Monday the 8th we walked through a bush track from the Lake
Argyle Van village to the Durack Homestead. When the Ord Dam was built and the
valleys were then flooded to form Lake Argyle, the Argyle Downs cattle station,
owned by the Durack family, went under water. The Durack’s were not against it
as it was Kimberly Durack’s idea. The station and a couple of other very large
stations nearby were established by Patsy Durack. Starting in 1883, he and his
brothers and business partner drove 7000 cattle, and horses and some sheep from
their holdings in central Queensland. It was a 3 year long drove and he lost
half his stock and a few men. Droughts, floods and disease hampered their
progress. It is an amazing story and I am keen to download the book, ‘Kings in
Grass Castles’, written by Patsy’s grand-daughter, and start reading.
The homestead on Argyle Downs was taken apart stone by stone
and faithfully restored on the site it is now, near the dam. It was amazingly
cool inside.
Monday night was movie night and Red Dog was showing. Had
seen it before but I was glad we saw it again.
Next day Linda and I went to just below the dam to fish in
the Ord River and have a picnic. Didn’t get a bite but it’s not about that
anyway, is it? The area was just so beautiful. The picnic in the park was very
peaceful.
On Wednesday the 10th we went with neighbours,
Kay & Doug, to a spot on Spillway Creek that Doug had been told about where
there should be some reasonable size fish. Kay & Doug wound up pulling in
two good size Cobbler catfish. The fish in the photos are not the ones we kept.
They were the tiddlers.
Freshwater catfish in WA use to be considered a very
ordinary white fish meat and sold cheaply. Someone decided to change the name
to Cobbler and greatly increase the price and it started selling in a big way.
We had a great fish dinner that night eating our fresh Cobbler catch. Linda and
I only caught little bottlenose catfish, not even anygood for eating, but we
still enjoyed the day immensely.
Thursday and Friday have been filled in with a couple of
walks near the village, doing some trip planning, making some bookings for the
Horizontal Falls tour and the Bungle Bungles van park. You have to do a bit of
planning at least or you don’t get to go on these great things you want to do.
It gets busy at this time of year and we only just got in with our booking for
the Horizontal Falls and that was over three weeks in advance for that
booking. Three or four days either side
of our preferred booking date were booked out so we were very blessed to have
made our booking when we did. One of the reasons why the bookings were so heavy
right at that time is that was when the tides were at their best for a month
and it just so happened that our preferred day was among the best, so doubly
blessed.
We got the last powered site at the Bungles van park. We
will be leaving our van there in storage while we tent it into the Bungles.
We further filled in our time with meeting a lovely Kiwi
couple, John and Lisa and their gorgeous little five year old Madeline. Such
nice people and it was great to be able to get info on Cape Leveque from them
as they have already been there. It is good to do some research but being able
to get timely, accurate info from fellow travelers is priceless. We keep
getting great tips from people but it is a pleasure to be able to pass on stuff
that we have found out too. We thought we better make a booking for Cape Leveque
as they said that it was booked out when they were there. So made the call and
could only get one night powered and two nights camping as it was school
holidays. We will have to go to other campsites to see the rest of the Cape.
Cannot take the van as the road is to rough. We will just have to get by with
one night of power to charge up the jump pack battery and the spare battery
that we run the fridge/freezer with. Luckily that powered site night is in the
middle of the eight days we will be away from the van and tenting it. As we
won’t have solar we will have to get by with charging all the devices by a bit
of driving, the powered night and the camp hosts hopefully doing us a favour by
plugging in the jump pack through the day for a couple of days.
What a wonderful week we have had at Lake Argyle! It has
been one of our two most favourite destinations of our trip so far which is
just on two months travelling. The other favourite was El Questro. Hard to
split them. One common thing to all the Kimberleys is the balmy tropical
nights. It is just so comfortable, sitting out of a night in singlet, shorts
and thongs. Oh, sorry to rub it in for those in the south.