2006/08 Australia trip - Badgingarra |
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Saturday August 5th
Jurien Bay turned out to be a nice, quiet seaside resort with a sandy beach protected from the waves by a sand bar, a great place to take the toddlers, but not too exciting. We left early and set off towards the Perth area. Our intention was to spend some time in Badgingarra park, which is famous for its wild flowers. We never did find an official entry to the park but we spent a lot of time on little maintenance tracks that took us in amongst the flowers. Close to the ocean, the predominant flower colour is yellow, particularly the yellow acacia/wattle balls, but as we got into Badgingarra we began to see reds and blues and purples, as well as the head high grass trees.
Western Australia’s flowers are eccentric to our eyes and come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Most are yellow balls, or spikes, or feathery shapes, unlike anything in the northern hemisphere. Perhaps these were nature’s early experiments with flowers, and they live on in Australia after they’ve disappeared in the rest of the world. We’re used to flowers growing off the twigs, but these can grow off the main branches, sometimes inside the plant’s mantle of leaves, or out of the leaves themselves, or even on the ground well below all the leaves.
I’ve tried to capture the variety of the flowers in this composite picture. Two that didn’t fit the composite were the head-high 
grass tree on the left and the tiny (half-inch) unknown plant on the right.
While looking at all these flowers, I became infested with ants again. These ants took a liking for my feet and just smothered my socks. They could not be brushed off, even with a real brush. They seemed to get stuck in my socks and had to be pulled off by hand, even when dead! Of course, while I was doing this, there were more coming on board via whichever foot was on the ground.
We were running out of daylight, and we blasted on south towards Perth, and took the bypass around the city as we were hoping to camp somewhere in Freemantle. Perth is the capital city of Western Australia, located on the Swan River, and Freemantle is the port where the Swan River empties into the Indian Ocean. We got lost for a little while, and found ourselves on a piece of freeway that was newer than our map, and we rolled into the Freemantle Village campground just after dark.