1st July 2013
Port Hedland, I wonder how many of you
picked me up on the misspelling of Port Hedland in my previous post. We did a
history bus tour of Port Hedland while we were there and found it very
interesting. Captain Peter Hedland (Originally Hedlaund I think), discovered
the place as an ideal location for a port around 1863 and it was finally
gazetted as a town in 1896. Unfortunately Aboriginals murdered poor old Captain
Hedland in his mid fifties.
One end of the town we were shown a complex
that is now a large modern looking motel, but originally it was a detention
centre for refugees. Apparently when China declared a one child family law,
which no doubt many of you can remember, a lot of Chinese refugees turned up
many with pregnant wives or more than one child. These people were housed in
the unsecured detention centre, could come and go at will, were a happy,
friendly and polite group of people, to all accounts were accepted and treated
well by the locals with whom they mixed. The next wave of inmates were middle
eastern refugees and were a different kettle of fish, they objected to the
centre caused trouble in the community, eventually rioting, wrecking and
burning things and basically had to be fenced in like a prison. We saw a
section of these buildings that haven’t yet been converted and they do look
like a modern prison.
A lot of the houses and buildings in Port
Hedland have heavy steel bars like railway lines secured along their roofs,
this we were told was to hold the iron on during cyclones, all the houses were
devoid of gutters so the rain water can run straight off the roofs it only
rains now and then but when it does apparently it buckets down and gutters
don’t cope. The rain I mentioned in my previous post that inundated the region delivered
almost the years normal supply of rain in two days. That would account for the
amount of water still lying around making the place look like wetlands and out
of town many roads are still closed.
Cyclones are quite prevalent in this
region, buildings are designed to withstand natures fury and one of the things
we had pointed out was that houses all have steel mesh fitted in front of their
windows to prevent missiles smashing them, even a coke can will penetrate a
window in a cyclone we were told. Once air pressure equalises inside a house
from a smashed window the roofs come off and and they disintegrate. Around town
you see signs reporting the status of cyclones allowing people time to prepare
for an onslaught.
The Port is one of the busiest in Australia
as far as shipping movement and tonnage is concerned. Massive bulk carriers
line every available dock where huge loading facilities pour iron ore into
their holds. These huge ships, most of them destined for China turn around
within a couple of days and are gone again. Out on the horizon you can see
dozens of vessels anchored awaiting their turn to enter port, much like you see
the coal boats off Dalrymple Bay at Mackay in Qld. Of course there are other
products shipped out from here like mineral salt from the Rio Tinto Salt works
on the edge of town, where they flood areas with sea water and let the sun
evaporate it until they have a concentrated mineral salt build up, this is also
used in the production of iron and steel and is loaded in bulk the same as iron
ore.
At the information centre where we were
picked up for our tour there was a notice board giving the daily tide times and
heights, shipping movements in and out of the port such as the ships name, time
of arrival, time of departure, tonnage and destination. I thought this
information was rather interesting and gave you an idea of just how big the
ships are and how fast they are loaded and turn around, some of these vessels
are in excess of 200,000 tonnes and get loaded in a couple of days. The good
thing here is you can walk down the street and watch the shipping movements
from fairly close quarters.
Port Hedland is basically established into
three locations, Port Hedland itself which is the original location, a medium
industry section and South Hedland that appears to be the newer suburb of
housing and shopping and is about 12 kls from the Port.
Unfortunately the only chap that
could fill gas bottles at our caravan park was called out of town for a few
days. The price to fill would have been $35, so I called the Caltex servo as
recommended and they wanted $55 to fill, just bloody extortion. So we left town
with one empty bottle, let’s hope I don’t get egg on my face.
Saturday 29th June
We left Port Hedland in a south easterly
direction on the Great Northern Highway en-route for Karijini National Park (originally
Hamersley Range National Park) approximately 327 kls, here we are walking
gorges etc and had intended staying for a while in the national park, but a
cold easterly wind is blowing (the same as a westerly in Qld) and after two
days the sky is very threatening so we will hold council and decide on our
movements.
Tuesday 2nd July
The wind dropped and although it’s pretty
cool once the sun drops the days have been gloriously warm. Subsequently we
extended our stay here and have hiked several gorges here both at Dales Gorge
area and Weano Gorge some 45kls away. The gorges here in the Hamersley Range
are made up of hard deep red iron stone cliffs formed like layers of slate
looking remarkably like giant ornamental walls. All very spectacular and
challenging, photos don’t do them justice. The region was formed some 25,000 to
27,000 million years ago, due to various geological plates moving the land mass
was pushed up and belted around thereby creating the massive foliations in the
rock strata and where there were fault lines and cracks, gorges were formed
through gradual erosion. It’s a very interesting place.
Today we moved onto Tom Price One of the
largest iron ore mines in the world and where we have the opportunity to do a
mine tour, get some maintenance done and Nancy can catch up with her washing,
plus we have internet connection and can get the blog verbal posts up todate
unfortunately photos take for ever to upload and I sometimes wonder if I will
ever get those up todate.
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