We were covering ground that we’d seen before and, more importantly, there were blocks of time set aside, especially for the Flinders Ranges, and hard-to-get sailing dates set for Tasmania.  All that meant that we’d decided to move from northern WA to southern SA with vigour.  A quick blast down the previously seen WA coast, an essential stop for crayfish in Geraldton, a delightful overnight stay on the river near Mandurah and we were soon in Busselton. 

Busselton is indeed a bustling town with a lovely new waterfront precinct and a great long jetty which we never got round to walking on.  Access to the Margaret River area is easy and so we spent some time there.  Notable was the White Elephant café at Prevelly – Lesley had remembered it fondly from our Cape-to-Cape walk 5 (!) years ago when apparently we had coffee outside on a lovely day.  This time it was cold and grey and windy but the café was warm, as was the welcome👍👍.  Super laid-back but with exemplary service – a hard combination to pull off.

Cullens has one of Australia’s more interesting vineyards and some great great wines, at great great prices.  We had lunch there and it was probably the best single meal of our entire trip so far, certainly the best wine – fine dining at perfect pitch👍👍$$.  All their production is done according to biodynamic “rules”, way further than organic, and involving burying manure in cows horns, mystery potions, waiting for the right moon-cycles, carbon capture in the soil and so so much more – once again, weird but the results are incontestable.  We were so so overcome by the quality of everything done here, we bought just one bottle of wine (for the same price as a reasonable half-dozen) and have promised ourselves to drink it as soon as we have 48 hours without some sort of mishap – probably never to be consumed.

All these long travel days got a person thinking. Way back in Brisbane in the mid 70’s, we borrowed a caravan from Lesley’s aunt and uncle.  I convinced my boss to let me have the one and only sales rep’s car with a towbar and collected the van in Warwick (no doubt, with many unremembered instructions), drove tentatively down the range via Crows Nest and spent a week at Sunshine Beach CP just south of Noosa.  We had two small girls with us, the weather was perfect, the beach was on our doorstep; it was as good as it could have been.  And we said to each other, “Let’s never do that again”.  There have been times when I’ve wished we’d listened to our younger selves.  The travelling has been fantastic but the caravanning itself, sometimes less so.

We’ve fallen in love with seeing new and remarkable places; fallen in love with discovering insights into how our country works – and sometimes doesn’t work; fallen in love with delightful people we’ve met along the way – some charming, some fascinating, some a bit weird; fallen in love with the sheer pleasure of driving serenely through vast swathes of uninhabited land; fallen in love with ATGANI and the adventure of the whole darn thing.
I’ve fallen out of love with campsites where I can’t get level and where fires are banned; fallen out of love with equipment surprises and failures – from broken water pumps to leaky sullage hoses (yuk); fallen out of love with unexplained noises and the hints that they give of future disaster; fallen out of love with diesel bowsers that have “no diesel today” and air hoses that don’t pump air, jerry cans that get stuck in their holders and gas cylinders that run out mid-meal; I’ve completely fallen out of love with the constant fiddling needed to pursue the adventure and to keep ATGANI happy!

The only consolation is that I’m not alone.  Just about every caravanner we’ve met has been “fixing” something – something small, something large, but never-ending. They keep calling them teething problems, but my milk teeth are through now.

And then the marvel of the travel takes over, and all is forgiven.  You get to a place like Esperance and wonder how it is you’d never been there.  There’s a magnificent campsite at Cape LeGrand NP which, of course, requires booking months ahead so we just stopped in a quirky park a few kms out of town and drove around.  The weather was kind and this area is so picturesque that you want to take yet another photo every other minute.  We drove the Great Ocean Drive, took a 5km hike in the NP and had a swim in the cold, clear water at Lucky Bay where the quartz sand is unbelievably fine and the “scientifically-proven” whitest in Australia.  True or not, it gives the water the most beautiful turquoise hues – breathtaking. Once again, we failed to walk on their famous rebuilt jetty but spent our time sneaking in a good Thai meal at Siam👍 before hitting the road east – we could see the jetty!

