Excuse me, I think I’ve got gas………. |

Dampier, WA, Australia

Remember the movie Red Dog? or the book it was based upon?

Red Dog was the real deal, otherwise known as the Pilbara Wanderer, he died in Dampier in 1979. There’s a nice monument to him just outside of the township of Dampier and he’s a big thing up here. Stickers, shirts, stubby holders, you name it and you can get it with Red Dog on it!

We took a short drive around Dampier this morning after doing a bit of cleaning. Everyone had inches of red dust to wipe, hose, sweep etc. I’m sure we’ll find more but we’ve given it a good crack so things look a little cleaner at least.

Dampier is built for one purpose and that’s to ship iron ore out of the country. It just so happens that there is also a Salt industry and now the North West Shelf Gas project but make no mistake, Iron Ore is still a big, big deal up here. As a result, the poor tourist dollar isn’t regarded very highly and there’s not a lot to do. Driving around the town we found a nice little lookout and a spot to watch the iron ore carriers being loaded ( not as easy to see as Port Hedland) but little else to occupy our time.

A short drive up the road to the Burrup Peninsula and we were about to educated. I’m not big on aboriginal culture but Merryn was keen to check out the Petroglyphs at Hearsons Cove. The tourist guide said turn right onto the Hearsons Cove road and carefully measure 2.2km and then turn right onto a track. Well, it was right. We managed to find the carpark with no trouble, but there isn’t a sign in sight? I don’t know if it’s to discourage us or just that they don’t care?

Petroglyphs are rock carvings and I recall seeing some one other time that were nothing more than circles and straight lines. What we found today (by scrambling over an enormous pile of rock) were actually pretty cool. It was about 17,000 degrees today as we went looking for these and we were all pleasantly surprised to find engravings of emus, wombats, kangaroos and of course some weird looking guys drawn predominantly out of circles and straight lines. These could have been aliens, I’m not sure I’ve interpreted them correctly. Anyway, given these engravings could be tens of thousands of years old and they were scratched with a rock, they were as previously stated, pretty cool!

Our next and last stop for the day was the Woodside North West Shelf Gas Project Visitor Centre. Gas isn’t high on my list of things to do and see but it was very interesting to see how gas is drilled for offshore, how it’s processed and how it’s transported. This is a huge new industry for the region, clearly, one that is worth $100,000,000,000,000,000 billion and one that will provide employment up here for a long while. We’re now all very much smarter about gas and it was interesting to see where some of the pumps that Flowserve (my employer) built have gone. I must tell them at work that we should charge more, there’s lots of money here.