Carnarvon Space Tracking Station
The Carnarvon Space Tracking Station has a museum in the pedestal of the big dish (contact the Tourist Bureau to have it opened) with an interesting collection of bits and pieces from the moon landing period including the hand prints of the astronauts who visited Carnarvon. The museum is worth visiting for anyone interested in Australia's connections with the US space program or for people who want to be amazed at the speed at which modern technology has progressed. How can things which were considered the height of modern technology in 1969 look so old and antiquated only a couple of decades later?
One Mile Jetty and Lighthouse Cottage Museum
There are a number of interesting places in Carnarvon. Of the most interesting is 'One Mile Jetty', originally constructed in 1904. The jetty stretches 1493 metres into the bay on the western side of Babbage Island. For those lazy people a jetty train operates every day in the tourist season and is a convenient way of not walking the mile to the end of the jetty. At the landward end of the jetty is the excellent and interesting Lighthouse Cottage Museum which is open from 2.00 pm - 4.00 pm daily.
Maps of Carnarvon and a useful booklet Visitor's Guide to Carnarvon are available from the Tourist Bureau.
Monkey Mia
Monkey Mia (see Shark Bay for more details). Carnarvon is often seen as the major town for visits to Monkey Mia and certainly a number of one day and two day trips leave from the town. Contact the Tourist Bureau in Robinson Street - (08) 9941 1146 - for details. A hovercraft makes the journey from Carnarvon to Monkey Mia four times weekly.
Blowholes, Quobba, Lake Macleod and the Korean Star
The Blowholes, Quobba, Lake Macleod and the Wreck of the Korean Star. North of Carnarvon are some of the most interesting sights on the whole of the Western Australian coast. 24 km north of the town is a turnoff to 'The Blowholes'. This trip across near-desert landscape for 49 km offers superb views of the coast as well as the blowholes, a look at an unusual salt loading facility and the wreck of the Korean Star. The coastline is characterised by spectacularly beautiful craggy cliffs, beautiful white sandy beaches and a dramatic variety of seascapes. The road passes near to the famous Lake Macleod, a huge 225 000 hectare coastal salt lake which is 110 km long and 40 km wide. The lake is mined by Dampier Salt Pty Ltd who ship the salt out of the area from the jetty at Cape Cuvier.
The Blowholes (the plural is relevant - there must be 20 or 30 of them) are just south of the point where the road reaches the coast. The road crosses some huge sand dunes which have been whipped up by the westerlies before dropping to the coast.
The traveller is greeted with a huge sign declaring: 'KING WAVES KILL'. It is not something to be treated with disdain. It is a sober reminder to the careless and foolhardy that over 30 people have died as a result of freak waves on the coast.
The Blowholes were first discovered by Europeans as recently as 1911 and since then they have become an increasingly popular tourist attraction.
Further north is Quobba Station standing alone and isolated between the sand dunes and the coast and 30 km north of the Blowholes is Cape Cuvier where the salt from the Dampier Salt works is loaded onto ships bound for Japan. The Carnarvon Tourist Bureau arranges tours of the Salt works every Thursday. The novel loading method involves simply bulldozing salt onto a conveyor belt which carries it to the bulk carriers which moor at the end of the jetty.
On 21 May 1988 Cyclone Herbie hit the area and the Korean Star which was waiting to be loaded was blown onto the rocks where it subsequently broke into two. The wreck lies at the bottom of the 60 metre cliffs at Cape Cuvier and can be reached by 4WD down a road which cuts between the cliffs.
Bernier and Dorre Islands
Off the coast from Carnarvon (and certainly not part of the regular tourist schedule for the region) are the fascinating Bernier and Dorre Islands. They are now both uninhabited apart from the very rare banded-hare wallaby, Lesueur's rat kangaroo, little barred-bandicoot and Shark Bay mouse all of which are extinct or nearly extinct on the mainland. The islands are really nothing more than narrow strips of coastal limestone surrounded by cliffs which rise, at their highest point, to about 45 metres.
Both Bernier and Dorre Island would be unimportant if they hadn't played a sad role in the decimation of the Aborigines of the Gascoyne and Pilbara. Some time before 1910 the islands became used as a 'hospital' for mainland Aborigines who had contracted venereal disease. The 'patients' were shipped across to the islands to isolate them and, in turn, they were separated so the men were located on Bernier Island and the women on Dorre. In her famous book The Passing of the Aborigines, Daisy Bates recalls: 'Dorre and Bernier Islands: there is not, in all my sad sojourn among the last sad people of the primitive Australian race, a memory one half so tragic or so harrowing, or a name that conjures up such a deplorable picture of misery and horror unalleviated, as these two grim and barren islands of the West Australian coast that for a period, mercifully brief, were the tombs of the living dead. When I landed on Bernier Island in November 1910 there were only fifteen men left alive, but I counted thirty eight graves. There were seventy-seven women on Dorre Island, many of them bed-ridden. I dared not count the graves there.
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