Cervantes, WA, Australia

After the HMAS Sydney memorial yesterday, Lyn and I spent the rest of the day in the Geraldton Museum. The Museum has a number of different galleries; a shipwreck gallery focusing on the Batavia and Zuytdorp (two Dutch ships wrecked against the coast in the 1700’s), an HMAS Sydney section and a general gallery dealing with Geraldton’s history and agriculture. In addition to this, there was a special exhibition on Leonardo DaVinci’s machines.

After a guided tour of the shipwreck gallery, Lyn strolled through the rest of the museum while I went into the DaVinci exhibition with Mathew. An interesting couple of hours followed with Matthew and I studying and working out how DaVinci’s inventions worked, marvelling at how one guy could come up with so many clever ideas, things we use every day, more than 500 years before they became a mainstream technology.

Since we didn’t get a chance to finish it all off yesterday, Lyn and I returned this morning so that I could take a look at the Sydney gallery and Lyn could finish off some of the other exhibits. Merryn, Patrick and Matthew all went off to the Department of Meteorology to watch a weather balloon launch and Glen moved onto Greenough to check out the historic settlement there.

Heading out of Geraldton we came to Greenough, a historic settlement with a chequered history. Initially established to encourage English settlers, within a few years the town had a population of over 1,000 and was a highly successful wheat growing area.

A series of disasters starting with a major cyclone in 1872 and major flooding in 1888, as well as the discovery of gold in the goldfields, caused the gradual decline and abandonment of the settlement so that by 1900 most of the settlers had left the area with many of the small farmlets converted to grazing. In 1993, a woman and her three young children were brutally murdered in this small town, an event which became known as the Greenough Family Massacre.

Today there is a tourism industry showcasing several of the original buildings and we spent an interesting couple of hours wandering through the streets looking into all of the homes and public buildings after enjoying a very good Devonshire Tea. (I have to say Patrick missed out on a beauty here).

Just out the road a little there was Greenough’s other tourist attraction, the Leaning Tree. There’s a number of these weird trees around here, affected by the prevailing winds, they have horizontal trunks and just look as if they’re laying down. Most curious!

We got into Cevantes around 3:30 or so and before we’d finished setting up the Coughlins also arrived. There was time for us to shoot out to the Pinnacles before dark and as Glen has decided to head home from here, it will be his only chance to see them. 20 k’s out of town is the Nambung National Park where the Pinnacles are located.

What are the Pinnacles I hear you asking? Well, there appears to be some conjecture on this. They’re either sandstone that’s been eroded over thousands of years or they’re petrified trees. It would seem that in Geological terms they aren’t very interesting, nor very old, so they haven’t attracted much attention. They are very cool tourist attractions however and we had a great drive through the park before dark set in.

Good-bye, so long, farewell……..

Dinner at the Cevantes Country Club to farewell Glen (Fish). He has to be home a week earlier than the rest of us, so he’s off in the morning. It’s been great having him along and we all hope he travels safely and enjoys what remains to be seen before returning to work. Thanks, mate, it’s been fantastic…..