dropped in but not tipped out.

During WWII, every Japanese person in Broome was interned and this was a disaster not only for the pearling industry but for pretty much every industry in Broome.   As other materials were developed such as plastic for buttons, the demand for pearl shell decreased.