Chapter 24: Fremantle and Coolgardie: Catching up with family, present and past
Having finally managed to turn our gross sheets into clean ones in Serpentine, we head to Fremantle to work through the last enormous loads of washing before beginning the long drive back to Melbourne.
T and I are both from Perth. As a young adult, he lived in Fremantle for many years, including when I met him. His rental house was so disgusting that one of my friends astutely observed that I must’ve really liked him to put up with it. Since then, his family has long since moved on so perhaps that explains why he has far more nostalgia for our hometown than I do. He likes to drive past the old shithole he lived in and marvel at how for some unknown reason — especially when house prices are insane in Fremantle — it is still there in its original form.
We stay down in Woodman’s Point near Fremantle. It’s a scrappy little wilderness area with an obscenely overpriced caravan park that’s two saving graces are a pool and a very efficient washing machine.
T’s family lived nearby in the 1980s so he happily reminisced and marvelled at all the changes. There’s now a very fancy surf club and lots of bespoke mansions of various sizes clamouring for a few of the windswept ocean and the very derelict power station.
The ironic thing about Australia is that when the British colonists came and stole all the land from the indigenous people, they never let the beaches fall into private ownership. This means that today, beaches are still government land; publicly accessible and free to use (although usually not to park).
Sometime after the 1990s, the Government belatedly overlaid information on the indigenous history and usage of the beachfront land. They were not about to give it back to them of course, because by this time, it was highly prized and priced. Instead, they put up a few lame plaques and expected the traditional owners to suck it up and be grateful.
My Dad comes down to join us for coffee in East Fremantle. We catch up at a café perched on the banks of the Swan River estuary. The day marks our fifth day of glorious, sunny weather. I may not have much nostalgia for the place but by God do I miss the real summer weather.
In the afternoon, my niece and nephew come for a visit and take the kids to some kind of glow-in-the-dark mini-golf thing. Seizing the last chance we have to be by ourselves for the next week, T wanders off to go fishing and ‘get rid of the last of the bait’ — the one and only thing that fits in the crappy freezer. I go for a swim and read crap on my phone.
We both thoroughly enjoy ourselves.
Coolgardie
The next morning, we decide it's time to start ‘getting up early’ and begin our adjustment back to Eastern Time (three hours in front). I set the alarm for 5 o’clock and we all grumble but manage to get packed up and on the road to Kalgoorlie before 7 am.
I want to stop in at Coolgardie because it’s where my great-grandfather was born.
The day is forecast to be a scorching 42 degrees there. We stop in at Southern Cross and for once, my kids have a legitimate complaint that it’s too hot. We manage to time the visit just in time for G, my giant train nerd of a son, to take a quick video of the Kalgoorlie Prospector train departing Southern Cross station. The train takes only 10 minutes longer than the car trip but you still need someone to collect you from the station.
The dirt starts to get progressively redder and the vegetation sparser. It’s 3 pm when we finally make it to Coolgardie.
Coolgardie was the first of the WA Gold Rush towns. After a couple of guys discovered gold there in 1892, it grew into a large shanty town filled to the brim with prospectors trying their luck. The town structure had formalised more by the time my great- great- grandfather came out from Cornwall to supervise a gold mine there. My great-grandfather Ken was born there in 1896.
Back then, the waterholes used by the indigenous people (who had saved many lives by showing hapless prospectors where they were) were drying out from over use. There was no reliable water supply and it needed to be shipped in on camels and carts. Many people unable to afford water died of disease and dehydration.
All I could think was how my poor great- great grandmother Annie coped. She was fresh from the cool climate of Cornwall and dealing with a baby in that god awful heat with no access to water.
It must have been horrific. But she must have been bloody tough because here I am to tell the story.
We move on to Kalgoorlie where it is hot, windy, and heavily overcast. The weather is back to all its hideousness.
