14 March 2000
Hugely glad to get out of Perth this morning. Nice place, but wouldn't want to live there.
Drove out to Fremantle and then down the coast road through Kwinana, Rockingham, Mandurah, Myalup, Binningup, Pullmeup (only kidding), Australind, Bunbury, Gelorup, Busselton, Dunsborough, Mary River and on to Augusta where we are spending the night in a cosy room at the Augusta Hotel-Motel.
Some of the above (Mandurah in particular) seem to be very young towns (possibly not more than 10-15 years old) and the houses and estates - to my mind at least - are overly large, ornate and pretentious. Almost as if everyone is trying to outdo everyone else. The other thing that struck us was the number of resorts. Six or eight or sometimes many more in each town. All of them quite new. I don't know where they think they're going to get the tourists to fill them all even in the short term, let alone on a continuing basis. Likewise all the land for sale in all the new estates. Several new estates in each town (and sometimes many more). And again I don't know where they are are going to get buyers for them all. It seemed to us the tourism and residential land and building markets were hugely oversupplied. All this development spoilt many of these towns for us. Not the development itself, but the type and quantity of it.
Having said all that, Bunbury, Busselton and Augusta were delightful - although Bunbury, with its black and white check lighthouse, is well on the way to being spoilt by the developers. Huge mansions right along the seafront. Totally out of character with the rest of this beautiful old city. Busselton is a smaller version of Bunbury (without the over-development - yet). And Augusta is a jewel. Although catering to the tourist trade, it seems to have been developed to a much more reasonable degree, and in a manner not out of keeping with the rest of the area.
Not far out of Augusta is a large karri forest - the most westerly area in which the karri trees will grow. We took a drive through this on the way here. It was a striking sight to see acre after acre of these trees with their tall straight trunks and all growing within a couple of metres of each other. The wood from these trees is prized as a hardwood for building and structural purposes because of its beauty, and also for the lengths it is available in because of the trees' growth habits. They grow straight up for many, many metres and only branch at the top. There is a karri log on display in King's Park in Perth which is 37.5 metres long and has a girth (from memory) of 12 metres. They can grow up to 80+ metres.
And wineries. Everywhere we looked from about Dunsborough down were wineries. In one of the tourist books we counted 19 of them - and this is only down the coastal strip.
After arriving and checking in we went for a drive out along the Cape Leeuwin road to the lighthouse. Cape Leeuwin is the most south westerly point in Australia and is the point, apparently, from which Matthew Flinders began his mapping circumnavigation of the Australian coast in 1801. It is also the place at which the Indian and Southern oceans meet. Looking forward in the morning to having a good look round this lovely area before we move on.
From here it is eastwards towards Albany and Esperance and, eventually, home.