“It goes against the grain to outlay all that money,” I said, “but I’m prepared to go on the $190 cruise.”
David demurred. “The $299 one is better.”
We were discussing possibilities for an Ord River cruise from Kununurra, a town that only came into existence in 1961 as a by-product of the dam project.
“That tour doesn’t even give you an extra meal for the extra $110,” I argued. “Just nibbles and a glass of champagne.”
“Yes, but you get to see Lake Argyle as well as the Ord River.”
“So what? It’s just a dam.”
This was like secular blasphemy to a lover of dams and other feats of engineering. “It holds 21 times as much water as Sydney Harbour,” David cried. He flapped the brochure about in the early dusk and his unkempt beard fluttered in the Kununurra breeze. “I want to see it. I don’t want to miss it.”
I had to give in. You can’t stand between a man and a dam.
Sadly for David and for my dam education, his desired tour was booked out and we had to settle for the one I’d originally chosen. This is what happens when so many Australians are travelling at the same time. We did see and admire Lake Argyle, but not for quite as long as he had hoped.
Before this heated discussion, we had spent a few days and nights travelling ponderously along the highway from Derby to Kununurra. On the whole, the road had been quiet and lonely, but not without its idiosyncrasies and its pleasures. We had driven over any number of one-lane bridges spanning creeks that only have water in the wet season, and we had navigated, as usual in Western Australia, many kilometres of roadworks. We had stayed overnight in Fitzroy Crossing, at Larrawa Station (not a patch on Bullara Station) and at Doon Doon Roadhouse.
Other travellers had told us to avoid stopping overnight at Halls Creek because of its “security problems”, but it was at the Poinciana Roadhouse there that we had one of the most memorable moments of the whole trip. We met an Aboriginal man, Ivan Bridge, exactly David’s age, and he told us about his childhood and life on a cattle station as the son of an Aboriginal woman and an Irishman. His father, unlike many other white people at that time, had encouraged him to speak his mother’s language, Kija. I asked him to speak to us in it. The sentence that he chose, and kindly repeated when I asked him to, was: “I am speaking to you from the mouth of my mother.”
I would have liked to undertake an intensive language course for weeks on end.
But back to our river cruise. The thing about tours is that you surrender yourself for a whole day to someone else’s planning. After weeks of reaching our own not particularly knowledgeable decisions, we felt liberated. Once we had climbed onto the bus, we were in the capable hands of the tour providers, Triple-J Tours. All we had to do was lean back, enjoy the air-conditioned comfort and await further instructions.
The boat driver and tour guide, Grant, was clearly a lover of dams and of the plethora of living creatures that make their home on the Ord River. He was especially enamoured with the elegance and ingenuity of the dam system that has been developed over the past 60 years. “No pumps!” he said. “It’s all done with gravity. And there’s no concrete in the dam wall either.” The clay in the wall expands and becomes watertight as it gets wet, which seals it in a natural way. Lake Argyle currently holds 18 Sydney Harbours, but at the height of a particularly heavy wet season, it has held 43. It is one of the largest freshwater lakes in the southern hemisphere.
As the boat twisted and turned along the Ord River and then across Lake Kununurra, we were mesmerised by the towering red cliffs, the trees that nestled on them, seeming tiny in comparison, the emerald green water, the white spray, the reeds swaying in the sunlight, and the spinifex clinging to the rocks. Grant could pick out even the most well-camouflaged wildlife, such as the crocodiles sunning themselves on the banks and the tree branches, and the rock wallabies peeping out from their little caves. There were all sorts of birds too: sea eagles, ospreys, darters, cormorants and jacanas, which Grant nicknamed “Jesus birds”, because they can walk on the floating vegetation.
I had to admit that we really did need a boat to see all this, rather than our trusty, dusty car. Yet to my mind, the meeting with Ivan, over a coffee and a Kit Kat at a dingy roadhouse on a seemingly interminable highway, was just as memorable as our river cruise.
Final Notes
- Fitzroy Crossing: Fitzroy River Lodge Caravan Park (excellent)
- Larrawa Station (basic, pleasant walk to Christmas Creek)
- Doon Doon Roadhouse (excellent opportunity to eat junk food and home-made trifle)
- Kimberleyland Waterfront Holiday Park (very good)
