DadTalk

Ore-some place

One of the things we said from the start is we didn’t want to just do the rounds of the world’s tourist spots. We wanted to head off to places which are interesting, but not exactly on the tourist route.

With this in mind we have just spent a few days exploring Port Hedland and Karratha, somewhere in the desert north of Perth. Unless you have a strong interest in the production of iron ore there is absolutely no reason why you should ever had heard of them. These are desert towns, whose sole reason for being is to transfer huge, and I mean huge, amounts of broken up ore from the mine trains into vast container ships.

The world’s longest trains, kilometres long, drag thousands of tonnes of rust red rock, through a Martian landscape of red dust and red hills. Vast mechanical monsters build huge rock piles and then pour them on to massive ships, taking over a day just to fill one ship.

These are manly towns, were we stand-out as the only people not driving mining company trucks and the only people in the supermarket not wearing fluorescent work jackets. These are frontier towns, were the work force lives in campsite huts and trailers, as they have not built enough houses yet.

But this is not the only story. In Port Hedland we had a great lunch in a 1940’s railway dining car. We also saw an excellent exhibition at the town art gallery, which took this extraordinary landscape and made it truly breath-taking. Outside Karratha, down an un-marked dust track, we hiked in a deserted valley surrounded by ancient rock-carvings, somewhere between seven and twenty thousand years old.