Anyway, first up the road takes you through Roebourne which is small town with a population of less than 1000, though it has some nice old buildings still, as you can imagine with a population that size it really doesn't have a lot happening, though there are some great public spaces there and some money has certainly been spent in the area. The visitor centre is in the old jail which was built in 1887 and was built in the + style with four blocks having a central "courtyard" area. It is an interesting building and houses a somewhat eclectic collection of items for display. It seems that it was used to house only indigenous men as a labour force and that they were all shackled with a throat collar and chain, at night they were attached to iron rings in the cells, which really sounds quite barbaric and shameful that anyone was ever treated this way.
The town is quite small and has a few interesting old buildings that have been restored, though there are others along the main street/highway that are in a fairly shabby state, some with big security grills, though most don't have them. It makes for a nice little main street anyway. Roebourne was once the largest town between Perth and Darwin, due to it being a large 'Gold Rush" town, it's not any longer though.
Main street / Highway
The Shire is now run from Karratha, not from this building
Onwards to Karratha now and the skies have been cloudy all day, as the song goes, or doesn't as the case may be. This grey and gloomy sky really doesn't help you to warm to a place and maybe that is what happened with Karratha. It is a unusual place where they are obviously spending a shed load of money on the place realigning roads and whacking up flash new apartments. It is quite a large town and there are lots of people about, I went to the local "mall" to look for a electronics place as mentioned before, and the amount of people in the place had me wondering if anyone actually worked in the town, it was packed in the middle of the morning. It's another mining town and as such there are lots of FIFO people about and there are a few miner villages set up around the place for them. I am not really sure if it has a main street at all as none of them really stand out as being one. There are just a few turns available to take from the highway that goes past it to Dampier, which is in itself seems to be considered by most a suburb of Karratha now rather than a town in it's own right.
The road that goes out to Dampier is HUGE, no really it is just a massive road that would put the main arterials of some east coast major cities to shame and there are acres of housing estates being opened up all along the way packed with brand new houses, it is certainly a town experiencing a massive growth. It is interesting to note in the industrial area that there are big parking lots for the hire car companies and they contain nothing but vehicles that are already set up for use at the mines, with the required aerials and fluro yellow side strips and registrations for the mines.
Dampier, well it is a small town and I believe that it is still a town in it's own right, but there is not much happening there and as to shopping and such I am sure that the locals usually head for the Coles and Woolies in Karratha and treat the local IGA as a "corner" store for the forgotten items needed urgently, it seems a reasonably sized small town
Looking towards the Dampier esplanade.
Dampier shopping centre.
Dampier foreshore
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As you can see it was all looking grey and really as I said not a lot happening, so I decided to press on, mind if I had been into the whole "Red Dog" thing (I believe they made a movie about it and titled it Red Dog, though I haven't seen it) I would have been well catered for. It seems that they have, as someone in Winton said about the whole "waltzing matilda" thing, grasped madly to the slightest bit of fame they could and are hanging on to it for dear life. I am sure there should be more here to interest people that just some old dog.
Anyway I decided that I should perhaps push on again and try to get further along the coast and closer to Perth. So I headed out of Karratha and turned south on the on the North West Coastal Highway through the Pilbara. I stopped as it was starting to get dark again at the Nanutarra Roadhouse. 272km between Karratha and Nanutarra3 hours 24 minutes at 80kph.
Setup before it got dark.
Nanutarra Roadhouse for the night.
Next is heading for Canarvon to see if there is someone that will have a look at the computer, oh and of course to have a look around town...
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