Blog

by Julian Tompkin, author of Undiscovered Western Australia

Kambalda is a town that is – by and large – known only to the maps. It is the sort of place you pass through on your way to somewhere else further down the track. Esperance or the Nullarbor, most likely. Kalgoorlie or perhaps Lake Ballard to the north.

It would be here in this sun-faded nickel town of a few thousand souls, however, where it occurred to me that I may inadvertently be writing a book – despite my best efforts to ignore its presence. I had been keeping notes from my various travels around the state in recent times, largely in pursuit of my journalism and research work. After too many years estranged from my homeland – living between Paris and Berlin – I felt a genuine need to retether myself to this country of my birth. To travel beyond the margins in search of some kind of truth, if only for myself.

And here I found myself, amidst the gimlets lit up like Christmas tinsel at dusk, in the very town of my childhood. Kambalda was, like so many WA country towns, a generous and unburdened place to come of age. In the 1960s regional WA quietly underwent a social revolution: utilitarian desert arcadias grafted onto ancient rock – with full employment, high wages and no private property. Kambalda was – along with Tom Price – one such utopia, sprinkled with gold dust and red dirt…the sort my mum said never washed out. And she was right, it never quite did.

Driving past the football oval I was suddenly overcome with visions from my past: memories long since tucked away in the archive of the soul. They swelled like a king tide and threatened to wash over me. I was forced to pull over. I reached for the moleskin – the one full of hastily scribbled sketches from my travels – and started to blacken another page:

Kambalda

Forty degrees and it’s hardly gone eight. The kids all in the street - Ben Lexcen skateboards, hand-me-down Melvin Stars and gravel in our knees. Parables of last night’s Christmas Tree at the oval. Who locked lips behind the shed, now written in scripture in the old salmon gum near the lawn bowls club that always smells of stale rum: AR4GB. Turbo Terry dusted off the outfit for another year - red suit, red dirt, red face, already a six pack of West Coast Cooler deep. The explosive guys with their makeshift fireworks, setting picnic blankets alight. Polony sandwiches abandoned mid bite. Our clear eyes unflinching, skyward - looking for something. A crack in the gem-speckled carapace. Christmas morning, back home. Dad’s given up on trying to save the last holdout of couch and has dropped the needle on the Everly Brothers. Always the Everly Brothers. Mum already at the stove, making custard and stuffing the big bird that arrived as an iceberg from the city seven hundred clicks away. Soon the air will be all fat and potatoes. Plum pudding and threepence in our teeth. The desert wind wakes the curtains, stirring the paper crowns. The debris of empire. Empty tins of Swan and Passiona chiming as church bells.

On returning to my home in Fremantle I flicked through the smudged pages of that moleskin and finally admitted to myself I am writing the book that would come to be Undiscovered Western Australia. It is not a traditional travel guide as such – more an exploration of place that endeavours to try and map it in a physical and metaphysical sense, sharing in the unique stories of its people, landmarks and culture, and inviting readers along on that journey of discovery.

Like that utopian promise of my desert town, Western Australia is a truly mercurial place – an irresistible contradiction of paradisical coastlines set against a formidable hinterland that will confound even the most adventurous of souls. A land both quixotic and audacious. This contradiction does not end here – for this is a place both ancient and contemporary. Home to the world’s oldest living cultures and, with them, the geological crucibles that are the Yilgarn and Pilbara Cratons – at between 2.8 and 3.6 billion years, the most ancient tracts of land on earth...almost as old as the planet itself. Yet, in its contemporary context, this is a state still in its nascence: a place being formed in real time.

It was here that the contemporary Australian story began to take form. The ‘discovery’ and mapping of Western Australia by the Dutch in the early 17th century would make real to the European mind what had long been speculated. Terra Australis would be incognita no more – making its debut as New Holland on global maps long before the remainder of the continent. Indeed, betraying convenient national narratives, Captain James Cook never did venture here to the West. His story – and that of much of Australia – is not ours.

Today I flick back through some of those early sketches, the genesis of this book – an intersection of both memory and discovery. Compulsive but often seemingly nonsensical observations in which I attempt to capture a candid polaroid of both the sights and the sensorial. They are probably best left to a box in the shed or thrown upon the pyre, but here I will share a few: harried vignettes from the sunstruck miles. A glimpse under the hood – with all its messy tethers and ink stains – of Undiscovered Western Australia.

Karijini

The rains came late to Karijini and now a plague of flies has extinguished the sun. Not a single net left in stock anywhere south of Wyndham, says the boss lady. She hands me a branch from a mulga tree. "The old way.” Down we go, past the place where the olive pythons dangle like Christmas decorations from the trees. Time travel with each step towards the centre of the earth, back to the beginning of all things. The water bites and then sets us free.

Burrup Peninsula

The industrial symphony of steel on steel. The moneyman’s leviathan, longer than the horizon. But not the memory. As this land is old and chiselled back to the raw sinew. Nothing can hide from its truths. The rocks remember. In the late afternoon light they speak.

Dampier Peninsula

It’s more barnacle than net. She jimmies the oyster free and shucks it open in the mangroves. Ancient oracles etched into mother of pearl. She says blokes used to dive 30 fathoms just to see their reflection in this…returning with buttons for empire and crooked heads. Shouting mugs of champagne for all the buccaneers of Roebuck Bay while the crocodiles slept.

Augusta

Game on. One hand, one bounce. One smashed dunny window - now glitter in Dad’s hair and on the old stack of Sunday Times. All Burke and Bond. Somersaults on the trampoline as the white cockies laugh hysterically from the fig tree. The green tea whiff of a neighbour hacking his lawn down to the nub. We turn our backs to the winter and let the sun blind us.

Coolgardie

The baked tombstone of desert suddenly buckles and the land turns molten. Wild rivers of styx - bones awoken from their hundred-year slumber beneath the kurrajongs. Where before great desert citadels stood - dominions of god and gilt, packed up in the night. Brick by brick, as though they never were. A mirage. A spectre in the scrub. Siberia, Niagara, Black Flag. The debris of fool’s gold and folly. The track to Coolgardie runs red, but we drive on towards the tungsten fires as the ancient land revolts at our back.

Gracetown

Down south. The pilgrimage. Flashbacks unleashed like summer dragonflies. Mapped in tan lines and Paddle Pop sticks. The scaffolding of the soul. Cars stuffed to the roof. I spy with my little eye sausage roll crumbs and the Mandjoogoordap sign in the rearview mirror. Windows rolled down and the sky in our teeth. The birdsong of quick-dry boardies as we leg it over the sand, white as spinifex ash. As scalding too. Burnt into the deepest places, where we hide. The aunties all punch drunk on peppermint fumes and two-for-one rosé. Faded nail polish and new year’s resolutions put on layby. We call. We call and the ocean it answers.

Julian Tompkin

All words, excerpts and photos.