Out of the airport into Perth heat. Five minutes traveling in the hire car and we discovered the All Travelers Motel, of such pre-fab Californian beauty that it had to be recorded. It's a set built for Wim Wenders or perhaps a setting for some modern horror movie. From the power cables threaded through the palm trees and cactus I'm afeared that they have fairy lights in them at night. Like Bill Bryson I have an attraction to strange roadside motels. I may have to revisit this one. (Image 700pixels wide. 120k)

Fremantle. Be careful how you say it, the locals don't like you saying Free-mantle, it's Frr-mantle. No matter how we said it, we didn't get to stay there. We arrived on a Food and Wine Festival weekend, streets were closed off, no accommodation available anywhere, so we decided to explore a bit and move on.

The old multistory buildings and the very European narrow streets were a contrast to the new tackier tourist wharf area (we did have a good fish and chips meal there however). It's a place to stay and explore. That's what happens on road journeys with a time schedule. You have to suck the essence from a place and move on. I use images to hold some of that. 

On the tourist banners on the road into Northam, amongst the 'Avon Valley - home of recreational aerial sports' images, was one of the pipeline. It was not a very surprising attraction after having watched the pipe for the last 100k. but hey, accentuate your positives. 

Northam was gazetted as a town in 1833 and was a crossing point on the Avon river. It became a departure point for the new goldfields and when it was chosen to be the rail hub in 1891, grew to be the biggest inland town in West Australia. I'm an expert now on the town after just a few web searches, Avon.net and Walkabout provided the following information about the town which has the most lovely Victorian period street buildings of any country town I can remember. The visit became increasingly strange however as we drove around.

Read on, but also have a look at some of the larger images of Northam here (Popup window 8 images 350 pixels wide 320k total). 

We stopped in a very country motel on the edge of town, a room that looked over a few houses and then on to paddocks with large round haybales. It was clean and quiet, but you knew that you weren't their regular customer when the sign above the reception desk said, 'We do not split bills'. We dropped our bags and went exploring.

The presence of an aboriginal community was suggested by the ATSIC, Legal Aid and other support agency's buildings we passed, but other than a young aboriginal girl driving a car, and a few older women shepherding a group of kids across the road, this was to the tourist, a white town (with a big migrant community I later guessed.)

Later I found that Northam was the site of a racist scandal in 1933 when the town's entire Aboriginal population 'were rounded up by police and dumped in the Moore River Settlement. The Northam Shire Council said they had scabies and were a health risk.' 

On that dark night, speaking in the street to the crowd which had assembled, [he] described with deep feeling the horror and misery of war, and his sorrow that so many fine men (some of whom had been boys with him in Northam) would not be coming home to their wives and families. It was a dramatic moment when he announced that as a result of the suffering he had seen, 'the war has made me a socialist'.'

Katharine Susannah Pritchard from her novel Child of the Hurricane. Hugo Throssell later committed suicide in Russia. 

Then lying in the warm hotel room with the curtains and sliding window  open to let in air, listening to dogs in a backyard barking nearby, sleeping that night was very disturbed. Our body clocks were out of whack. We were awake and left early, to miss driving in the heat of the day, and headed to Kalgoorlie.