Australasia > Australia > Western Australia > Perth > Articles > The Pilbara, Western Australia

‘Well, that’s a pretty desolate place’, said a Perth taxi driver, referring to the Pilbara region of Western Australia. And so it seemed at first, as we drove through Australia’s unutterable north western vastness. The tarmac scorched a black trail through an interminably flat landscape of spinifex bush. Telephone lines looped repetitively on the left; occasionally an eagle’s nest sat on the top of a pole. Emus picked their way about among the ten foot termite mounds, which stood like lone incisors.

But it is not without interest, the country up here. Exmouth benefits from the lowest level of cloud-cover in Australia and what with its fine beaches and sea, the area is seeing the beginnings of winter tourist traffic. Australia’s second barrier reef, the Ningaloo, lies offshore, coming within inches of the shoreline in places and it is magnificent. Inland, oddly, the area is also home to some of the oldest rock in the world. As a rock fan, this was an irresistible novelty and it raised an irrational, somehow undefinable desire: to go there, to touch it, hug it, or maybe hit it, just be next to such old and venerable rock.

It’s normal to join a tour in these parts and so we did. We were driven by an Australian, Graham, who never quite relaxed in the face of six independent wills, each determined to head off in an opposite direction. Otherwise we were all British except for Rolf, a company executive from Switzerland. Chris was a Stockport County supporter with a quick-fire barrack-room humour, and there was Cora, who was delightful in the generosity of her laughter. It came at the slightest hint of humour. Her husband Peter was a mild-mannered former Army officer who went seemingly unfazed by being addressed as ‘mate’ and was happiest out photographing the wildlife.

In Coral Bay the silver line of the breakers hovered in the heat-haze on the reef. We loaded up in a glass-bottomed boat for a look at the corals, trousers rolled up and wading offshore to guarantee ourselves a seat ahead of the crowds - ‘a bit like the evacuation of Singapore really’, mused Cora.

The reef was as impressive as it was revealing: plate corals the size of satellite dishes jostled for space in a fearsome, forested tangle of lavender coral and staghorns; fish that protected themselves from predators by wrapping themselves in a sleeping bag of mucous, and parrot fish females that turned into dominant males (one way of coping with the seven year itch, I suppose).

‘Oi, I don’t like the look of those ones much,’ said Chris, pointing out the tiny scissor-tailed sergeants, twittering black and white striped fish that appeared at regular intervals on the reef, guarding their patch. ‘Too much like Newcastle supporters if you ask me’. He was torn, though, because they turned out to be formidable fighters, so aggressive that they would attack a submarine if it came too close.

Later, in a dive boat, we went farther out. Turtles surfaced lazily for air, darting off in a panic when they spotted the boat, dugongs tooled around in the shallows and we spent a short while stalking a tawny nurse shark. Really it was whales we were after, though and eventually we found a humpback mother and calf with an accompanying nanny. We were able to follow them at a distance (sometimes as little as twenty yards) for half an hour as they swam and played, cruising lazily and rolling, surfacing to blow, taking in air and then disappearing with a slow-motion slide of the tail.

After a couple of days we ‘headed bush’, inland along more interminable miles of blacktop and gravel road. Barely a roo stirred, but gradually mountains began to rise from the flatness, the Hamersley Range. Stratas of rock protruded in the hillsides, beige with interposed fillings, like a production run of massive wafer-biscuits. They snaked with the contours, curling and buckling, even twisting vertically in places and splaying like the back plates of a stegosaur.

As we reached the Karijini National Park the scenery took on more typical signature of the Australian outback: a yellowing landscape with tufted gum trees that stand like heads of broccoli. The park is known for its canyons and rockpools - real Crocodile Dundee country this - and above them the sky, cloudless of course, was relentlessly stark and blue. The air was oppressively hot and somehow brittle, more like The Picnic at Hanging Rock. Cora’s laugh chuckled refreshingly like clear, cold water.

Before taking a walk into the canyons the seven of us stood and studied the hiker’s checklist on an information board.

‘So, have you got your bird-tweeter then, Rolf?’ asked Chris.

‘No, but of course I haff my Sviss Army knife... so we should be OK’

The rockfaces rose around us like cathedral walls, with pinnacles like finials and buttresses that protruded as chunks had eroded underneath. The wafer brown had become a rich deep red, even magenta, with burnt black edges. The rock now seemed crisp, like the layers of millefeuille, its strata curly and buckled and fusing into a primeval goo. Graham picked up a small slab of stone and dropped it. It rang like a bell. The iron content is so high that the rock has a musical quality.

We walked in the shade of myrtle trees, with running water that collected in pools where dragonflies hovered and darted among the ferns and grasses.

‘Where’s Peter?’ asked Graham, with a note of rising exasperation.

‘Oh, he’s off stalking hibiscus again’, said Chris.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were following the water into the guts of the earth, down an ever-narrowing gorge until it became a sinuous channel, smoothed by aeons of water movement. We slithered over a lip with the aid of ropes into a huge cavernous hollow, where the water was caught in a rockpool. I jumped in to cool off.

The rockfaces stood sheer on all sides. Distant, almost mystically ancient names from British geology sprung to mind: cretaceous, palaeozoic and jurassic. But at less than 500 million years old these are mere juniors by comparison. Some of the sandstone in the Pilbara is five times older than that. It goes by a suitably conclusive name: Archaeic.

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