New Norcia- Jurien Bay – 23 to 25 April 2010

We left Perth to drive to Jurien Bay. On the way we stopped at New Norcia a lovely old Benedictine monastery established in 1846 and still in operation today, although down to a complement of only eight Benedictine monks.

It is quite surprising to find an oasis of European culture and art in what early on was a remote and primitive location.

The cluster of chapels, schools and associated buildings include some beautiful frescoes, altars and furniture fashioned from local timber. The founding Monks Dom Rosendo Salvado and Dom Joseph Serra from a Benedictine community in Spain, established good relations with the aboriginal people of the Victoria Plains and the government authorities locally and in Perth.

New Norcia was an aboriginal mission from 1846 to 1900 and later schools for farming families and local aboriginals were operated from 1908 to 1991.

Now, in addition to farming and a justly famous bakery [the fruit loaf is excellent] they provide hospitality for both tourists and residential camps for school children to learn about the past.

The Benedictines maintain their religious schedule and visitors can join them for prayers or services in the chapel with a glorious Munster organ imported from Germany.


A thoughtful and informative tour guide showed us over the many buildings, lamented the habit of the 1960’s and 1970’s to cover the frescoes with white “Dulux” paint and the jarrah floors with linoleum. The only saving grace being that after painstaking scraping of the paint the frescoes beneath are quite well preserved.

From New Norcia we drove to Jurien Bay. This was our base for visiting the stromatolites at Lake Thetis, the unique limestone pillars at the Pinnacles and Lesueur National Park.
On April 25 we attended the Anzac Day service at Jurien Bay.

Like all such services throughout Australia it comprised a large contingent of locals and visitors of all ages come to pay respects to the Australians and New Zealanders who have fought and died in the many conflicts since the landing at Gallipoli. Perhaps if the academic historians, who recently asserted that Anzac Day is unfortunate for its celebration of the militarism of a bygone era, attended more of these local ceremonies they would recognize the very evident strong community desire not to celebrate war but to keep the promise to the fallen Diggers:-

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

 

Lake Thetis near Cervantes on the way to the Pinnacles is home to one of four locations in Western Australia of stromatolites, one of the earliest forms of life to evolve on earth. Samples from them show similarities with fossils over 3 billion years old.

The Pinnacles is an immensely popular destination with a happy atmosphere. There is a babble of different languages and a traffic jam of cars filing round the site. It is fun but not the ideal place to commune with nature alone in the desert.

It is not really known how the limestone pinnacles formed but we prefer the explanation that they are the remains of fossilized tree trunks. Whatever the reason it is an intriguing and beautiful location particularly at sunset.

After the Anzac Day service we drove to Lesueur National Park. On the way we stopped at Dynamite Bay and Desperate Bay. In Dynamite Bay the local shire seems to communicate with its ratepayers through public signs.

The Lesueur National Park is named after Charles Alexandre Lesueur the botanist on the French ship “Naturaliste” captained by Nicolas Baudin which explored the coast in 1801. In the spring it is a blaze of colour and would be standing room only as the WA wildflowers are famed. Even at this time of year there are a lot of very beautiful and colourful flowers. The park has an exceptionally diverse range of Flora. Windblown sand dunes form the shoreline and then the grains of sand aggregate to form limestone. In the Park you can see three different shorelines as the oceans receded and rose. We also visited the salt lake in the middle of the Park.