On the way to Esperance, we’d stopped at Plantagenet and singlefile wineries near Mt Barker, stocked up, and then battled our way through a ferocious twice-in-a-year storm (with a bit of attendant damage) before calling stumps and overnighting prematurely at Ravensthorpe.  This was Lesley’s call and thanks heavens she overrode my reluctance – we later found out that there were trees down on the highway so we’d have never got through that night anyway.  Hardly anybody wants to say, “I’m sorry.  I was wrong.”  Phew! 

From Esperance, it was a further quick blast across the Nullabor – some people say it’s fascinating; we say it’s long.  Trying to cover it all in just a few days, this road was in great condition, the road trains were exemplary, anything oversize was well signalled and there were dozens of easy campsites along the way for self-supporting vans like a well-behaved ATGANI.  We had two great overnight camps with fires (encouraged by the high chance that our firewood would be confiscated at the quarantine station), and 1500km just rolled under the tyres as we streaked into South Australia.  Our sights were set on lunch at Drift in Streaky Bay.  Matthew Flinders, a literally-minded 26 year-old, had named this bay after the streaks of seaweed on the bright white sand.  (Here’s a thought: Imagine dispatching a 26 yo lad, in a 30m boat, with 80 other men, to sail around an as-yet-unnamed Australia to see if it might be an island?)

Streaky Bay has a jetty too, so after previous poor efforts, we actually walked on this one.  It also has 3 or 4 fabulous stone churches, just ripe for redevelopment, but it’s a long way from anywhere, so we’ve decided to keep our powder dry.  Drift served us a lovely lunch, as per the plan, but we were too slow for coffee afterwards, thus no afogato (machine is cleaned at 2pm).  We’d chosen not to have oysters this time as we were saving ourselves for Coffin Bay, the bottom of the Eyre peninsular and our jumping-off point (a long jump, I admit) for the Flinders Ranges.

All that earlier talk about falling out of love can be safely disregarded.  If anyone asks me what to do in a year around Australia, I’ll advise moving swiftly to Coffin Bay and staying there for the full 12 months. Maybe, get a tinny – 3.85m, 15hp; it’s all you need! What a spot!

We chose to do our obligatory “tour” with Oyster HQ (the other guys were booked out – didn’t matter).  They dressed us in neck to toe (obvs) waders and we set out across this shallow part of the bay to a platform with tables and benches where we sat and they told us most everything about their oysters, gave us a shucking lesson (much needed, but I’d brought my knife – no need for Philip’s zoom consultation), fed us those self same oysters and, because we’re like that, sloshed a bottle of Bollinger down our necks – I know it doesn’t sound classy but just think of Ab Fab.  Bolly, sweetie darling?👍👍

We’ve previously been a bit snooty (did I hear someone shout “a bit”?) about Pacific oysters vs “Sydney Rocks”, but these were off-the-scale good.  A Japanese breed, selected after lots of trialling and not really a thing until well into the 1970’s, Coffin Bay is the ideal environment for them and gets them to their special place (ie ready to eat) in pretty quick time – about 18 months from spat to chomp.  We thought the taste and texture was exceptional but by now we’d drunk a bottle of champagne, while sitting comfortably in a metre or so of super clear water being both entertained and informed, prising shells open, rinsing them in the water we were sitting in and deciding whether to add tabasco or not (not!) etc etc – would you trust these people?  I thought not.  Commercially, the oysters are then shipped (unshucked – they last for ages, chilled) around Australia every single day, all by road.  The freshest oysters water-to-table after Adelaide are in Hong Kong – they’re air-freighted from Port Lincoln and sell for about A$17/oyster!  It’s all about status apparently. Doesn’t mean they aren’t good.

Oyster leases here are now “closed”, they’re really tightly and mostly family held, the business model numbers look ridiculous, there are 4 hatcheries in the area, the plastic growing crates are made from 100% recycled drink bottles, the crate logistics are done through the SA Prison system, there hasn’t been any disease here for years and years, so I’m planning on entering the market – what could possibly go wrong?